A Conversation with Michael Glawogger (Part 3)

Is Toni the Hustler one of the characters closest to your heart?

He was one of my most exciting experiences, but also one of the scariest. He kept on saying I was his friend, but I was never sure what he really meant by that. He was Afro American, he was a friend and a junkie. It got terribly involved. At all events, he took me to the very limits of the film. He said to me: You’re just taking advantage of me. You turn up, take my life, go off, and that’s the last I’ll ever hear of you. I hate you for that already. (more…)

A Conversation with Michael Glawogger (Part 2)

Interview about MEGACITIES

Is this the message of your film?

With all my films I’ve been criticised for not saying clearly enough what I think. For just showing things, putting them on the screen, without a message at the end. A message would entail a solution - giving people the reassuring feeling that it could work that way. I don’t have any solutions to offer, nor do I just say that that’s how things are, and it’s fine that way. On the other hand, though, I feel that the film does adopt a standpoint, in visual terms - that is, cinematically. It does more than stick a camera in people’s faces. It gets them to portray themselves and the world they live in. That accounts for the visually featurefilm style, which actually leaves room for much greater documentary accuracy.

The film may not have a message, but it does have hidden comments, like the Mexican cartoon character Superbarrio Gómez …

Yes, Superbarrio is a superhero and a fighter who was invented by the then opposition party as a figure battling on behalf of poor people against injustices like the housing shortage - a figure people could identify with. We used him to write a joint text about the city so that we could give the film a commentary without its having a commentary in the conventional sense. (more…)

A Conversation with Michael Glawogger (Part 1)

To begin with, a question about the film’s ending, where someone says „I am very happy” …

… Yes, some people have felt that sentence to be a mockery. I don’t agree.

You show people who eke out a miserable existence, who live in utter destitution - but not in utter hopelessness. On the contrary, they sing, dance, play soccer. They may be poor, but they’re not necessarily unhappy. It’s a less black-and-white approach than we’re used to.

There’s a brand of journalism that strikes me as being patronising. When it shows poverty, it does so from a stance that doesn’t expect to find anything except poverty. Often that only scratches the surface of people’s actual lives. There are millions of people who live in inconceivably squalid conditions, but even then their way of dealing with their problems is very similar to ours.

Are they perhaps happier than we are? (more…)