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INTERVIEW:
SLUGS
Two interviews by Peter Krobath
A PASSION FOR FUN
Pia Hierzegger talked to Peter Krobath about a passion for fun that can arise if you approach pornography with humor.
Peter Krobath: SLUGS shows us in an amusing way that porn acting is not a profession worth striving for.
Pia Hierzegger: Yes, but I didn't think it was in the first place. I have to admit that I have never watched an entire porn flick, just documentaries about porn movies. It goes without saying that it won’t really be worth striving for to someone who doesn’t like doing it. That’s why I think it’s realistic that the characters in the movie fail. It simply isn’t easy to fuck on command.
Peter Krobath: This project must have been a double challenge for you as an actress: first, there were nude scenes and second, the jokes had to be funny ...
Pia Hierzegger: Being naked has nothing to do with acting, either you’re naked or you’re not. I find it much more difficult to make the jokes and punch lines work.
Peter Krobath: A project like this can completely backfire. You don’t see the result until the film is done. Was that something you were worried about?
Pia Hierzegger: Since I’ve known Michael Ostrowski for a very long time and had read his screenplay in various stages of development, we knew we could trust each other from the beginning. But there were still discussions about what we were doing, for example: up to here, but no further, otherwise we might as well just forget it right now. But I never had the feeling that I was being forced into anything. In the preparation stage it was really important for us to talk a lot and try different things in order to develop a mutual trust. Of course, everything becomes normal to some extent when you’re surrounded by dildos and scantily clad people all the time. We still never completely lost our shyness about nudity. And there were certain scenes we approached with more respect. I think what we were afraid of most was that we might go too far. I mean I can look out for myself, but to some extent I have to look out for the others too.
Peter Krobath: What is it that makes the crossover with pornography so interesting? Pia Hierzegger: I think if it’s done with humor, it can be funny. Other than that, it’s probably got to do with wanting to provoke people.
Peter Krobath: Was that an issue with you, the desire to provoke?
Pia: No, not really. In fact, it wasn’t until the film was finished that I even asked myself if it might be upsetting to anyone. To me, SLUGS isn’t a realistic film, it’s more of a fairy tale. It wasn’t directed to depict reality, that’s why it doesn’t provoke people. I’d find it hard to believe if someone actually felt offended by SLUGS. And if they did, then it would probably be more because of the causal drug use in the movie. Probably people would find the pot smoking more upsetting than the nudity.
Peter Krobath: How would you describe the humor in SLUGS?
Pia: Definitely naïve, a very open kind of humor. Although there are also characters with a slightly cynical bent. For example when Max goes off on his tangents, it’s always a mixture of seriousness and irony. But basically it’s a kind of humor that comes from a true passion for fun. Maybe it’s a pothead sense of humor.
Peter Krobath: Didn’t this flirting with pornography ever take you out of your comfort zone?
Pia: Strangely enough, no. I simply didn’t take it too seriously. Besides, since I played the director in the film I had an easier time. In the early phases of the screenplay, in fact, I wasn’t even going to have to take my clothes off at all. The group scene where we all romp around naked in the backyard wasn’t planned from the start, it evolved out of the rehearsals. Maybe it would have been harder if I had thought about where all this could lead when I first read the screenplay. But the challenge of making my first movie and above all the relaxed atmosphere that we had from the very beginning kept me from thinking about whether I thought it was stupid or embarrassing.
Peter Krobath: In the movie, pornography is depicted as something relatively common. It wasn’t all that hard to talk your character into making the porn film. How do you see this personally?
Pia: More than anything I think porn movies are boring. I don’t condemn them, but sometimes I think it’s sad that people need that kind of thing. But maybe it’s just a form of aesthetics that I can’t relate to. If someone asked me if I wanted to be a porn actress, I would answer without hesitation or regret: “No, I don’t.” I simply can’t imagine it being much fun making that kind of movie. It’s not a profession that attracts me.
FRICTION FICTION
Michael Glawogger and Michael Ostrowski tell Peter Krobath why you can’t make a movie about chicken farming without chickens, why pornography is honest, and why they even almost dedicated SLUGS to Gunther Philipp. Peter Krobath: To me SLUGS seems like a Dogme95 film that violates all the rules of the Dogme95 collective on principle. I mean the style is sort of along the lines of Dogme95, but at the same time it erupts into total artificiality.
Michael Glawogger: There are moments where our characters are very close to being themselves, for example the scene where they are sitting together on the couch explaining why they would shoot a porn movie. That’s maybe what you mean, but I never actually thought about Dogme95.
Michael Ostrowski: When I wrote the first of many versions of the screenplay, I had the feeling that no one would ever want to make the movie. At the time Dogme95 was what motivated me to try anyway. I thought if I really couldn’t find a director, I would shoot it myself using the minimalist rules set down by Dogme95. In that sense Dogme95 was important to me, but only for financial reasons, not stylistically – that was never really one of my considerations.
Peter Krobath: What was it about Michael Ostrowski’s story that attracted Michael Glawogger?
Michael Glawogger: Actually nothing. It was something completely different: when the idea turned up more or less by chance on my desk, I basically thought it was funny, not the way a stand-up comedian is funny, but really, genuinely funny. Somehow really off-the-wall. But it wasn’t easy to write the screenplay. Five of us shut ourselves away in a house to write the story. We acted out scenes, tried out dialogue, took the time to really see how far we could go.
Peter Krobath: That’s an interesting question: how far can you go in a film like this?
Michael Glawogger: Of course you can’t weasel around the subject. To put it more bluntly: I can’t make a movie about chicken farming without chickens. The question as to how far you can go is something each person had to answer him- or herself. It was easier with actors who already had relationships with each other, of course, but basically everyone has a different way of dealing with his or her own body. For a director it’s like shooting a movie about soccer. The problem is always the same: the people you’re working with either can’t kick or can’t act.
Peter Krobath: Still, the protagonists in SLUGS shoot a porn flick. And a porn flick has certain requirements that simply have to be fulfilled.
Michael Ostrowski: I know what you're saying. We realized early on that we’re not porn actors, that there are a number of things that we simply can’t do. That’s why we even briefly considered hiring professionals for certain scenes. But on the other hand the explicit sex shown in SLUGS only makes up a very small part of the movie, and it’s certainly not the core of the story.
Michael Glawogger: Besides, you see more naked men than naked women.
Peter Krobath: Was that intentional?
Michael Glawogger: I’ll tell you how it came about – and this is actually probably the only Dogme95 thing about the whole project. If you shut yourself away in a house to write and rehearse, what comes out in the end is something that everyone can and wants to do. And the screenplay oriented itself along those lines.
Peter Krobath: All right, but we still haven’t defined the genre ...
Michael Glawogger: I would say that SLUGS is a sex comedy. Originally, I even wanted to dedicate the film to Gunther Philipp. A sex comedy. Or better yet: a post-hippie sex comedy.
Michael Ostrowski: A post-hippie, indie sex comedy! Michael Glawogger: Exactly. Post-hippie because the young people, who are the same just with different clothes, are surrounded by stuff from their father’s generation, and the father is me in a way. The record collection in the movie is mine, those are my tunes. In that sense, of course, it’s also a generation-gap film.
Peter Krobath: Is it just a coincidence that the cute little animals that pop up everywhere remind me of the kitschaesthetics of the photographers Pierre et Gilles?
Michael Glawogger: Funny you say that because the tomato/jerk-off scene was inspired by a Pierre et Gilles poster hanging on the wall next to Michi’s toilet. There were other coincidences too. Maybe these kinds of elements were what made the film, despite all its artificiality, seem Dogme95-like. More than that, though, what I had in mind during shooting was comics, especially with the colors in the film: clear, rich, yellow-green comicstrip colors.
Peter Krobath: Getting back to the animals ...
Michael Glawogger: Right, the animals. They were very important to the film. The bunnies you could take home with you and pet at the end of the day, but not the deer. The owl flew away and the local firemen spent four days looking for it. That was nice. Joshi the leopard usually works at a Czech airport chasing ducks … and that in turn led to the conversation in the film about Indian runner ducks and slugs.
Peter Krobath: Were the animals written into the screenplay from the beginning?
Michael Ostrowski: Actually, all that started with a series of puns in the film that derived from an obsolete German word. One thing led to another and before we knew it, we had the animals in there as a funny structural aspect.
Michael Glawogger: There are plenty of other connections the viewer doesn’t notice either. For example when the tractor passes Michi on the road, the farmer is wearing exactly the same ski cap the three friends used in the beginning in the chocolate game. Or the leopard climbs up the apple tree, in other words the leopard “apples” himself.
Michael Ostrowski: A film rich in metaphors and symbols.
Michael Glawogger: But you also have to add, beware of seeing symbols!
Michael Ostrowski: SLUGS is a film that is full of symbols but doesn’t function on a metaphoric level. Instead, it stays very superficial, refuses to get close to the audience, unlike a melodrama where the story comes straight at you. It’s like that with the symbols here too: they are there, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to understand them in this film, at least that’s what I think. It’s okay to not know what’s going on.
Peter Krobath: Why is it that in film, literature, and the visual arts there are more and more artists who are choosing to cross over into the area of pornography?
Michael Ostrowski: At first, when I came up with the story, I thought: how can it be that nobody has done this before. As an actor I always wondered how a porn star works. Because for one, fucking in front of the camera is a humanly difficult thing to do, but it’s also hard physical work, and then you have to stay in character the whole time. It combines a lot of aspects, that interested me – by that I don’t mean to say that our intention with SLUGS was to make a real porn flick.
Michael Glawogger: The first filmmakers gave us documentary material, people leaving the factory and that kind of stuff. But immediately following that the next thing they showed us was people fucking. With the Internet this became even more pronounced: fucking is omnipresent. For me there is something very honest about porn flicks in the sense that the actors are really doing it. Porn flicks, even if they are badly made, have an undeniable authenticity that really blows you away – and it is this very area that other film genres, the non-porn genres, are now starting to move in on and conquer. It’s something that is yet to be exhausted in the normal feature film. I think it will assert itself and soon there will be more fucking in normal movies. We’re already starting to feel the effects of this. The hard part is getting over your own shyness. That’s why we all stripped for the rehearsals and even played normal scenes naked. That helped the movie a lot, even if you don’t always see it.
Michael Ostrowski: “Friction fiction” that was the overall motto of the screenplay from the beginning. I wanted to write a pseudo-intellectual dialogue that was silly yet at the same time true. And the same thing goes for the movie too: it’s pretty silly, but it also hits the nail on the head.
© Mario Hopfgartner
DOWNLOAD INTERVIEWS:
Interview slugs.pdf
INTERVIEW:
SLUGS
Two interviews by Peter Krobath
A PASSION FOR FUN
Pia Hierzegger talked to Peter Krobath about a passion for fun that can arise if you approach pornography with humor.
Peter Krobath: SLUGS shows us in an amusing way that porn acting is not a profession worth striving for.
Pia Hierzegger: Yes, but I didn't think it was in the first place. I have to admit that I have never watched an entire porn flick, just documentaries about porn movies. It goes without saying that it won’t really be worth striving for to someone who doesn’t like doing it. That’s why I think it’s realistic that the characters in the movie fail. It simply isn’t easy to fuck on command.
Peter Krobath: This project must have been a double challenge for you as an actress: first, there were nude scenes and second, the jokes had to be funny ...
Pia Hierzegger: Being naked has nothing to do with acting, either you’re naked or you’re not. I find it much more difficult to make the jokes and punch lines work.
Peter Krobath: A project like this can completely backfire. You don’t see the result until the film is done. Was that something you were worried about?
Pia Hierzegger: Since I’ve known Michael Ostrowski for a very long time and had read his screenplay in various stages of development, we knew we could trust each other from the beginning. But there were still discussions about what we were doing, for example: up to here, but no further, otherwise we might as well just forget it right now. But I never had the feeling that I was being forced into anything. In the preparation stage it was really important for us to talk a lot and try different things in order to develop a mutual trust. Of course, everything becomes normal to some extent when you’re surrounded by dildos and scantily clad people all the time. We still never completely lost our shyness about nudity. And there were certain scenes we approached with more respect. I think what we were afraid of most was that we might go too far. I mean I can look out for myself, but to some extent I have to look out for the others too.
Peter Krobath: What is it that makes the crossover with pornography so interesting? Pia Hierzegger: I think if it’s done with humor, it can be funny. Other than that, it’s probably got to do with wanting to provoke people.
Peter Krobath: Was that an issue with you, the desire to provoke?
Pia: No, not really. In fact, it wasn’t until the film was finished that I even asked myself if it might be upsetting to anyone. To me, SLUGS isn’t a realistic film, it’s more of a fairy tale. It wasn’t directed to depict reality, that’s why it doesn’t provoke people. I’d find it hard to believe if someone actually felt offended by SLUGS. And if they did, then it would probably be more because of the causal drug use in the movie. Probably people would find the pot smoking more upsetting than the nudity.
Peter Krobath: How would you describe the humor in SLUGS?
Pia: Definitely naïve, a very open kind of humor. Although there are also characters with a slightly cynical bent. For example when Max goes off on his tangents, it’s always a mixture of seriousness and irony. But basically it’s a kind of humor that comes from a true passion for fun. Maybe it’s a pothead sense of humor.
Peter Krobath: Didn’t this flirting with pornography ever take you out of your comfort zone?
Pia: Strangely enough, no. I simply didn’t take it too seriously. Besides, since I played the director in the film I had an easier time. In the early phases of the screenplay, in fact, I wasn’t even going to have to take my clothes off at all. The group scene where we all romp around naked in the backyard wasn’t planned from the start, it evolved out of the rehearsals. Maybe it would have been harder if I had thought about where all this could lead when I first read the screenplay. But the challenge of making my first movie and above all the relaxed atmosphere that we had from the very beginning kept me from thinking about whether I thought it was stupid or embarrassing.
Peter Krobath: In the movie, pornography is depicted as something relatively common. It wasn’t all that hard to talk your character into making the porn film. How do you see this personally?
Pia: More than anything I think porn movies are boring. I don’t condemn them, but sometimes I think it’s sad that people need that kind of thing. But maybe it’s just a form of aesthetics that I can’t relate to. If someone asked me if I wanted to be a porn actress, I would answer without hesitation or regret: “No, I don’t.” I simply can’t imagine it being much fun making that kind of movie. It’s not a profession that attracts me.
FRICTION FICTION
Michael Glawogger and Michael Ostrowski tell Peter Krobath why you can’t make a movie about chicken farming without chickens, why pornography is honest, and why they even almost dedicated SLUGS to Gunther Philipp. Peter Krobath: To me SLUGS seems like a Dogme95 film that violates all the rules of the Dogme95 collective on principle. I mean the style is sort of along the lines of Dogme95, but at the same time it erupts into total artificiality.
Michael Glawogger: There are moments where our characters are very close to being themselves, for example the scene where they are sitting together on the couch explaining why they would shoot a porn movie. That’s maybe what you mean, but I never actually thought about Dogme95.
Michael Ostrowski: When I wrote the first of many versions of the screenplay, I had the feeling that no one would ever want to make the movie. At the time Dogme95 was what motivated me to try anyway. I thought if I really couldn’t find a director, I would shoot it myself using the minimalist rules set down by Dogme95. In that sense Dogme95 was important to me, but only for financial reasons, not stylistically – that was never really one of my considerations.
Peter Krobath: What was it about Michael Ostrowski’s story that attracted Michael Glawogger?
Michael Glawogger: Actually nothing. It was something completely different: when the idea turned up more or less by chance on my desk, I basically thought it was funny, not the way a stand-up comedian is funny, but really, genuinely funny. Somehow really off-the-wall. But it wasn’t easy to write the screenplay. Five of us shut ourselves away in a house to write the story. We acted out scenes, tried out dialogue, took the time to really see how far we could go.
Peter Krobath: That’s an interesting question: how far can you go in a film like this?
Michael Glawogger: Of course you can’t weasel around the subject. To put it more bluntly: I can’t make a movie about chicken farming without chickens. The question as to how far you can go is something each person had to answer him- or herself. It was easier with actors who already had relationships with each other, of course, but basically everyone has a different way of dealing with his or her own body. For a director it’s like shooting a movie about soccer. The problem is always the same: the people you’re working with either can’t kick or can’t act.
Peter Krobath: Still, the protagonists in SLUGS shoot a porn flick. And a porn flick has certain requirements that simply have to be fulfilled.
Michael Ostrowski: I know what you're saying. We realized early on that we’re not porn actors, that there are a number of things that we simply can’t do. That’s why we even briefly considered hiring professionals for certain scenes. But on the other hand the explicit sex shown in SLUGS only makes up a very small part of the movie, and it’s certainly not the core of the story.
Michael Glawogger: Besides, you see more naked men than naked women.
Peter Krobath: Was that intentional?
Michael Glawogger: I’ll tell you how it came about – and this is actually probably the only Dogme95 thing about the whole project. If you shut yourself away in a house to write and rehearse, what comes out in the end is something that everyone can and wants to do. And the screenplay oriented itself along those lines.
Peter Krobath: All right, but we still haven’t defined the genre ...
Michael Glawogger: I would say that SLUGS is a sex comedy. Originally, I even wanted to dedicate the film to Gunther Philipp. A sex comedy. Or better yet: a post-hippie sex comedy.
Michael Ostrowski: A post-hippie, indie sex comedy! Michael Glawogger: Exactly. Post-hippie because the young people, who are the same just with different clothes, are surrounded by stuff from their father’s generation, and the father is me in a way. The record collection in the movie is mine, those are my tunes. In that sense, of course, it’s also a generation-gap film.
Peter Krobath: Is it just a coincidence that the cute little animals that pop up everywhere remind me of the kitschaesthetics of the photographers Pierre et Gilles?
Michael Glawogger: Funny you say that because the tomato/jerk-off scene was inspired by a Pierre et Gilles poster hanging on the wall next to Michi’s toilet. There were other coincidences too. Maybe these kinds of elements were what made the film, despite all its artificiality, seem Dogme95-like. More than that, though, what I had in mind during shooting was comics, especially with the colors in the film: clear, rich, yellow-green comicstrip colors.
Peter Krobath: Getting back to the animals ...
Michael Glawogger: Right, the animals. They were very important to the film. The bunnies you could take home with you and pet at the end of the day, but not the deer. The owl flew away and the local firemen spent four days looking for it. That was nice. Joshi the leopard usually works at a Czech airport chasing ducks … and that in turn led to the conversation in the film about Indian runner ducks and slugs.
Peter Krobath: Were the animals written into the screenplay from the beginning?
Michael Ostrowski: Actually, all that started with a series of puns in the film that derived from an obsolete German word. One thing led to another and before we knew it, we had the animals in there as a funny structural aspect.
Michael Glawogger: There are plenty of other connections the viewer doesn’t notice either. For example when the tractor passes Michi on the road, the farmer is wearing exactly the same ski cap the three friends used in the beginning in the chocolate game. Or the leopard climbs up the apple tree, in other words the leopard “apples” himself.
Michael Ostrowski: A film rich in metaphors and symbols.
Michael Glawogger: But you also have to add, beware of seeing symbols!
Michael Ostrowski: SLUGS is a film that is full of symbols but doesn’t function on a metaphoric level. Instead, it stays very superficial, refuses to get close to the audience, unlike a melodrama where the story comes straight at you. It’s like that with the symbols here too: they are there, but somehow it doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to understand them in this film, at least that’s what I think. It’s okay to not know what’s going on.
Peter Krobath: Why is it that in film, literature, and the visual arts there are more and more artists who are choosing to cross over into the area of pornography?
Michael Ostrowski: At first, when I came up with the story, I thought: how can it be that nobody has done this before. As an actor I always wondered how a porn star works. Because for one, fucking in front of the camera is a humanly difficult thing to do, but it’s also hard physical work, and then you have to stay in character the whole time. It combines a lot of aspects, that interested me – by that I don’t mean to say that our intention with SLUGS was to make a real porn flick.
Michael Glawogger: The first filmmakers gave us documentary material, people leaving the factory and that kind of stuff. But immediately following that the next thing they showed us was people fucking. With the Internet this became even more pronounced: fucking is omnipresent. For me there is something very honest about porn flicks in the sense that the actors are really doing it. Porn flicks, even if they are badly made, have an undeniable authenticity that really blows you away – and it is this very area that other film genres, the non-porn genres, are now starting to move in on and conquer. It’s something that is yet to be exhausted in the normal feature film. I think it will assert itself and soon there will be more fucking in normal movies. We’re already starting to feel the effects of this. The hard part is getting over your own shyness. That’s why we all stripped for the rehearsals and even played normal scenes naked. That helped the movie a lot, even if you don’t always see it.
Michael Ostrowski: “Friction fiction” that was the overall motto of the screenplay from the beginning. I wanted to write a pseudo-intellectual dialogue that was silly yet at the same time true. And the same thing goes for the movie too: it’s pretty silly, but it also hits the nail on the head.