Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:05 

April 15th, 2012, the Harvard Film Archive screened Megacities. This is the audio recording of the introduction and the Q&A and discussion that followed. Participating are HFA programmer David Pendleton and filmmaker Michael Glawogger.

David Pendleton  0:26  

Good evening, folks. My name’s David Pendleton, and I'm the programmer here at the Harvard Film Archive. On behalf of the HFA, I want to thank all of you for coming and welcome to this, sadly, the third and final evening in our presentation of a trilogy of documentaries by Austrian-based filmmaker Michael Glawogger.

Briefly, if you have anything on you that makes any noise or sheds any light, please be sure to turn it off now. Please don't use it while you're in the theater and please wait to turn it on after you exit.

I also wanted to give thanks to our partners on this program. For one thing, we're partnering for the first time with The DocYard, which is an organization of three very talented film programmers here in Boston, who present a regular ongoing screening series of nonfiction cinema at the Brattle one Monday a month. The next screening being actually tomorrow at 8pm, Marathon Boy, so thanks to them, as well as thanks also to Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab and the Film Study Center here at Harvard. And finally, thanks to Dennis Lim, David Schwartz, and Rachel Rakes at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, who helped organize Mr. Glawogger’s visit here to the US. He's traveling around with his new film Whores’ Glory from 2011, which we showed on Friday night, the New England premiere. I should also thank the Austrian Cultural Foundation.

Tonight, what we're showing is the first film, the predecessor in a way, to Whores’ Glory. Michael works in both fiction and nonfiction cinema, but he's made three documentaries over the last fourteen years or so that are often referred to as a trilogy, the globalization trilogy. We can talk maybe a bit more about that term–Michael talked about it before the other night–what we're seeing is the first film from 1998, Megacities. If you've seen the other two films, you'll know that the method for the films in this series is to go from one location to another, hopping continents and countries around the globe. And this film is no exception. As the film's subtitle has it, it's “Twelve Stories in Survival.” In this case, while the other films have a unifying theme or thread, usually that of work—I think we could say—here, the structure is a bit more episodic. The other way that this film I think differs from the other two is that there's much more returning back and forth, to and from the same locations over the course of the twelve episodes. Michael is standing right next to me here to say a few words to you. He will be back after the screening, of course, for a conversation and to take your questions. But now here to say a few more words of introduction, please welcome Michael Glawogger.

[APPLAUSE]

Michael Glawogger  3:11 

Hello. It's very nice that I see faces that I’ve seen the other nights before, so you keep coming back to these films. I'm honored. In this film, which is probably my favorite of the three—maybe because it's the first and I found my method of working in this film, but also for many other reasons. One is the bioscope man. That's a man in the film that shows with a little machine that he built films to kids in the street. And I thought when I first saw this man in Mumbai, that there [are] many people like him, but that was a mistake. I found this guy and he disappeared. And in a city of 15 million people, it's hard to find this guy again. So I even hired a detective to find him again. But I actually met him by accident on the street again. And he was probably bound to be in my film or it was faith in a way, because what this guy actually is doing is stitching film pieces together that he finds on the floor in the screening rooms of movie theaters. So I consider this guy to be my alter ego. I really like that. And he does it with needle and thread, which is a little out of fashion these days, but I really like it when you see it in the film that he actually does that. He stitches film together. And in a way I want to honor this method. It's by chance you find some pieces of things that people found, and you stitch them together. In a way that's how this film was made, and we can talk about it afterwards. Thank you for coming.

[APPLAUSE]

John Quackenbush  5:19

And now, David Pendleton.

David Pendleton 5:21 

Does anybody have any questions? Anybody ready to ask the first question? I can ask a couple of primer questions. But there's a question. Can you wait—if you look to your left, Amanda's got a mic for you so we can all hear you.

Audience 1  5:35  

I was wondering how you found or sought out the people that you had in the film.

Michael Glawogger  5:43  

How I found the people in the film?

David Pendleton  5:45  

Or sought them out.

Audience 1  5:47  

How you chose them, or how you found them.

Michael Glawogger  5:50 

Mostly at those times, it was like that I walked the cities, I spent a lot of time there, and more or less the people found me, and not I found them. Like, Mikey the hustler, he tried to hustle me for those girls. And I said to him, “Listen, this makes no sense. It's very funny what you're trying to do, but I'm not gonna go for that. But if you want a beer, we go for a beer,” and we sort of became friends. And I went up to him, to Harlem, where he lived and he was really a trickster. He really had a lot of nerve and he got a lot of money out of me. And I regretted meeting him many times.

[LAUGHTER]

But he was very funny. He was a jack of many hats, like he used to say. And so also, you know, you walk around the corner in Mumbai, and you see a guy that's yellow, and the next day is red, so you introduce yourself. It was really, really like that. I was very naive when I made this film; I had no concept of how you do that. I was still wondering why they gave me money for it. Actually, I tried out a lot of things that I liked, and as I said with the bioscope man, I lost him and I found him again, and I lost him, and so it was a very open process. Like, it's actually a joke that this film is called Megacities. It's about a lot of things, and about life, and about human experience, and about survival. But it's not like the normal thing about megacities, you know? So since then, I know that the theme of a film is not the important thing.

David Pendleton 7:52  

Other questions? Do you want to talk a little bit about how you chose the cities that you did? Are these cities that you had lived in prior to shooting? Or is it cities that you went to? I’m also a little bit curious, too, about your proposal, like, what did you tell the funders that the film was going to be about?

Michael Glawogger  8:10

About four or five big cities. And two of them are in the film. I did Mexico City first and then Mumbai, and then I actually was, like, bound to go to Cairo. Everything was set up, and I already had assistants and stuff. And then I thought, “No, this is not gonna work.” If the film, like, stays in this kind of exotism, I don't want that. So I was dreaming about having mirror-like situations, like people in India would wonder about Mexico, wonder about New York and Moscow. And people here would wonder about the other part of the world.

David Pendleton  8:51 

Wonder,  you mean? Or...

Michael Glawogger 8:52

Wander. [sic]

David Pendleton  8:53

Oh, wander.

Michael Glawogger  8:53  

Like, what do we think, oh wow, like New York…

David Pendleton  8:57

I see.

Michael Glawogger  8:57  

...is very exotic to me being an Indian. It didn't work in that sense, really, because the film is forbidden to [be] shown in India. I actually have a distributor there, but it was not allowed to be shown there for many reasons. And I was a juror this year at the Documentary Film Festival in Mumbai, and they asked me to send my films because they screen films of every juror. But when they saw the film, they didn't touch it. It could never be screened there because it's sort of something that the Indians don't want to see about themselves or something like that. They showed, in the end, Workingman’s Death because it's Pakistan. That's easy.

[LAUGHTER]

That's the enemies.

David Pendleton  9:47  

Oh, yes, there's a question in the back.

Audience 2  9:52  

So did you pay your subjects?

Michael Glawogger  9:55 

I say that again and again, and I say it with a certain pride: yes, I do. And I like to do that because I think it's bad behavior not to do it. I think there is a myth, especially in this country, that paying subjects is something that you shouldn't do, because they then would tell you something that they normally wouldn't. Then you profoundly mistake journalism with documentary filmmaking. These people, and many of the people I've worked with, they give me stories of their life, they share with me things, they give me time, they give me so many things. So the only decent thing is to give them something back. Sometimes it's a bunch of flowers, sometimes it's photographs, sometimes it's money, whatever I feel is right. But I think it's a true misconception that if anything, to give people money makes what you're seeing on the screen less true. I think even the idea sucks.

Audience 2 10:59  

The guy in the Moscow underground there, he was complaining that he didn't get paid enough.

Michael Glawogger  11:05  

Yeah, by other people, by German journalists. Journalists never pay, but you have to pity them because they do not have money.

[LAUGHTER]

Because CNN is very poor.

Audience 2  11:18 

How did you get in the Moscow drunk tank? Since that's an operation of the state, isn't it?

Michael Glawogger  11:22

Yes, it is an operation of the state, and you can have very mixed feelings about that because, like most of the places I get interested in, they have, like, two sides. On one side, it's a pretty oppressive thing to do that. On the other side, many drunks in Moscow and other places in Russia would freeze to death if nobody picks them up when they fall down in the streets. So on the one hand, it's a very nice institution, and it exists as well for men as for women. On the other hand, they just can pick anybody up in the streets if they're bored or feel like it and lock them up. So it's a very strange thing. You hardly could imagine that here, that when you go home drunk, and you fall down, the police can pick you up and lock you up for a night. But that's sort of a leftover of Soviet times.

Audience 2 12:22  

So how did you get in there? I don't imagine that they would want that to be known to the outside world.

Michael Glawogger  12:29 

You just have to ask, I mean...I give you an example, from my yesterday's film, Workingman’s Death, I always wondered why they would so openly let me film the whole slaughterhouse sequence. It was very easy, because they're not ashamed of that. Because it's something very, very normal. They don't want to buy their meat if they don't see the livestock, you know? They would think that's wrong. So it's a very open thing. You ask for it, and they allow it. But one morning, like in all these countries, when you film, you have a censor. And one morning I was coming with my censor, and I was filming the guys in the slaughterhouse sleeping on the food stands where they sell the meat. And he was immediately breaking off the shoot and said, “You cannot do that.” And I said, “Come on, I mean, the whole slaughtering is much worse than people sleeping here on the food stands.” And he said, “But that's against the law. You cannot do that.” So you know, it's very hard sometimes to judge what people would think that is wrong in a country and people think that is right. So everybody in Russia grew up with sobering-up tanks, so they don't think that's anything so special. It's something normal about your life. I mean, in Los Angeles, you get a ticket of $50 for jaywalking. If you do that in Europe, they probably would lock up the policeman, you know? So there [are] different customs or different rules in different societies. And the sobering-up tank was not something that would bother somebody from Russia as something that's cruel or bad.

David Pendleton  14:30  

And there's a question up front, hang on a second and Jen will bring you a mic.

Audience 3  14:38 

I'm curious a little bit about the different countries—and in particular New York City—as far as what, if anything, did you have to do to get the sort of permission from different people to film them? And not only the main characters, but just the sort of street life and city life itself that we see. I'm just curious, what, if anything, are the sort of standards or rules? Or is it pretty much just because it's public, you can pretty much film anything?

Michael Glawogger  15:11  

Actually, I wonder now that you say that. Probably in 1996, this was a very different city. It was this whole bunch of people around Mikey, they all were from Harlem and places, but they worked 42nd Street. I mean, those people don't exist anymore. Also the surrounding people don't exist anymore. I was part of a little community. I mean, I was arrested once in Harlem, and they asked me what I do there because they thought I'm the normal, like, Soho guy who goes to Harlem to buy drugs. And I said, “Those are my friends,” and police officers would say, “Some friends you have, sir. You better get out of here.” So it was almost a community thing. I would go to Mikey to his parole officer and say, “He has to stay out because I need him for the movie.” And that also passed; they let him stay out.

I spent so much time with these people that I became part of them. But on the other hand, they were criminals. Like, he would ask me to take a Polaroid camera, so he can make photos for the “air-pussy.” The next day the camera was gone. Of course, you know? It was always like that. He would call me up at two o'clock in the morning and say, “I need my drugs, otherwise I die.” So I would go from Manhattan up to Harlem and buy his drugs, which I think nowadays, I was completely stupid. I could have ended up in jail, whatever, you know? But I was very naive then. I just did it. He was my friend. So I was like going every other night to buy his heroin, you know? So they accepted me. And the moment they accepted me, they let me in.

Audience 3  17:09 

It seems like it'd be very difficult to duplicate that. Like you said, now, it just seems... you film anything now, and it seems like there's just a lot...

Michael Glawogger   17:19  

It's probably also not there anymore. I mean, it's tame. I mean, I think the police officers don't even know what to do in Manhattan.

[LAUGHTER]

They buy bagels, right?

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  17:35 

I have to ask, you know, the john that we see him selling the air-pussy to, as well as the john that he himself picks up and beats up, were these friends of his? I mean...

Michael Glawogger  17:44

Yeah, yeah, of course.

David Pendleton  17:45  

They were sort of acting out vignettes that he had been through?

Michael Glawogger  17:46  

Yeah, but that was an offer of them, that they said, “Come on, you pussy. You film this and that. We show you what we really do.” So I said, “Well, this is gonna be bad.” It's gonna be bad acting in a hotel room. But I was curious. And it turned out quite interesting, I think.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  18:06

Are there other questions out there? This gentleman over here, raise your hand high so they can see you. And then we'll get to you back there.

Audience 4 18:20  

My question is about what seems to be a state, like a choreographed or staged moment when Mikey is attempting to stab the guy in the hotel room. That scene seems very clearly, if not directed or staged...it's a reenactment, or it's not a real moment. You're not in there while this guy's getting held up. But how many of the other scenes...how much of the other footage is reenacted or recreated?

Michael Glawogger  19:00 

Forget about this whole concept of reenactment. That's all journalism. There is no reality. There is only authenticism, you know? You can ask people to do everything, you know, but only what they really do in their real life. And if you don't do a film about the war or a football game—where people have to do something that they do anyways—you are always there with your camera and massively interfere [with] what happens. The most undocumentary situation in the world is an interview. Because you nail somebody to a chair, and to a wall, stick a microphone in his face and say, “What is this all about?” That has nothing to do with documentary filmmaking. That's a very, very unreal situation because nobody sits in a chair and talks about his life. And if you go into private spaces of people, you create. You create for your film. The moment you say, “Take this bottle again,” the whole thing is over. The whole thing of objectivity in that sense that you are invisible is over. There is no invisibility in filmmaking, there is only aberration towards a reality that maybe exists. But the real reality that you put on your screen is your vision of a reality. And the only thing you may never do is ask people to do something that they normally don't do. So the children in Russia, they rob people, and they know how to rob people. So you can ask them to rob something for the film because they know how to do it. If they don't, it will show, because it's not authentic. But that's the only rule. Besides that, you are the master of the reality that is being shown. This is not objective reality. It doesn't exist in filmmaking. It never does. It's my reality, and there is nothing else. And that's what I show you. And reenactment is not even a question.

Audience 4  21:21  

It is a question because there are some scenes which are clearly reenacted, and others which are clearly not.

Michael Glawogger  21:28  

Good, then you know it.

Audience 4  21:29  

So how much? Tell me.

Michael Glawogger  21:30

You know it anyways. It's a contract between me and you. If I show you that in the hotel room, then it's a clear reenactment because I could never be there with a camera. Never. You know it, I know it, you see it. So what's the question?

Audience 4  21:50 

Well…It’s not a...

[LAUGHTER / APPLAUSE]

Audience 4  21:56

I'm not trying to, like, start trouble here. [LAUGHS]

Michael Glawogger  22:00  

Yes, start it! Start trouble. I like trouble.

[LAUGHTER]

David Pendleton  22:07  

Maybe if you have a follow up, you can do that. Otherwise, maybe we should move on to the next…or we can come back to this question, because obviously it’s a...

Michael Glawogger  22:11

But I know what you're talking about. But really, don't get confused about this. I'm a little provocative here. But still, whenever you are in a room that has only twenty square meters, and people get violent to each other or do something like they do here, then they do it in a way for the camera. But it's gradually something that you have to decide if you do it or not. Like when Mikey’s on the street and hustling for air-pussy, you could never, ever film that in a documentary way, because if you stand behind the guy with a camera, do you think a john would walk up and say, “Oh, hi, could I have some pussy here?”

[LAUGHTER]

Never. So you have to find means. But I saw that scene so many times, because I hustled with him for weeks. And I knew what kind of guys would stop there. So I would take Mikey, and we would rent an office, and we would man the casting, and all these kind of new New York actors would come. And I always looked at him and said, “Could he be a john? Could he be a john?” So we chose three, and we would not tell them what's going to happen, and they would come around the corner and play along. So that's an aberration of reality. It turned out authentic because it looks authentic, because I know how it looks. But it's not the real thing. The real thing is a football game because they have to score goals. But whenever you rent a private space, you do some kind of aberration of reality, always and ever. There is no way around it. That's filmmaking, it's a creation. You don't have a hat that makes you invisible. You are an artist. And there is no objective truth. It does not exist.

David Pendleton  24:19  

It's actually more real than I had thought, because I thought you said that those are all his friends who've done this before. But so, also the scene in the hotel room where the guy gets menaced with a knife, there’s a whole bait and switch. Is that an actor who knew that...

Michael Glawogger  24:31  

No, that's not an actor. That's a friend of his, they both do that...

David Pendleton  24:33  

Okay, that’s a friend, but the john...

Michael Glawogger  24:35  

...so they know how it works.

David Pendleton 24:37

Right...how it works. Right. Right. Thank you. There's a question over here and then we'll go back.

Audience 5 24:42  

I was wondering how your subjects respond to the idea of, you know, being in this film that's, you know, shown all over the world and having their story shown to potentially thousands of people or...and is this like their incentive for appearing in your film, or I guess what draws...

Michael Glawogger  24:58

Translation...

David Pendleton  25:02

He was asking...

Michael Glawogger  25:03  

Your accent, I’m sorry, I can’t...

David Pendleton  25:04  

There’s a weird echo too. He was asking how people feel about being in these films when they know that their stories are going to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, or is that perhaps part of the incentive for being in the film?

Is that pretty much what you said?

Audience 5 25:19

Yeah, yeah, that’s it.

Michael Glawogger  25:21  

Since this film, I show the people the film, if I can get a hold of them afterwards. It's not always easy. Mikey has never seen the film because he was in jail when the film was finished, and I think he never got out again. I never found him again. But normally, it's, like, people who have an artistic view of what they see, or a very intellectual approach towards movies, they overcharge what can happen. Actually, when you show these people the film, it's like showing your aunt holiday pictures you took of her. The people, they see themselves and they're astonished. And they say, “Oh my God, that's me. How do I look?” Like we all do. It's like when we hear our voice on the radio, we think, “Oh my god, what is that sound?” Those are the kind of reactions. Sometimes if the people are very lower class, it gets even interesting in an ethnological sense. Like with my film Whores’ Glory, I had the reaction of one of the mothers that she was pointing at the TV where she saw us and she said, “What this woman says is right.” And I said, “Hasina, that's you.” And she said, “Yeah, yeah, that doesn’t matter, but what she says is right, and the whole world should hear it.” So if you see she's very far away from her image, also in her mind. On the other hand, you get sometimes reactions that you never would think of, like in Mexico, the women were totally against the Thai part. They said, “If I would have to work in a fish tank, I would kill myself, because how could I know if I like the customers or not if I sit behind the glass wall?” So there is an almost philosophical reaction to that. But normally, it's only about “how do I look?” Like I don't know if you've seen the first film that now I'm referring to, but there's this woman sitting with her breasts open, and she's talking about the wildest things about prostitution, about stinking socks and fucking people who stink and whatever and ever. And I said, “Did you...were you ashamed when you said that?” And she said, “No, no, no, what I said was wonderful. But did my boobs look all right?”

[LAUGHTER]

So it's very normal. That's how it happens. So it's not intellectualized, you know? Because you see yourself on this big screen, and that's the main [?coat?]. That's the issue.

David Pendleton  28:08

There's a question back behind there.

Audience 6  28:14  

Can you hear me?

David Pendleton  28:16

Yes.

Audience 6  28:17

I saw all three movies these few days, and I was wondering about how you transition from this movie to the next two, which are much more sort of focused on a particular theme? Like the second is the labor, and the third is obviously prostitution, and also reacting to what you said just now...because you said on the one hand that you don't want to do exoticism, right? But on the other hand, responding to the other question about the Russian drunken, whatever...that thing, you also said that, you also talked about how different cultures function differently, right? So we should be thinking about cultural differences and so on. So I'm sort of wondering about whether you're more interested in human universals or something like that, or cultural differences, or both, obviously, so I'm wondering [what] you say to that.

Michael Glawogger  29:12

In a way both, and within the three films, the world has changed. Like today, I wouldn't think about exotism anymore so much, because I really see it in a way more globalized. I think, like the Fish Tank in Thailand, that's first world. It doesn't matter if I go to Thailand, or if I go to Vienna, or if I go to New York, that's pretty much all the same. The major difference is if prostitution is forbidden in the country or not. And on the other hand, of course, that's my method. I mean, I think I learned this kind of filmmaking with my physics teacher, when he put the hot water in the cold water—that you put your hand in and the cold water makes the hot water feel hotter and the other way around. It's also like if you put on the screen a black and white image and a color image, if you splice them together, the color looks more black and white, and the black and white looks more color, you know? It enhances. It's not really about that I want to show there is so much difference. I just want these scenes to react with each other. It's about the human condition and soul, and it's about what you are as a human being. Like some people in Workingman staff, they said to me, “I could never do a job like that.” And I think that’s utmostly true. If you're thrown into very harsh conditions, you can handle anything. So that's why these films also give me hope. These people are very strong in these movies. I mean, imagine. Come on, imagine, go to 42nd Street and sell anybody air-pussy. That's pretty tough, to make a buck out of that. I mean, who would stop? I mean, how can you do that? So actually, these kind of things amaze me, how tough these people are, and if it really counts what you are able to do. So, that's much more my interest now, then where it happens and, like in ‘96-’97, this kind of exotism was much more an issue. Sometimes it's still an issue nowadays, but not for me so much anymore. Maybe because I've traveled the world so much.

David Pendleton  31:38  

I'm curious just about formally...your editing strategy. I mean, watching this film, again, it's much more montage-based in a way, I would say, then Whores’ Glory. I mean, if you look, this is twelve episodes, Workingman’s Death is, what, six episodes? And then Whores’ Glory is three episodes. I'm wondering, are you conscious at all of an evolution or a change in your style over time? Or does it more have to do with the specifics of each film? And would you go back to making a film like this, where it's bouncing around a lot with a lot of different episodes?

Michael Glawogger  32:14 

I don't know. I think yes, but I also had the feeling that I always said, “When I grow up, I make a film about one thing.” In Megacities, I was so hungry to make a film, that you want to put everything in, everything. It's almost like a first big movie mistake. On the other hand, I enjoy it now, when I see it because it was fresh, it was a need, and films are mostly good when the director has a need. I don't believe that calculated films or films that you do for a certain reason are such a good idea. You must be hungry for that. And with Megacities, I was very hungry to understand the world, and I was also very naive as a filmmaker. And later on, that got a little more settled. And maybe I’ll go back to that kind of hunger, or I hope so. I don't know. But on the other hand, every place you film is demanding. Every place you film has different needs of itself that you can show, like the Mexican part in Whores’ Glory, that the cars drive around there fifteen miles an hour. That's very challenging in terms of filmmaking, because it can get very boring. So you really have to put all your knowledge into it to see that the cars are still running around in this kind of slow mood that you have to convey the reality. On the other hand, it shouldn't be real real because then you would be bored out of your shoes. So sometimes it's also like the reality sets the pace of the thing.

David Pendleton  34:05 

Other questions from the audience? Yes, there's a woman right there, and then we'll go in the back.

Audience 7  34:11  

I [am] wondering what are you [hungering] for now? I mean, what's your need now? What do you want to do after these three movies?

Michael Glawogger  34:19  

I want to do a film about nothing. I don't know if I said this in the evenings before, but I think the biggest enemy of documentary filmmaking are theme and issue. I don't want that anymore. Like I give you an example, I traveled to Africa for my prostitution film, and I experienced so many things that were very, very interesting and I couldn't film that because I made a film about prostitution. So I just want to travel and film. It's very hard to convince people about that because they think you're completely crazy. I mean, they think I'm crazy anyways, but not that crazy. And so I have a hard time raising the funds, but if I can, I will just move around for a year and film whatever I feel like.

David Pendleton  35:20  

Oh, yeah. And then Michael has his hand up in the back.

Audience 8  35:24 

One question that seems to hang over this film, unlike Whores’ Glory, with each subject, or not all subjects, but certainly in the beginning was a question of, what do you dream about? I found that they were answering that question that was posed to them while they're living in this harsh condition, “I'm really dreaming about a better house” or land or something like that. So was that a question you posed to them? It gave, for me, a certain tragic or melancholic layer to it that Whores’ Glory didn't have and I found to be great. I'm not sure if it needed it. But what was your strategy with regards to that question?

Michael Glawogger  36:06 

Maybe I asked myself that question at the time. Questions are almost always also for yourself. I think the best answer in that film is when Mikey falls asleep to the question.

[LAUGHTER]

It's that the film is about that without even ever asking the questions. So this is not the kind of interview film where anything has to be asked through those questions. But it was the one question that struck me at the time when I made the film. I didn't know yet that all the answers are very similar. Of course, people dream of a better life and a house and some money. It's so obvious. But when you're young and curious, you think there is going be the most extravagant answers to that. There's not. It was strange, because Cassandra the stripper, which I think is the best scene in the movie, I'm still a friend of hers, and I'm the godfather of her child, and I travel every year to Mexico to buy clothes for the kid and blah, blah, blah. And she would sometimes watch the movie with me, and when she saw the scene where she talks about her dreams, she started to cry, and I said, “Why are you crying?” And she said, “Because I still don't have a house.” So that's what it's all about. [PAUSE] With the dreams.

Davin Pendleton  37:42  

Other questions from the audience?

I wonder maybe, maybe I'll ask a question about the trilogy as a whole? Well, first of all, do you think of it as a trilogy? Or was it the critics and programmers who lump these three films together?

Michael Glawogger  38:01 

If they do, that's fine. It's their job, not mine. So I accept it.

David Pendleton  38:08

It seems one thing that links them together, even more than some concept of globalization is, well, poverty for one thing. I'm looking at poverty, but also looking at a lot of things that are considered obscene, in the sense of things that are either taboo to show or considered boring to show, right? I mean, like work, crime, death, sex...

Michael Glawogger  38:28

Maybe religion should be coming up, you know? Because religion is in all three films.

David Pendleton  38:36

That's true.

Michael Glawogger  38:38

I mean, the whole Cassandra sex scene is for me, like an almost church-like experience. It's very religious. I don't know. I mean, these things come by [themselves]. Say if I make a film now, it's open of concept, it will still reflect everything that's in this film. Because those are very subjective kind of views of the world. And maybe they deal with poverty a lot because, I mean, most of the people on this planet are pretty poor. Your country too. So if you go out there and make a film, you probably would have to stay in Harvard to avoid it.

David Pendleton  39:27  

Maybe I don’t even have to go that far, actually. There are other parts of Cambridge, other parts of Cambridge and Somerville. Are there other questions? Okay, yes, you get a follow up question. This gentleman down here.

Audience 9  39:44 

I'm a little bit curious about what kind of a crew you had? And if there were ever points during the filming where you, I guess, feared for your life or were in any sort of danger or were just fearful in general of certain things at all.

Michael Glawogger  40:05  

I had a crew of five to seven, sometimes with the addition of local people but never less than five. Only in the mines of the Ukraine, it was fewer who went in. What was the second part?

David Pendleton  40:16 

Were you ever in a situation where the crew was afraid, or where you were afraid...

Michael Glawogger 40:33

No...

David Pendleton  40:34

...for your safety or your lives or...

Michael Glawogger 40:35  

I got robbed once in Mexico City, but I hired the guys for the film.

[LAUGHTER]

But they never gave the cell phones back because they were so new at the time that they sold it immediately.

David Pendleton  40:53

I should have done the research on the credits, but to what extent do you have a team that you've worked with on all three films, and is it a team that you're still working with, or do you change…?

Michael Glawogger  41:02 

No, the cameraman is the same. The assistant cameraman now became a cameraman of his own, so he's not with us anymore. But mainly I have two sound people who… You see, European filmmaking has become a little difficult, because you need funding from many places. And the places want their money back. Not in the sense that when the film makes something that you give the money back, but then if you get funding from Berlin, you have to do sound mixing in Berlin, or take a sound man from Berlin. So now I have an Austrian sound man and a German sound man, because I don't know where the money comes from. And if the money comes from Switzerland, I probably have to do either the sound mix in Berlin or have an assistant from Switzerland, you know? You're not free in choice anymore if you work on a certain level, especially with feature filmmaking. Like, I filmed the film mainly in New York, but there was a part of it that played in a cellar of a house where a Nazi criminal was hiding, and I would have to rebuild the cellar of New York in Cologne, which cost five times as much as I would have filmed it in New York, but I had to do it because I had to spend the money there. So it's getting very absurd at times, but you have to follow those rules, because otherwise you don't get that kind of money. But especially to make the films, to give the films that look, the closeness to my cameraman, you can feel that in all three films, because that's what we [have done] since the late 90s.

David Pendleton  43:07  

Other? Yes, and you. Do you want to…

[INAUDIBLE AUDIENCE QUESTION]

The first question is, how long did you spend in each of the cities for Megacities? And the second one..

Audience 10  43:21

The other question is, why is the Russian film so literary? Why [INAUDIBLE] quotations?

Michael Glawogger  43:30

Maybe because the Russians are more philosophical people. And they read more, they’re very...they have, you know, they have this soul for things. And I cannot really answer the “how long;” it's as long as necessary and sometimes longer because the permissions wouldn't get through or you're delayed, and then you have more time at hand. But everything that sort of...the closeness to the people or everything that's in this film is not about the shooting process, it's about the research process. So normally, I spend like one or two months in a place, and then I shoot ten days.

David Pendleton  44:18  

I have a quick question. Who wrote the text about negativity that we hear near the end?

Michael Glawogger  44:22  

The guy in the basement.

David Pendleton  44:25  

With the REM poster and the Butthole Surfers t-shirt?

Michael Glawogger  44:28

Yeah, yeah, that’s his text.

David Pendleton  44:29

Interesting. And then, yeah, there was a question. Yeah, there's a gentleman.. You there in the hat. Amanda will hand you a mic.

Audience 11  44:38  

So a lot of the portraits are very intimate, and I'm just wondering about the relationships you've developed, and how you develop trust with people so that you can get in that close, because I felt like people were very vulnerable in a lot of the scenes and I was curious about those relationships.

Michael Glawogger  45:00  

There is no magic behind that. It's like you're making friends. You cannot do it with everybody and you don't wanna do it with everybody. You have to connect. I mean, like Mikey, we liked each other. Though he fucked me over all the time, he was an intelligent, interesting person. Otherwise I couldn't have done it. But it's not..there is nothing magical about it. It's like going to the schoolyard and say to somebody, “You want to be my friend? Let's play ball,” something like that. See, it's no big deal, and if people want that, they play ball with you. That's it.

David Pendleton  45:49  

Any other questions? If not...Michael, I want to thank you for your time here and wish you good journeys. You're going on to New York to present Whores’ Glory, and then on to the West Coast. So thank you so much for coming and playing ball with us here.

Michael Glawogger 46:07  

Thank you for having me here. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

David Pendleton  46:09

And thanks to all of you.

©Harvard Film Archive

The first film of the trilogy, Megacities was in many ways the seed for the whole enterprise – including the fact that the film's international success enabled Glawogger to raise the funds for the subsequent two. Less thematically unified than the others, Megacities is a particularly vivid kind of urban anthropology. The film unfolds as a series of twelve episodes set on the mean streets of the slums of Mumbai, Mexico City, New York City and Moscow. Glawogger's thematic preoccupations with the beauty and precariousness of life on the margins helped generate a certain amount of controversy around the film, as did his unabashed – and freely admitted – interventions and re-stagings. – DP