Based on the novel Quicksand by Japanese author Jun'ichirô Tanizaki, originally published in Japan with the title "Manji." There have been four Japanese movie adaptations of the book.
Berlin Affair (1985) (The Berlin Affair) was the first film produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus in Italy for Cannon. It was shot in Rome at the Paolis Studios and Vienna from April to July 1985.
Gudrun Landgrebe, one of the discoveries of the New German Cinema, had appeared in director Robert van Ackeren's Uma Mulher em Fogo (1983) (A Woman in Flames), director Edgar Reitz's Heimat: Eine Chronik in elf Teilen (1984), and director István Szabó's Coronel Redl (1985) (Colonel Redl). Kevin McNally, a British actor, plays the husband. Casting the role of Mitzuko was challenging. Liliana Cavani went to Tokyo looking for a model of beauty that could balance seductiveness with an iron will. She found it in the 24-year-old actress and pop singer Mio Takaki.
The original title of the film, Interno Berlinese, can be translated as Inside Berlin or Interior Berliner. The story is based upon Jun'ichirô Tanizaki's novel "Quicksand," or "Manji," published serial from 1928 to 1930. Manji was published as a serial novel in a literary magazine between 1928 and 1930. Sonoko, the first-person narrator, recounts her own story to a prominent writer as a long monologue that continues the novel itself. It is the story of a passionate love affair with Mitsuko that eventually involves her husband and Watanuki, an impotent effeminate dandy. Mitsuki was actually the name of Tanizaki's third wife. She inspired several of his novels.
Liliana Cavani was drawn to the novel because of its dramatic intensity and extreme economy, his capacity to bring us, as nearly breathless spectators, inside the meaning of seemingly insignificant details. Cavani brought the story forward in time and set the plot in Germany in 1938.