Faust was the most technically elaborate and expensive production undertaken by Ufa until it was surpassed by Metropolis the following year. Filming took six months, at a cost of (only half was recovered at the box office). According to film historians, Faust seriously affected studio shooting and special effects techniques. Murnau uses two cameras, both filming multiple shots; many scenes were filmed time and again. As an example, a short sequence of the contract being written on parchment in fire took an entire day to film. Intertitles The task of writing the intertitles was originally assigned to , a German novelist and playwright who had moved into screenwriting. He decided to combine various lines from the original folk tale, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Goethe's Faust, Part 1, as well as providing some of his own. However, his efforts were disliked by the Ufa production team, and Gerhart Hauptmann, one of Germany's leading playwrights and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, was engaged instead. Hauptmann agreed to write his own completely new intertitles for , twice what Ufa had offered. Kyser found out, and there was an exchange of vituperative letters between the two writers. The film received a pre-release showing with Hauptmann's intertitles at the Ufa-Pavillon am Nollendorfplatz on 26 August 1926. Unfortunately, Ufa's directors felt that Hauptmann's titles were even worse: Ufa informed Hauptmann just a week before the premiere of "unexpected difficulties", and in the end Faust opened with Kyser's intertitles at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 14 October 1926. Hauptmann's verses were separately printed as a brochure for sale in cinemas. Variant cuts There were several versions created of Faust, several of them prepared by Murnau himself. The versions are quite different from one another. Some scenes have variants on pace, others have actors with different costumes and some use different camera angles. For example, a scene with a bear was shot with both a person in costume and an actual bear. In some versions, the bear simply stands there. In one version, it actually strikes an actor. Overall, five versions of Faust are known to exist out of the over thirty copies found across the globe: a German original version (of which the only surviving copy is in the Danish Film Institute), a French version, a late German version which exists in two copies, a bilingual version for Europe prepared by Ufa, and a