Interview with Michael Glawogger, conducted at the Venice Film Festival on September 4, 2005 by Ginu Kamani

Maybe the birth of this documentary goes back to my childhood, it was something our parents told us, that you have to work to be somebody, and you have to work hard to be somebody, and work is a question of honor. I've always had this idea that the work I do as an artist or filmmaker is not real work, it's just something you do and enjoy. I used to work in factories when I was younger, 16 years old or so, to earn some money in the summer breaks, and I was always fascinated by the whole atmosphere of work, by what goes on between workers, so I wanted to know more about it, I wanted to know how hard manual labor really is for people. I started to look at documentation and feature films on the history of workers, and I soon found out that one thing you never see in these films is work. You see some ideological things, you see the worker as being a monument, the worker as being a pillar of the state and the system, but you cannot feel what the work is about. I wanted to make a movie where you sit in the cinema and actually feel the weight on your back. I was looking for places where the representation of things is very obvious, like this very ancient form of people carrying sulfur, and then again the tourists who watch them. So, I was looking for places where you have a point of connection between the actual work and the world as it is today, like the place in Pakistan where they take the scrap metal of the first world, and break it down for use again. I'm not an anthropologist, I'm a filmmaker. The process for me of working in surroundings like these is very normal and very straightforward. I go there, I see a situation which I think is very much worth filming - take for example the Indonesian part. I see the volcano, I see where they get their sulfur, and I see where it ends: where the sulfur is weighed and the people are paid. I see a path from A to B, and in that situation I get to know the people. I go with them every day, I see how they carry, I see how they live, I see how they sleep, I talk to them, I live with them, and then I start to know what to film. If you get to know them, you know more and more what they're all about, that they talk about their whores, their children, the tourists. And the more I get to know them, and get to know the situation, the more I know what I have to do in terms of cinematography. In Indonesia I knew I had to use a Steadicam, because otherwise I would not know the feeling of these baskets being carried, because this work is in motion, and you can only show it in motion. If you don't have a way, be it handheld or whatever, to show this in motion, you won't succeed. I get asked this question very often, How do you get to know the people? It's like any other process in life - you approach them, you say, Hello my name is Michael, and the man says, Hello my name is Ivan. You take it from there - you talk with them, you live with them, you get to know them. It's simple. You ask them, and they will say 'yes' or 'no'. It's not that big a deal. But I think people still have this notion of the invisibility of the camera, and candid shooting, which is a myth. I think very few films have been shot candid, because technology is not like that, it's very hard to shoot anything that's relevant and consumable in a candid way because you have to have a microphone very close to the mouth in order to actually understand somebody. Because of films like The Conversation, maybe, people think you can be up on a roof with a telescopic microphone and you can understand people. It's very, very difficult and hardly doable. People think you can shoot films like that, being invisible. Maybe that's also a dream of filmmakers. In Indonesia when I filmed the sulfur workers they said, But the French in 1987, they woke up at 2 a.m. and they walked up there. And that's the way it normally goes. If you film in America, they ask, What is this, is this an HBO documentary or are we going to be on National Geographic, or are you doing this candid, or why is the camera here... That is the situation you're normally confronted with these days, not the situation of Oh my god, I cannot be in this picture. You go there and you feel out the way it's going to be shot. You can start shooting the very first day itself, but then you have to stay longer because you don't know the people, you don't know what's going on, so everything is fascinating. It's the same if you take your photo camera and you go to a place you don't know and it looks interesting, you will take pictures because it's so great. And after a week you will look at these pictures and think, What the hell, this interests nobody. Because in Indonesia, the men carrying baskets filled with yellow things, that's not a good photo. It's always a question of time. Like I said, when I come to a place that's interesting, or a city, in the first few days I think that I can film everything everywhere, it's wonderful, and after a week, I think, What the hell should I film here everything is so normal. But that's a good point to arrive at - when you think that, then you're getting close, you're getting closer, you filter out the more important things. And then when you go home and look at the images, they will be interesting again because you're getting more and more concise, you're getting out the essence of things. Cameramen feel that very strongly. They say, I worked with a director who makes me film the flowerpot when he wants to film the hotel, and film this and this and this, and then you go crazy, because you film everything, and the director thinks he'll make the film on the editing table. But it doesn't work. You have to start out by saying, I want to film this hotel, but I do not want the old part, I just want that part, and I want it from here, because then I can see the inside and the outside, so you have to focus on a few things, and they are hard enough to get, and if you start spreading out you get completely derivative. Of course, on the editing table you can sometimes make a movie out of it, you can always make a movie out of it, but it will lack everything. That's the most important part, to lessen the amount of what you want to film, and even that is hard to get in terms of time and economics. With Indonesia, I knew, there is the sulfur, there is the weighing station, they go from here to there, they take their breaks and their breaks are my chance for conversations. Then I have this one point where the tourists are, so for a moment I have a way - I know that I want them walking, I know that I want this process of carrying and walking, and I know that from the beginning to the end, I want it very archaic, leading up to Bon Jovi, yes? So I have only a few things - I have the taking out of the sulfur, walking, conversations, tourists, and that's the end of it, that's not a lot. But to get that, when you know that you want that, then it's a lot. If I wouldn't have had the tourists, which gave me the idea that I can make this transformation from two hundred years ago to now, I would not have taken this footage, I would have gone away, because then it would have been a National Geographic kind of colorful nothing - not nothing, but I was always looking for this one thing that is the twisting point, which for me is always something little. In the Ukraine, I saw all these statues. I saw these statues and they gave me the feeling that I can do something here that is past and present and historic and a transformation from very modern to very archaic. It's different, it's the opposite, very rich to very poor, and if I don't have these little angles where I can start to construct my ideas, I just don't do it. I don't know how I recognize these angles or hooks, but I know it. I see all these statues and I start taking pictures of them and I look at the pictures, I put them on the table - I work more visually, I think. Or sometimes you go to the archives and you see these record-setting old documentary clips, you wonder if they're for real or shot in a studio, and then you start thinking and things start to grow. You have days when things fall into place, and you have days when they just don't. This is also why I speak of having to limit yourself to what you want, then you have the chance of things falling into place because there are so many days when they don't, when everything goes wrong, when there's so much snow that you can't reach the mine, but then some days everything works out. I think it's a question of wanting something, you have to really, really want that something works out. I believe in some kind of co-incidence or magic, because in the Ukraine in that winter when we started to film, there was no snow, no snow, no snow and I wanted snow very badly. And then it started to snow during the very first take I shot - big time. From then on, the winter was full of snow. I've also had losses. At the mine with the bikes - a mine where the workers all went down with their bicycles because otherwise their bikes were getting stolen, so we called this the bicycle mine and there are amazing shots - I came there the first day, it was all snowy and the sky was full of crows. It was this kind of poetic image that I'm always after. There's one image like that in the women's mine when they go in and it's snowing heavily and they have a big fire burning. That is for me an amazingly poetic image and that was here too, and I said, I want those crows. It sounded like bad news, it was going to cost us in nerves and everything, but I bought these huge sacks full of birdfeed and I drove there in the night and scattered the birdseed all over and the miners were going, This guy is nuts, better put him in jail! And of course when we came there to film the last crows were leaving, so fat that they couldn't fly any more, so I really fucked it up because I should have done it in the moment when we were filming and then they would have come twenty minutes later, so you see maybe one crow in that sequence! Sometimes you try to force it and it doesn't work. I believe that when certain people come together and share some ideas, something is there. When five people do films together for years and they want something, maybe it makes an air around them, and this spark sometimes goes over to the protagonists or the people who work with you. Like with the workers it was sort of simple, because really when they saw how hard we worked, that meant something, and the other way around, so the connection there was easy to make - sometimes it's hard to make, but when it happens, a lot is possible. It's also a question of money. When you can spend time, and you have the means with which to spend time with people and you want to do it, then you can, and then you get into it. Because when they see you working hard, or when they see you willing to spend time, then they're more interested. Sometimes a longer-staying guest is a nuisance, but then on the other hand he can become somebody interesting. Often what amazes people about my film is that it looks so big, that it's like a feature film, that it takes its time. Normally people with this kind of funding don't make this kind of film. They just don't crawl into a mine and stay there for a few days, they just don't do that. The Ukraine was so extremely rich in terms of what this film could be, that for a moment I thought I would just focus on the Ukraine. I could easily have spent two years filming there, or longer. In a way this would have been more fascinating, to work that way, but not so much for the final product, because I always enjoy diversity, to look at one theme from many different angles, many different levels, many different colors, many different kinds of people. Maybe it's a very simple thing I'm after. In film school I was always fascinated when I could edit a black and white image next to a very colorful one - it made me really happy. This is something very simple, and in a lot of ways I always enjoyed it. When I see in Workingman's Death the last zoom in Nigeria which opens up over the entire area, and then pretty soon after there comes an image of the wide open sea as a ship approaches and lands on the shore - these two worlds, two colors and two types of people coming together like that makes me happy. It's something that makes your mind reel, it's always giving. It's always giving, to do that. It will be interesting for my prostitution film to go to the Inuit and see if they have prostitutes, and then in the next moment we are in Thailand. I don't enjoy traveling anymore without filming, I don't want it, because it provides an access to things I cannot provide with my kind of money or with the things I want to see. I enjoy traveling and filming. I make a film about prostitution so I can go to these places and this traveling is always interesting because you open up a door, it's very colorful and the women who are there know a lot, so it's easy access to a very interesting theme. The traveling is input, like doing research with a camera for a feature film. You go places where you see things you don't know of. It's like, in your own city, you don't know the hotels unless you have a lover and then you start to get to know the hotels. I realized that in the cities and places I traveled, I used to show people things that they'd never heard of or seen, like in the Ukraine, when I took my co-workers to Donbass, their eyes were popping out. Of course they knew that the situation with the miners is bad, but when they actually saw what it's like, they almost started crying. These films for the subjects are very normal. They think, That's me, I do that, what's so interesting about it? They're astonished that you find it so interesting that you'd do a movie about it. The Pakistani workers were always wondering why in the world I went there and filmed that. In the end one worker came up to me and said he'd found the solution, that I want to tell my people in Austria how to tear apart ships. For them it's very normal and they don't think anything special about it. I think that they are the anthropologists. The most common reactions from my subjects are: that they do not believe that we're actually going to make a film about them; they really wonder why, because what they do is so common for them that it's not worth filming; and then sometimes they're also happy and proud. Very often they try to come in their Sunday best to look nice. I think this goes back to the very first film ever made because Lumière's film should not be called 'Workers Leave The Factory,' it should be called 'Workers Leave The Factory In Their Sunday Clothes,' because that's what Lumière actually did. He said, I'm not going to film you in your dirty, filthy clothes, you're going to put on nice clothes! And when you look at this little strip of film, they all walk out dressed very nicely, so everybody thinks that's the way to do it, which is completely untrue. Lumière said, I want to make this little documentary so you better dress nicely. But nowadays you don't do that, you don't ask them to dress up. It happens with pretty much every documentary I do, the first day of shooting the guy I choose as my protagonist comes in completely different clothes. Sometimes it's the clothing that gets the funny story. In Nigeria there was this guy Bunmi and he was always singing and dancing and making jokes and he has this colorful shirt. He's a real Nigerian show-off, and he's the head of the goat-roasting section. We had approached this whole market of slaughterers, and one guy said, Okay, I'm the boss of it all, you give me a basketful of money and your worries will be over. Bunmi from the goat-roasting section was really pissed off, because he hated this guy who was from the cow section, and he wanted his money. My production manager said, You're crazy, I cannot give money to the cow section, the pig section, the goat-roasting section, the chicken section...this has to come to a halt. So he goes with the guy from the cow section to the goat section and they have an argument and scream and shout and then somehow it got sorted out. Then we did the first day of shooting. At the end of the day I said to Bunmi, Please, Bunmi, wear the same shirt tomorrow. And then I saw a light bulb going off in Bunmi's head. He turned around, went to my production manager and said, If I do not get fifty dollars every day at the end of shooting, I'll wear a pink shirt tomorrow, a green shirt day after tomorrow, a yellow shirt the next day...! And so every day he got his fifty bucks and wore the same shirt. When you're at a height and you look at Port Harcourt you can immediately pinpoint where the slaughterhouse is because at noon or so the vultures start circling over this spot because they know that in thirty minutes it's feeding time. After everything meant for human beings has been taken away, the vultures get the rest. It was good that we filmed in the slaughterhouse - it is the only place in the whole town where there is no Valhalla. Valhalla is something that everyone traveling to Nigeria will come across. It's in the mentality of the people. Every one says these people are very aggressive, and very loud, and maybe that's right, but they're also very happy and nice, they're friendly. But everything is a Valhalla, so you make a big deal about everything, especially if they see some white guy and he takes out a camera, people will gather around him and say, You cannot take pictures here, the chief of this block has forbidden it, give me twenty dollars now! And if the white guy says, I won't give you twenty dollars, why should I give you twenty dollars, then another guy will say, You can't ask this man for twenty dollars, he's come here as a guest! And they all start to shout and there's a big Valhalla and they might even take out knives or whatever...and then in ten minutes you sit with all of them and drink a beer. Maybe sometimes they even kill each other and then it's over. And then they drink a beer! It's strange to understand. The concept of Valhalla is strange. If there's an intersection and two cars almost collide - they don't even crash into one another - still the drivers have to get out and stand there for ten minutes shouting at each other. Then of course all the other cars come and they get very angry with these two idiots, because if they'd just driven away, there would be no jam, but it happens all the time, there's always Valhalla. But not in the slaughterhouse, because everybody has a knife. So, he who makes Valhalla in the slaughterhouse is out. They all know this is the only place where it's an absolute no, because otherwise everyday somebody would have a knife in his chest, they can't control themselves. So that's their very strict rule. You're a very good worker if you get a job in the slaughterhouse, you have very big knives, but no Valhalla. You can see that on our very first day of filming - the men throwing the meat into the taxis, that's outside the boundaries of the slaughterhouse, and immediately this was Valhalla. We ran out of the market with the camera and one guy said, You're filming me, you're filming me, this is going to cost you five hundred dollars! And it just went on. It's a mentality. There are a lot of things, especially with this film, which were cut out. The film could be easily an hour longer with the material I have, but I want the film to be shown and not only at festivals. Also, I like concise things, and I sacrifice good stuff to keep the film concise. I'm actually not quite happy, I think Workingman's Death could be something like seven minutes shorter with the same inputs. A film starts to live, it starts to live while you use it. If you show a rough cut of this kind of movie, people always say, But I liked so much - extremely much - this or that part. For me, the opening sequence in the rough cut with the music of Stockhausen is a real loss. But I just couldn't get the music, he asked for so much money that it was impossible to afford. I even would have mixed it, left Stockhausen in the beginning and used John Zorn for the rest, but it was not possible. Or, the montage of the end title sequence in the rough cut, I matched a Rolling Stones piece with a lot of archival footage. If I would have gotten the Rolling Stones piece, which probably would not even have been possible, but if I had, then this kind of archival material with that music would have cost as much as the entire film preceding that end title sequence. With this film I had the choice to not have music at all, or only from the countries themselves, or what people sing, or to have a music score. I finally decided to have a score because I saw many, many processes or atmospheres in terms of music, especially with the Nigerians, who are a very music-oriented people and I wanted them to like it, that they would also like it with music, see life with music, and that's why I decided to use not a lot, but some music for this film and John Zorn came up. From the things he's done I remembered his music as one that could fit. The collaboration was very simple, I showed him the film, he did what he wanted and I used what I wanted. That's all. There was no going back and forth, it was actually a really simple process. In this kind of documentary film and even with a feature film, from the moment the script is done to what's finally in the film, it's always a series of losses. If you get 70% of what you'd thought of, then you're really up there. Because the world is hostile to being filmed. There's noise, there are restrictions, there is time, there is money - pretty much everything is against you. It starts with not getting the actors you want, or the Pakistanis taking so long to issue your shooting permit that one major part of Workingman's Death - maybe what would have been one of the best sequences - is over. Because there were in this tanker - which is huge, huge, you don't see in the film how huge it is - in this tanker were Bangladeshi immigrant workers, because the Pakistanis don't want to do this work - it's not only in Europe that this kind of thing happens - they scratch out the oil inside the tanker. So, in this huge, huge belly, there are these little creatures, and they're up to their knees in thick oil, and they have one light bulb, and all day long they shovel out the oil, put it in sacks, pull it up and throw it in the sea. I shot 5 or 6 photos of it, but it was incredibly difficult because of how dark it was in there. I don't know how we would ever have filmed this, but we would have found a way because we're quite skilful at thinking up things - maybe we would have cut three holes in the ship, and with mirrors and stuff we would have done it. But when I finally got the shooting permit, this process was over, and the ship had been cleaned of oil and all we had were the welding and torching parts, which are wonderful, but I was sitting there watching this cleaning process, drinking tea, and then it was all gone! And there was no ship of that scale expected over the next few years, or there was one ship which was also full of oil but the owner wouldn't let us film, so sometimes you know what's right for the story, but it just goes away. Until the last day I was deciding whether to use the taxi story with the joke and the two hats from the rough cut, or the mine of women, or a third sequence of the bicycle mine - there's a hole in the ground where the workers carry their bicycles inside the mine, then they put them down one after the other and then they go to work in the mine. I had these three options, but I knew I could not use all three, or even two of them, because even now, the Ukraine segment is hard work in a way because the whole countryside is rough, it takes you a time to get into it, and with all three segments in the film it would be too long in the Ukraine to grasp the idea of the film, so I had to decide between these three things, and the more I got to know the film, the more I decided on this warm little story about the three women. It's more energetic and convincing to make films like Workingman's Death. There are days when you shoot ten minutes, then there's nothing, but it doesn't matter because it can explode and then you really hit the spot for a couple of days. It's exhausting to shoot feature films because that is really hysterical, it's too much, it's very hard to hold tension for eight weeks or so, every day for 10-12 hours, and it's often also boring because it takes such a long time. My way of living functions best when I don't do too much on one day, but I do something every day - so there is no Sunday, there is no weekend, there's no vacation. I want to be lazy for a couple of hours, and I want to work a couple of hours. Why this title Workingman's Death? It's a very simple reason, I've never told anybody really, but in the 60s there was a record by the group The Grateful Dead, called Workingman's Dead, and I always liked that because it was such a mixture of this group's name and working men. There were a couple of guys with hats standing on the cover like a fake old-fashioned photograph and it stuck in my mind. I thought it was nice to take it from there. Of course it has implications which are more content-oriented, like I think it was a French minister who said once that the working class can come and get their papers of leave, things like that, or people wondering whether this will exist in the future - a lot of authors like Rifkin said, The end of work has come. It's a mixture of that kind of content and my remembering this old record cover by The Grateful Dead - this is the way I work. Like I said, I have these statues in the Ukraine or the tourists in Indonesia, and those are for me starting points. And yes, of course, death, because many situations there are mentally, or actually, life-threatening. To crawl into that mine! Or on the ship, we had one moment before the big section fell. We had to go up the ladders on this very section, and while we were going up, you could hear creak, creak, creak, and this thing was starting to shake, and I'm quite afraid of heights, I'm not so afraid of going into a mine, but I'm afraid of heights, and suddenly this moment came when I felt, Yeah, I can die here. These guys, they talk a lot of death, because this is really dangerous. The way you see death in the slaughterhouse in Nigeria is just... as a European, it doesn't leave you anymore, you constantly think of death. That's also funny, the workers there never understood why this is so interesting, and we were always expecting to get kicked out, because we thought, this is so fantastic! This is so wild, why do they allow us to film this? Once, they did want to kick us out and got really angry, but that was because we filmed the guys sleeping on the market tables, and this is forbidden by law in Port Harcourt! I had to give them a roll of film, and I wrote on it, Guys Sleeping on Market Tables, which was, of course, not exposed film, and I had to give it to them, and if I wouldn't have done that they would have kicked us out. But not for reasons that we were filming something extraordinary. There are three festivals of the caliber of Venice, and to have a documentary received on the scale of attention that's possible here, there's no better way to get onto the festival circuit and no better way of presenting... I mean, in today's world of films, a film like mine is still a difficult film. I hear it very often. A lot of respect has been paid to this film in the last few days, from industry as well as from critics and people, but still the word difficult is used often. So, if a difficult film is presented on this kind of scale, it's good, because otherwise it's not going to live. For me, a movie lives if it's shown, and not only at festivals. I'm fighting for a cinematic life. I have lived through many interpretations of my films, sometimes I really wonder what people think when they see this. Maybe that's because I do not use any kind of voiceover, and I do not give clear interpretations of situations. I have a view of the world and I show it in the way I use the camera. I present people, I talk to people, but I never really say, This is my ideology. I actually do oppose that. I want to show something from these worlds, and I want people to feel it and understand it, but I will never ever say, It is like this, period. And if people interpret my film in the way they want to see it, that happens. That's part of the deal, and I do not fear it. The more movies I make, the clearer I get about how I want to show things. That's enough for me. And if somebody misinterprets me or interprets me in his way, be my guest.