The furniture warehouse belonging to the director’s own father became a space station, its leftover packing foam turned into set dressing for a science fiction film with almost no money behind it.

MOON 44 (1990) was shot over ten weeks in the winter of 1988 and 1989 in Sindelfingen, Germany, with Roland Emmerich directing from a screenplay by Dean Heyde and Oliver Eberle. Emmerich financed it by pre-selling distribution rights territory by territory, and when the money ran out before an essential establishing shot could be filmed, he improvised one using mirrors and his own crew standing in as extras.

Set in 2038, the story follows convicts sent to guard a mining corporation’s last working lunar operation, where shuttles keep vanishing. Michael Paré plays Felix Stone, an undercover agent planted among the prisoners to find out why, caught between corrupt overseers and inmates who trust no one. Malcolm McDowell, Lisa Eichhorn, Brian Thompson, and Dean Devlin round out the cast, with Devlin marking his first collaboration with Emmerich here, years before they would make blockbusters together.

Karl Walter Lindenlaub’s cinematography and Joel Goldsmith’s score give the cheap sets an atmosphere beyond their means. The film went direct-to-video in the United States, but producer Mario Kassar saw it and was impressed enough to bring Emmerich to Hollywood and hire him to direct Universal Soldier. It is a low-budget dry run for the spectacle that followed, filmed in a building meant for sofas.