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INTERVIEW:
MOVIES IN THE MIND
An interview with Michael Glawogger. Vienna, Sept. 16, 1996.
Questions and comments: Stefan Grissemann
SG: I suspect that one of the main difficulties you had with “Movies in the Mind” was finding different styles for the very different stories; on the other hand, you had to steer away from that – so you wouldn't just wind up with a hodgepodge in the end – and incorporate parallels, echoes, stylistic leitmotifs and recognizable patterns. How did you achieve this?
MG: In the beginning there was just the idea, and initially I didn't really ask myself what I was getting into. I looked at it as an adventure. But it quickly became clear that I would have to think about finding a style. I could have opted for using only so-called “auteur films,” very, very personal stories – or just those stories that were directly connected with the storyteller. In the end I found it more intriguing to pick stories that don't really get told in this country. As it turned out, most of them were genre films. The auteur film is also represented, but I treat it as a genre too. The filmmakers in “Movies in the Mind” relate very different things. Weaving these together was, of course, more difficult than tying together similar elements.
SG: In many shots you use recurring visual motifs. Did this develop during shooting, or was it part of a carefully planned pre-production strategy?
MG: It came from careful preparation: since everything was so different, I had to give the film a consistent style. I thought the most boring option would be to just let the people talk, that couldn't be all there was to this film, reduced to so few levels. It turned into more of a feature film than a documentary, at least that level is stronger now. I wasn't interested in making a purely documentary film with people describing their imaginary films.
That's also a possibility, to leave out the realization level, but that would be an entirely different approach. A film like that could be interesting because it would examine the lives of the heroes more closely. It wasn't my way, though. From the beginning, my intention was to create a foreground and a background, making the former the storyteller, and letting the latter hint at the film he or she would make.
SG: The film is packed with inside jokes and variations on previously established motifs, full of echoes and running gags. It seems to me that you can't catch a lot of them the first or second time around. Is “Movies in the Mind” a work that the viewer should – or even must – watch several times?
MG: It's funny: that's a question that consistently pops up with all the films I make – and maybe that's the key. I definitely believe that a film has to work the first time you see it, but I also think it's exciting if new levels unfold when you watch a film several times. Maybe it has something to do with my style: I seem to always produce these conglomerations of bits and pieces that turn out not to be so chaotic after all, or at least they shouldn't be. This happens in varying degrees: sometimes on their first viewing, audiences will notice things I would never have thought possible; and sometimes I am appalled at how little people see, associate, or notice. A lot of things didn't find their way into the film until the editing stage, and not everything was strictly planned. Strict planning doesn't work with a film like this because although there are screenplays for parts of it, a lot of it is also documentary.
SG: Is editing one of the main steps in your work? Do you spend a lot of time on this or is it a quick and fluid process?
MG: It took place in two stages: we edited the episodes themselves pretty quickly, the rest was a long process of assembling and reassembling the segments, trying that out and rearranging the whole thing again, playing with the finished pieces of the puzzle.
SG: On the genesis of the project: how did the idea for “Movies in the Mind” arise?
MG: For that I need to give you some background information. I always say that the film that is most important to my work is one I'll never make. It was a movie I wrote once, a movie composed of 32 stories interwoven according to a very strict pattern: for me that's probably the most typical film of all, but chances are I'll never make it, just because it's too complicated. I've used this system again and again, though. The idea for “Movies in the Mind” is old, but I never seemed to find the right moment. I never got the urge to make the movie because at first I envisioned it as a made-for-TV film or as an interview film. Later it occurred to me that I could visualize the individual stories. And this simple step, which is actually pretty obvious, was what ultimately gave me the kick to make “Movies in the Mind.”
SG: Like you said, many of the episodes in your film are attempts at genres that you don't find or no longer find in Austrian cinema: there are, for example, the “heimatfilm,” which used to be more popular, splatter and horror films, and the grotesque film, which is rarely found in this form in Austria. Are you by any chance trying to get new ideas to take root in Austrian cinema, or would that be overshooting your ambitions?
MG: I do find the idea of reintroducing the genre film interesting, although I wouldn't know how to actually go about doing it. One ambition I do have is to collect all the visions in our minds, and I think “Movies in the Mind” offers a fairly representative cross section: there were several similar stories for every idea and every genre, I could choose. It's hard to say whether or not these types of films fulfilled certain demands of the audience: I can't say whether or not the splatter movie has an impact in Austria – incidentally, I'm not even sure if the episode you are referring to falls into the splatter category: it has the potential to develop into something completely different, to become a very sensitive film. The idea of making a science-fiction film in Austria fascinates me too. I don't think the only kind of film this country needs is the auteur film.
SG: In a market as inconsequential as the Austrian one you might say nothing has an impact, not even the big festival successes. But maybe the ideas and movies we carry around in our minds are doomed to failure because of the Austrian funding institutions. If the genre film really is that popular, it ought to show up at the funding level, if only to be rejected in the end anyway ...
MG: My film isn't an indictment of the funding institutions, it's more of a stock-taking to show the potential out there.
SG: In other words, not an instructive film but an attempt to playfully introduce new facets?
MG: Yes, I would distance myself from instruction and finger-pointing and also from generalizations in these matters; a lot of it has to do with taste.
SG: Your film doesn't really live from the notion that the projects were all so outstanding that each and every film definitely had to be shot. “Movies in the Mind” is in fact an organic interaction between bits and pieces of film, interviews, and the other ten stories.
MG: At some point I caught myself choosing things, apart from the genre criterion, that I in some way wanted to shoot myself. If “Movies in the Mind” is a psychogram, then it's a map of my own person. The film tells of my secret wish to be able to shoot a vampire movie some day – or something very quiet and lyrical. At some point I realized that they are all themes or approaches I find fascinating as director. It's not that I would make these films – or make them differently; you could say: I made “Movies in the Mind” instead.
SG: The individual episodes in “Movies in the Mind” are all in a sense co-production where you sometimes even collaborated on the directing, because you gave inexperienced filmmakers technical and artistic assistance, because you encouraged a playful repartee.
MG: Yes, but I also made it my policy to only offer as much as the other person was willing to accept. There were scenes where I just operated the camera, and there were others where I did much more. I always encouraged as much uniqueness as possible – but at the same time also tried to keep it as much my own film as possible.
SG: Like so many of your earlier camera and directing projects, “Movies in the Mind” lies at the interface between the documentary and the feature film. Does that mean you want to pursue this course, that you want to portray or alienate real things or people? Or is it the other way around, that you want to make what you portray seem as “real” as possible?
MG: That is definitely a theme I am very interested in. But I think that there are two kinds of directors: the ones that always make the same movie – and they can be great every time – and the ones that always try to get away from that. I feel like doing very, very different things. You can't escape yourself anyway. But under the right circumstances and production conditions I think it would be fascinating to make a sci-fi film.
SG: You're also very interested in literature, music, TV. How important to your work are influences that are not directly related to film?
MG: At one point one of my narrators in “Movies in the Mind” says: “'Movies in the Mind' is like the sum of all the best films you've ever seen.” I think that is valid for culture in general. Our taste, like our creativity, is in some way the sum of the things we consume and process, whereby each individual exhibits other influences. The music in “Movies in the Mind,” like the visual style, is often very eclectic. How did this come about?
SG: I gave everyone the first cut of their film and left it up to them to provide their own music. If they didn't want to, I arranged for a composer to write the music according to the director's instructions. You use some of your narrators as actors ...
MG: I originally intended to incorporate this idea even more, to have the narrators appear in the other episodes. All you see now are relics of that, I abandoned the idea because it didn't tie the parts together so much as it produced confusion.
SG: Compared to your last film “Ant Street,” the regional dialect, the Viennese flair – depending on the stories – is less pronounced, but it is still there. Is it your intention to make specifically Austrian movies?
MG: Sure, but I found that aspect overrated in “Ant Street.” It was partly my fault too, though: I chose to place the film in a certain setting, and that was the subject of a lot of debate. Despite that, I don't think the qualities of a film like “Ant Street” rely on whether or not it is a Viennese-dialect film. That's not the way I want people to interpret it. What is important to me is that my films take place in authentic settings – but I wouldn't say that the aim of my work is to create a Viennese film.
SG: Back to “Movies in the Mind”: you said that above all you wanted to shoot an entertaining film. The entertainment value of the people chosen as narrators is therefore decisive for the entertainment potential of the film. Did you test the impact of your people beforehand?
MG: I hoped that people talking about their favorite projects and fantasies would generate enough impact on the screen. And that's something I like very much: there is a kind of varying linguistic rhythm, you've got different dialects, different degrees of seriousness, different levels of enthusiasm, and this fits in well with the differences in the stories. I see some of the statements in my film as sentences; others as periods – as points where you can pause and take a break. I'm not into films that blow you away for 90 minutes straight. I think it should be more like music.
SG: How much room do you leave for improvisation?
MG: That's a difficult topic. You have to be terribly well organized in order to be able to improvise. Making films depends on so many people that if you simply start to improvise, you have to create other production methods: you have to pare down the crews much more. It's not impossible, but if you want to create movie-like images, your options for improvisation are limited. ?
SG: There is something very eccentric in all eleven episodes of “Movies in the Mind” as well as in most of your previous films. Is it a kind of warning to the Austrian film scene, a plea for more productive craziness and absurdity – and less predictable stories?
MG: Maybe, but I'm not actually trying to tell people to “beware” of this or that or preach any moral lessons. Change is happening constantly: if certain movements are strong enough, they'll come forth and won't be suppressed. Maybe “Movies in the Mind” is my contribution to this. As a filmmaker it's not my job to give warnings, maybe more like... ?
SG: ... Welcoming addresses?
MG: Yes, maybe. To me all this “beware” bullshit just seems too restrictive. It's not something that fosters growth. I think we should make films that allow things to grow.
© Petro Domenigg © Puchner
DOWNLOAD INTERVIEW:
Interview Movies.pdf
INTERVIEW:
MOVIES IN THE MIND
An interview with Michael Glawogger. Vienna, Sept. 16, 1996.
Questions and comments: Stefan Grissemann
SG: I suspect that one of the main difficulties you had with “Movies in the Mind” was finding different styles for the very different stories; on the other hand, you had to steer away from that – so you wouldn't just wind up with a hodgepodge in the end – and incorporate parallels, echoes, stylistic leitmotifs and recognizable patterns. How did you achieve this?
MG: In the beginning there was just the idea, and initially I didn't really ask myself what I was getting into. I looked at it as an adventure. But it quickly became clear that I would have to think about finding a style. I could have opted for using only so-called “auteur films,” very, very personal stories – or just those stories that were directly connected with the storyteller. In the end I found it more intriguing to pick stories that don't really get told in this country. As it turned out, most of them were genre films. The auteur film is also represented, but I treat it as a genre too. The filmmakers in “Movies in the Mind” relate very different things. Weaving these together was, of course, more difficult than tying together similar elements.
SG: In many shots you use recurring visual motifs. Did this develop during shooting, or was it part of a carefully planned pre-production strategy?
MG: It came from careful preparation: since everything was so different, I had to give the film a consistent style. I thought the most boring option would be to just let the people talk, that couldn't be all there was to this film, reduced to so few levels. It turned into more of a feature film than a documentary, at least that level is stronger now. I wasn't interested in making a purely documentary film with people describing their imaginary films.
That's also a possibility, to leave out the realization level, but that would be an entirely different approach. A film like that could be interesting because it would examine the lives of the heroes more closely. It wasn't my way, though. From the beginning, my intention was to create a foreground and a background, making the former the storyteller, and letting the latter hint at the film he or she would make.
SG: The film is packed with inside jokes and variations on previously established motifs, full of echoes and running gags. It seems to me that you can't catch a lot of them the first or second time around. Is “Movies in the Mind” a work that the viewer should – or even must – watch several times?
MG: It's funny: that's a question that consistently pops up with all the films I make – and maybe that's the key. I definitely believe that a film has to work the first time you see it, but I also think it's exciting if new levels unfold when you watch a film several times. Maybe it has something to do with my style: I seem to always produce these conglomerations of bits and pieces that turn out not to be so chaotic after all, or at least they shouldn't be. This happens in varying degrees: sometimes on their first viewing, audiences will notice things I would never have thought possible; and sometimes I am appalled at how little people see, associate, or notice. A lot of things didn't find their way into the film until the editing stage, and not everything was strictly planned. Strict planning doesn't work with a film like this because although there are screenplays for parts of it, a lot of it is also documentary.
SG: Is editing one of the main steps in your work? Do you spend a lot of time on this or is it a quick and fluid process?
MG: It took place in two stages: we edited the episodes themselves pretty quickly, the rest was a long process of assembling and reassembling the segments, trying that out and rearranging the whole thing again, playing with the finished pieces of the puzzle.
SG: On the genesis of the project: how did the idea for “Movies in the Mind” arise?
MG: For that I need to give you some background information. I always say that the film that is most important to my work is one I'll never make. It was a movie I wrote once, a movie composed of 32 stories interwoven according to a very strict pattern: for me that's probably the most typical film of all, but chances are I'll never make it, just because it's too complicated. I've used this system again and again, though. The idea for “Movies in the Mind” is old, but I never seemed to find the right moment. I never got the urge to make the movie because at first I envisioned it as a made-for-TV film or as an interview film. Later it occurred to me that I could visualize the individual stories. And this simple step, which is actually pretty obvious, was what ultimately gave me the kick to make “Movies in the Mind.”
SG: Like you said, many of the episodes in your film are attempts at genres that you don't find or no longer find in Austrian cinema: there are, for example, the “heimatfilm,” which used to be more popular, splatter and horror films, and the grotesque film, which is rarely found in this form in Austria. Are you by any chance trying to get new ideas to take root in Austrian cinema, or would that be overshooting your ambitions?
MG: I do find the idea of reintroducing the genre film interesting, although I wouldn't know how to actually go about doing it. One ambition I do have is to collect all the visions in our minds, and I think “Movies in the Mind” offers a fairly representative cross section: there were several similar stories for every idea and every genre, I could choose. It's hard to say whether or not these types of films fulfilled certain demands of the audience: I can't say whether or not the splatter movie has an impact in Austria – incidentally, I'm not even sure if the episode you are referring to falls into the splatter category: it has the potential to develop into something completely different, to become a very sensitive film. The idea of making a science-fiction film in Austria fascinates me too. I don't think the only kind of film this country needs is the auteur film.
SG: In a market as inconsequential as the Austrian one you might say nothing has an impact, not even the big festival successes. But maybe the ideas and movies we carry around in our minds are doomed to failure because of the Austrian funding institutions. If the genre film really is that popular, it ought to show up at the funding level, if only to be rejected in the end anyway ...
MG: My film isn't an indictment of the funding institutions, it's more of a stock-taking to show the potential out there.
SG: In other words, not an instructive film but an attempt to playfully introduce new facets?
MG: Yes, I would distance myself from instruction and finger-pointing and also from generalizations in these matters; a lot of it has to do with taste.
SG: Your film doesn't really live from the notion that the projects were all so outstanding that each and every film definitely had to be shot. “Movies in the Mind” is in fact an organic interaction between bits and pieces of film, interviews, and the other ten stories.
MG: At some point I caught myself choosing things, apart from the genre criterion, that I in some way wanted to shoot myself. If “Movies in the Mind” is a psychogram, then it's a map of my own person. The film tells of my secret wish to be able to shoot a vampire movie some day – or something very quiet and lyrical. At some point I realized that they are all themes or approaches I find fascinating as director. It's not that I would make these films – or make them differently; you could say: I made “Movies in the Mind” instead.
SG: The individual episodes in “Movies in the Mind” are all in a sense co-production where you sometimes even collaborated on the directing, because you gave inexperienced filmmakers technical and artistic assistance, because you encouraged a playful repartee.
MG: Yes, but I also made it my policy to only offer as much as the other person was willing to accept. There were scenes where I just operated the camera, and there were others where I did much more. I always encouraged as much uniqueness as possible – but at the same time also tried to keep it as much my own film as possible.
SG: Like so many of your earlier camera and directing projects, “Movies in the Mind” lies at the interface between the documentary and the feature film. Does that mean you want to pursue this course, that you want to portray or alienate real things or people? Or is it the other way around, that you want to make what you portray seem as “real” as possible?
MG: That is definitely a theme I am very interested in. But I think that there are two kinds of directors: the ones that always make the same movie – and they can be great every time – and the ones that always try to get away from that. I feel like doing very, very different things. You can't escape yourself anyway. But under the right circumstances and production conditions I think it would be fascinating to make a sci-fi film.
SG: You're also very interested in literature, music, TV. How important to your work are influences that are not directly related to film?
MG: At one point one of my narrators in “Movies in the Mind” says: “'Movies in the Mind' is like the sum of all the best films you've ever seen.” I think that is valid for culture in general. Our taste, like our creativity, is in some way the sum of the things we consume and process, whereby each individual exhibits other influences. The music in “Movies in the Mind,” like the visual style, is often very eclectic. How did this come about?
SG: I gave everyone the first cut of their film and left it up to them to provide their own music. If they didn't want to, I arranged for a composer to write the music according to the director's instructions. You use some of your narrators as actors ...
MG: I originally intended to incorporate this idea even more, to have the narrators appear in the other episodes. All you see now are relics of that, I abandoned the idea because it didn't tie the parts together so much as it produced confusion.
SG: Compared to your last film “Ant Street,” the regional dialect, the Viennese flair – depending on the stories – is less pronounced, but it is still there. Is it your intention to make specifically Austrian movies?
MG: Sure, but I found that aspect overrated in “Ant Street.” It was partly my fault too, though: I chose to place the film in a certain setting, and that was the subject of a lot of debate. Despite that, I don't think the qualities of a film like “Ant Street” rely on whether or not it is a Viennese-dialect film. That's not the way I want people to interpret it. What is important to me is that my films take place in authentic settings – but I wouldn't say that the aim of my work is to create a Viennese film.
SG: Back to “Movies in the Mind”: you said that above all you wanted to shoot an entertaining film. The entertainment value of the people chosen as narrators is therefore decisive for the entertainment potential of the film. Did you test the impact of your people beforehand?
MG: I hoped that people talking about their favorite projects and fantasies would generate enough impact on the screen. And that's something I like very much: there is a kind of varying linguistic rhythm, you've got different dialects, different degrees of seriousness, different levels of enthusiasm, and this fits in well with the differences in the stories. I see some of the statements in my film as sentences; others as periods – as points where you can pause and take a break. I'm not into films that blow you away for 90 minutes straight. I think it should be more like music.
SG: How much room do you leave for improvisation?
MG: That's a difficult topic. You have to be terribly well organized in order to be able to improvise. Making films depends on so many people that if you simply start to improvise, you have to create other production methods: you have to pare down the crews much more. It's not impossible, but if you want to create movie-like images, your options for improvisation are limited. ?
SG: There is something very eccentric in all eleven episodes of “Movies in the Mind” as well as in most of your previous films. Is it a kind of warning to the Austrian film scene, a plea for more productive craziness and absurdity – and less predictable stories?
MG: Maybe, but I'm not actually trying to tell people to “beware” of this or that or preach any moral lessons. Change is happening constantly: if certain movements are strong enough, they'll come forth and won't be suppressed. Maybe “Movies in the Mind” is my contribution to this. As a filmmaker it's not my job to give warnings, maybe more like... ?
SG: ... Welcoming addresses?
MG: Yes, maybe. To me all this “beware” bullshit just seems too restrictive. It's not something that fosters growth. I think we should make films that allow things to grow.