28.02.2019 | The Golden Glove
Fatih Akin's film adaptation of the novel "The Golden Glove" has been showing in German cinemas since 21 February. A genuine Hamburg project that was filmed entirely in the Hanseatic city. However, many of the shots were not taken at the original locations, but in the studio. Why? We'll tell you here.
If you stroll along the Reeperbahn in Hamburg as a tourist, after a while you automatically turn off onto Hamburger Berg, where you are swept into the bars and clubs with the crowds, only to be spat out again a few hours later soaked in smoke. Right at the top of the hill on the left-hand side is the bar "Zum goldenen Handschuh" with its striking illuminated signs showing a golden boxing glove. It's actually a bar like any other - if it hadn't been the favourite pub of wife-killer Fritz Honka, who took his victims home here in the early 1970s. Since the early 2000s, another sign has been emblazoned above the entrance: "Honka-Stube".
Fatih Akin's Berlinale film has been showing since 21 FebruaryThe Golden Glove in German cinemas, in which he, like Heinz Strunk back in 2016, traces the story of the serial killer who first sawed up his victims and then left them to rot in the back of his flat. It's convenient for Akin that the pub still exists, you might think. But not a single scene was shot in the bar: "We couldn't have shot in the pub because it's never closed except for Christmas Eve. It has so many regulars that they would certainly have gone on the barricades," reveals Executive Producer Nurhan Şekerci-Porst. So, without further ado, the decision was made to build the entire pub in a studio in the halls of the former overseas centre - on a 1:1 scale, where Hamburg's cult director could film undisturbed.
Art director Seth Turner and production designer Tamo Kunz were responsible for the construction of the pub and Honka's flat. The latter has been working with Akin since "Against the Wall" and was also on board for the Golden Globe winner "Into the Fate". He also left nothing to chance with the Golden Glove. Whether it's a pub or Honka's attic flat - if you compare the film scenes with photos from the 70s, you will hardly notice any differences. Even the porn magazine clippings that adorn Honka's flat come from real old magazines. For the pub, however, the team sought advice from an expert: "I asked glove operator Sascha Nürnberg for advice. What do you serve and how? In what ratio do you mix Fanta and Korn? What does the bar do when there's nothing to do?", Akin reveals to journalists Volker Behrens and Michael Töteberg in the Akin biography "Im Clinch". Nuremberg provided the film team with crazy sayings and situations from everyday working life - in this way, the setting became more and more like a real neighbourhood pub.
And it was precisely this neighbourhood atmosphere that made the scenes hard work for the actors: "Of course we are all highly concentrated. The pub, this small room, creates an intimacy in which everything that happens affects you - be it actions, movements or even the fact that people are smoking," says Uwe Rohde, who plays the pub owner in the film. "As the day of filming progresses, you realise that your oxygen is getting scarcer and scarcer, your head starts to smoke - it's all very exhausting. Nevertheless, we actors made friends in no time at all. That's always a big advantage when you're working at such a high level of intensity." And so, at the end of a long day of filming, some of the actors were surprised to find themselves standing in a hall after leaving the pub and not directly on the Hamburger Berg. In the film, the pub is a haven of peace that offers the viewer time to take a deep breath: "In some of the pub scenes and during the conversations at the bar with Hark Bohm and the other regulars, you can take a short break from the murder scenes. The music, the costumes and the production design take the viewer into the world of the seventies. This also helps the audience to maintain the necessary distance from the subject," reveals Nurhan Şekerci-Porst. A distance that the Directors doesn't allow us in Honka's flat. Here at Zeißstraße 74 in Hamburg Ottensen, he killed and dismembered his victims. A real challenge for the film team, who had to work in a confined space in the flat, which was meticulously modelled on the original - and the challenge became even greater as the film progressed: the dramaturgical concept also involved Honka's flat becoming smaller from murder to murder, until "Fiete" ends up just sitting in a tiny kitchen and buttering his bread. "You can feel that things are getting thicker. Edgar Allan Poe would probably have liked that," says Fatih Akin in his biography.
The exterior shots of the glove and Honka's flat were of course shot at the original locations and then reworked using VFX to faithfully recreate Hamburg in the 1970s. And so, although "The Golden Glove" is the gruesome story of a serial killer, it is also a contemporary testimony and a study of a dark period in Hamburg's history.
