HIGH & LOW - JOHN GALLIANO — Kevin Macdonald tackles fashion and forgiveness

Superstar fashion designer John Galliano wrecked his career when he was caught on video in a drunken, antisemitic rant circa 2011. Now, in a new documentary, Oscar-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald (WHITNEY, ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER) asks audiences to gaze into Galliano’s eyes and decide for themselves if he deserves a second act.

On this special episode, Macdonald tells host Rico Gagliano about coming to terms with fashion, ambiguity, and the human mind.

HIGH AND LOW - JOHN GALLIANO comes to US and UK theaters on March 8, in Latin America March 14, and in Germany April 11.  For tickets and showtimes, visit mubi.com/galliano

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes explicit language documentary footage of anti-Semitic speech and spoilers. Somebody I talked to used this interesting phrase and they said"Oh, you're interested in the ugly, wonderful world of fashion." And... and I sort of said,"What do you mean by that?" And he said, "Well, everybody's, you know,"always looking up and looking at the beautiful models, but they don't realise that their feet are in shit." And I thought, there's something in that. There's something about the refusal maybe in the world of fashion, for people to look at wider social issues or the consequences of what they're doing or the rightness or wrongness of what they're doing and to only look at the aesthetic and only look at the beautiful that is not healthy. And I think John's downfall is an exemplar of that. You know, he was only interested in being beautiful, and his excuse for everything is all I was trying to do was make beautiful things. But maybe making beautiful things does not necessarily lead to a very healthy place. That is director Kevin McDonald and the John he mentioned is UK fashion designer John Galliano, who did indeed end up in an unhealthy place, along with at least one person he verbally assaulted. In his new film, McDonald traces Galliano's life from his explosion as an haute couture visionary to infamy when he was caught on video in a drunken anti-Semitic rant outside a Paris cafe.<i>Are you blonde? Are you blonde with...?</i><i>No, but I love Hitler.</i><i>- Seriously?- People like you would be dead today.</i> It wasn't his first drunk racist outburst. It wrecked his career. But with his star back on the rise, the question is does he deserve a second act? I'm Rico Galiano, I should say no relation. And welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service that champions great cinema on this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. We just wrapped up a season all about fashion on film. Today a special episode looking at a film about fashion, kind of. It's my interview with Kevin McDonald about his documentary<i>High and Low: John Galliano.</i> It opens this week at theaters in the US and UK. McDonald's previous docs include the Oscar winner <i>20 Days in September</i> and a pair of acclaimed music films,<i>Marley</i> and <i>Whitney</i> about the lives of Bob Marley and Whitney Houston, respectively. But this movie is both a biography and a sort of philosophical inquiry. You're going to hear us talk about the nature of trust and forgiveness about the sometimes damaging power of language and only really, at the end, a bit about fashion. Which Kevin told me right off the bat wasn't what drew him to John Galliano's story. Well, I'm not a fashion fan. I should preface everything by saying that. I've never been really interested in fashion. Obviously, I'm an extremely well dressed man. Not! But no, fashion's never been my thing. But I was aware of him in the nineties when he was the <i>enfant terrible</i> of fashion, and he was famously the first British designer who went to Paris to head up a big couture house in 1994. So he was a kind of famous figure culturally in the UK. But I was one of those people who just felt that fashion was, you know, very superficial. Probably beneath me... Well, then, what attracts you, then to suddenly do-- like why tell his story now? Because I was actually-- It was during lockdown and I was looking for-- To somehow tell a story about cancel culture and forgiveness as that applies to cancel culture. So how in a world where we don't believe in religion really very much anymore, we don't really have the means to forgive people, you know, it used to be that you said your Hail Marys and then you were forgiven, and that was fine, you went back into society. But that doesn't apply anymore. So... that was kind of-- I was looking at various stories and thinking how could you tell this in a way that would be interesting and have depth and resonance beyond an individual case? And somebody suggested to me, well, what about John Galliano? Because it happened a long time ago. And in fact, arguably he's one of the very first instances of cancel culture. He was filmed on a cellphone in 2011, so that's only a couple of years after cellphones became really,- widely available.- Oh yeah. And I thought, oh, fashion, that would be interesting to find out about fashion, to learn about fashion, and that is one of the things I love about doing documentaries is just the opportunity to dive into a world I know nothing about, and to try and appreciate things that maybe before you have been dismissive of. What interested you in the first place about doing something about cancel culture? I'm imagining you sitting at home, it's you know, locked down, you can be working on anything, why cancel culture? I think it was just something that was so much in the ether you know, there have been so many stories around that time where you know people do something that's considered to be wrong socially unacceptable. But it may or may not actually approach the level of actually criminality. And those people are ostracised. And that's a familiar thing through human history and many different periods and the social mores change and the reasons why people are ostracised change. But the difference now is just that we don't have a means to forgive them and I had this very early conversation with the rabbi who worked with John after he made his anti-Semitic comments and he was trying to rehabilitate himself, and I said to the rabbi, "Why did you get involved with John what, you know,"isn't this something that could be dangerous to your own reputation?"Where the people within your own community,"who would disapprove of what you're doing? Somebody who said these anti-Semitic things." and he said to me"Look, the whole point of religion"is that we believe that people can change. Without that what is the point in believing in anything?" and that really hit home with me. And it made me think, because I'm an atheist and most people I know are atheists, I think. So we don't have that mechanism. So I was thinking, oh, ok, so that's something that's really changed in the last I don't know, 50-80 years, and I probably thought it was going to be a more intellectual kind of film about that. But the character takes over. Well, let's talk a little bit about that. What was it essential for you to know before you started making this movie about a subject that you weren't familiar with to feel comfortable starting to make it. Really, before I decided I can spend, you know, two years practically making a film. I need to know that the person at the centre of it is able to carry a movie, you know, and is charismatic enough, interesting enough, talkative enough. So although I'd met him a few times and had a good sort of sense of him, I did something that I do quite often, which I'll do like an initial interview on camera quite early in the process before, I've talked in any detail, really to the subject. He was on vacation in the south of France 2021 and I went down there with a camera crew and got to know him a little bit and felt, you know, definitely. You know, there's something there and it's that moment, you know, you know... that there's something in this film, but you're not really sure what the theme of it's going to be. And it certainly didn't turn out to be really the film that I thought it was gonna be. But that... is pretty much the universal experience of making a documentary. If you know where it's going to end it's kind of boring to do Where did you think it was going to end? What did you think-- What were you going in and imagining? I think I thought that it was going to be a more simplistic story about his battle to find forgiveness. And that's not really what it's about. It's much more intricate, and that's the beauty of documentary. You know that real life is so much more complicated than what you can imagine. That's why I think, you know, I make both fiction films and documentary films, but I always feel with documentary that maybe formally, it's more limited than what you can do in fiction, but actually, the degree to which stories are unexpected, which characters are more contradictory, is so much greater than what any writer can... can hope to write. And in a way, documentaries allow you to like maybe to an extent, more than the typical narrative lets you get away with, you know, like it's complicated. That's what you can leave it at, and people get it Exactly, because we recognise that is true life. You know, life is life is usually complicated. There are usually multiple reasons why something is the case. With this movie, you know, taken it to a few festivals and a couple of times, of course, people have said to me in Q&As they say"So what's your opinion about what John did?" I had that on my list of questions today. And I always say the same thing, which is, you know, I can sit and talk to you about that for two hours, or I can just say, watch the movie because that encapsulates what I feel, which is that it's kind of ambiguous. And I don't have a hard and fast, black and white view of it. And that's kind of the point. Well, you can feel it. There's a balancing act going on constantly, especially in the last, say, half of the film. Where you do give screen time to many folks who are critical of him. Tell me about the the conversations that you had as you edited this of kind of figuring out how to balance things. I can imagine that being a long process, Yeah, I mean, I wanted it to be balanced because that was how I felt. And I think obviously the film is, is ultimately is and should be, I think, a reflection of how I myself felt through the process of making it, and I feel, you know personally very warm towards John. I really like John on a personal level, but I don't understand why he said what he said. And I can't say that I have the authority to be able to say he should be forgiven by everybody. So I was really, you know, I think in like in a lot of documentaries of this nature the sort of investigative documentaries for lack of a better word you know, you are the eyes and ears of the audience, and you develop your own feelings about things as you as you go through it. So... but sometimes it's hard to know when you do a cut, and you think this is the impression it's having on your audience. And then the audience say to you,"Oh, no, we think this about the person" and you're like, "Oh, no, that's not what I feel at all." And then you try and adjust it. But what I didn't realise is that it's about how people react to him more than almost anything else. And we all make judgments based on the raise of an eyebrow. You know, the lack of a tear in his eye at a certain point or you know, a laugh, or... and we all kind of have these associations with all these miniscule aspects of-- So when we look at someone and we judge them and it's a big close up of John, you know through a lot of the film talking about this and it's a very close and intimate kind of experience you're having viewing him so... you can't control how people are going to think about him, what their personal reaction is gonna be. Yeah, I have to say, as I was watching this, it's like in some ways you're like, he's a very enthralling kind of person to watch. But then, weirdly, I was thinking about the TV Show, <i>The Sopranos</i> which, spoiler alert, at the end of <i>The Sopranos</i> you realise the main character has basically been, you know, a sociopath the whole time. Who has been pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, including maybe the audience to seem relatable. Now that's from a fictional show, but it's a real phenomenon, and I wonder if that, like, actually looms large in a certain portion of the public's consciousness. It's like "I don't know if I can trust"the fact, even if I'm, like, sympathetic to this person, are they for real? Like I don't know if I can anymore." Well, I think that goes to the heart of what, to me, is interesting about not just this film, but I think about a lot of the films that I've done, which is they're about ambiguous characters. They're not about people who are straight out good or straight out bad for the most part. And they're about those judgments that we all make of people. But I think in this case it's really foregrounded. You know, you are constantly asking questions of John. Is he telling the truth? Why would he not remember how many times his had happened to him? You know when he says in a starting moment, he says, you know "Oh, there was only one anti-Semitic incident." Yeah, and you have to remind him that he went on these public rants more than once.<i>It sounds like there was these two separate incidents separated by,</i><i>I don't know, a couple of weeks or something, was it?</i><i>Do you remember that?</i><i>Two separate incidents?</i><i>That's what-- Weren't there two separate incidents?</i><i>It was just one incident at Rue de la Perle.</i><i>Remind me, Alexis. Did you hear that?</i><i>No, it was two different incidents.</i><i>Oh, tell me about the first incident, then.</i><i>Oh, I thought the video was of that night.</i><i>- No.- But it was? No?</i> And he doesn't seem to remember. And I think I find it fascinating because I have my own interpretation of why he says that. And a lot of people say "Oh, he's lying. He's trying to pull the wool over your eyes." I don't think he is. He's not stupid. He would have to be very stupid to think I hadn't done my research, it's that he genuinely doesn't remember. He doesn't remember that it happened multiple times. And that then opens up all these other questions for you. Is he in some sort of denial? Is this how he's protecting himself in some way? And then you get into the deepest mystery of all, which is the mystery of the human mind, you know? And it becomes this detective story you know, you are trying to figure out as the viewer you are trying to figure out who is this person. Should I like them? Should I dislike them? Are they telling the truth at this point, or not. And that mystery is made even more profound by the fact that John himself doesn't know. And I think that maybe, you know, we we need to get used to the idea that we can never really know what's going on inside other people's minds. In fact, we might not even know what's going on inside our own. Yeah, I actually remember speaking to another documentarian, Errol Morris, and that's something that he's really fond of saying is that he's like the thing that's always amazing to me is that I should have some idea of what's going on in my own mind, right? It's sitting inside my head. It is me. And yet I really don't understand myself at all. To some extent. Yes, I think, well, Errol is a huge influence on me, and I'm a huge fan of his work. And in fact, one of the very first opportunities to make a documentary I ever had was, I think, in 1992 I made a profile of Errol Morris and his films for the TV channel Bravo.- Wow!- So... I know quite a lot about Errol. Yeah, no. Yeah, so I'm I'm either subliminally reciting lines that I've heard from Errol or I've just reached after making documentary for 30 years you rea-- every documentarian reaches the same end point. Yeah, sure. I mean, what is a documentarian doing but trying to discern the truth and if you really I mean, I think what you're saying and I think to a certain extent agree, is if you look at something long enough, it's like the truth becomes very difficult to discern. Errol Morris is not somebody who thinks that it's always, you know, subjective. There is an actual truth, but it's like the difficulty of getting to it is for real. It's really difficult. Well, I think there is a-- I do believe that there's a truth, and I'm a believer in the notion of kind of objective journalism. I think what is very hard to ever say is to understand somebody's motivations because that is entirely internal. And when somebody says something as John did, you can say, well, it was a joke. It's something that I did because I was drunk. It's because of this... then you get into this all these different ideas about, you know, responsibility. And... should you be responsible if you're high? If you're... If you just had some terrible trauma does-- how much does that excuse what you say? And is that really who you are? This actually reminds me something that was really kind of fascinating to me and that I don't think I've seen in a documentary before. You speak to one of the people that he, you know, verbally assaulted, basically, you know, one of the people who experienced one of these drunken rants, was the recipient of it, and he's depicted as having really long term damage. Like psychological damage, like his life was really harmed by this. And I feel like I'm well aware of the fact that, you know, even a small, violent incident of physical assault can have a long term effect. But I don't know if I've ever seen that before, represented, that the long term effect of a single instance of verbal assault. Was that expected to you? That was a total surprise to me. Yeah, so I met Philippe Virgitti who is the victim who agreed to talk. I met him only on the day that we did the filming. I didn't really know anything about him. We had talked to his lawyer and his lawyer had intimated that he was someone who was damaged in some way and that linked that damage to the incident. And right away it was obvious that he was, you know, someone who was disturbed in some way, I would say. He was uncomfortable, just in, you know, ordinary kind of interactions before we started filming. And very nervous, and when he sat down, he started to talk about in, you know, great detail about what had happened that night, and he sort of raced through the story. And then he said this very sort of surprising thing. He then said "Then at the trial, I'm really upset with what I did." And I said, "What do you mean at the trial? Why why are you upset about what you did in the trial?" And he said,"I said that he wasn't an anti-Semite. I said that he was just a man under a lot of pressure." and I said, "Well, is that not what you really believe?" He said, "No, I don't believe that. I said it because I felt sorry for him." And I thought there was something so extraordinary about that on so many levels that here was the man who was the victim who'd clearly been so affected by this. But actually, his first impulse was to feel sorry for John. Yeah, absolutely. I mean... something I was thinking as I was watching this, is would things have unfolded differently if it happened today? And the reason I say that is that there's like this other path now and a frightening one to me, where if somebody is accused of something socially damaging and even caught on tape about it, there's now in the Trump era this kind of path that you can take where it's like you either deny it or you accuse your accusers of something, or you blame the media. And there's like this whole audience that is waiting there to support you in that and even maybe celebrate you as like it's some kind of martyr. Well, I think there's also another route. I mean, I think it is fascinating to think about what would have happened today. You know, John did initially try to say, "This is not true."You're libelling me. You just want my money." That was the initial response that he was encouraged to take by his lawyer because actually, there was no video of that instant. And then it was only a couple of days later, that video emerged for a previous instant, and at that point, obviously everyone was going to believe Philippe. But I think there's also another thing that happens today in these kind of instances. So you say something terrible. If you make the right kind of fulsome apology, then that can be enough for you to be, at least most of the way forgiven. But if you don't do that and you don't word it correctly, then your problems are, you know, sometimes redoubled. And it was one of the things, actually, I was surprised with John. You know that he when he was talking to me, he didn't have any PR people around. He didn't have anyone saying oh John, you better say this. You got to say these words. But most people I think today would not do that. They would not talk, you know, just themselves. They would have a team of PR people around them. Telling them these are the words you have to use. This is the apology you have to make. This is how you have to make it. Yeah, In a way, it kind of helps bolster his case. It's like I have nothing to hide on some level. I'm not gonna hide behind lawyers. By the way, in the other direction, too, I can imagine, like in a way, it's a sad but also beautiful thing that Philippe, his first instinct, was to feel bad for him. And I also wonder if that would be the case today. People seem so much angrier that the first instinct would be attack on both sides, I feel like. The first instinct for him would be to be like no, it's the media, these guys are against me. And the first instinct of the victim would be like "You're a terrible person." I think that's right. I think there's a playbook for it now and we've got to, you know, we've got to behave in this way and we've got to get our lawyers and we've got to get our PR people and we've got to, you know, battle lines are drawn. I just realised that I haven't talked at all about the fashion world part of this, which is one of the things that you'd said was like most fascinating to you about it. What was the biggest surprise when you're researching that world, for you? What kind of leapt out at you as being interesting? Well, I think there's two things that really surprised me about, you know, my exploration of the fashion world. One was... that so few people in fashion have a kind of analytical or retrospective view of fashion and can put pieces together and form a history or a narrative of what's happened, whether to do you know, whether John's career or anybody else's career or the history of fashion or how fashion has changed. People really don't think like that in fashion. They think about the next show, and the next show. Maybe they think a little bit about the last one, how much money it made or didn't make. But it's so in the present, and that was really surprising and kind of shocking to me. So that was quite hard to find people who could talk analytically about John's career, about the past, even people who were there. And sort of putting it in context, in a way? Yeah, that was surprising to me that that's just not how fashion people think. If you ask them "Do you remember that show that John did in 1993 in the chateau?" And they would go? "Oh, yeah. I remember that, um, beautiful clothes, really beautiful." And I said, "Yeah, tell me a bit more about why they were beautiful.""Well... you know, they were just beautiful." And that was basically... variations on that conversation, I had a lot of. So that that was one thing. But the other thing that really kind of operated almost against that was that one of the big debates in fashion is "Is it art, or is it just craft?" And I was inclined, probably to take the latter view. But people kept saying to me,"No John's an artist.""John's an artist." and I was like, hm, yeah. Well I'm not sure if I agree with your use of the terminology. But... then I began to realise that there is this whole autobiographical strain in his work. And that yes, you can see I think in the way that you can see with any great artist, the lineaments of their biography, of their life, playing out in their work in some refracted manner. And I think you start to see that in the film. When you see John doing this incredible show in about 2003, I think it is when his father has just died and his father, he has really ambiguous feelings about, his father was violent and homophobic and his father has died, and the show is set to this really aggressive Spanish flamenco music. And the models who come out have got this makeup, which looks like bruises on their faces and bits of blood coming off their lips. And they're wearing these Spanish inspired dresses, but they've got rips in them. And there's a violence, and there's a sort of passion. And importantly, his dad was Spanish right? His dad is sorry, I should have said that his dad is Spanish. And you began to see oh, ok, this is all a reaction. Those clothes are a reaction to what he's going through, and I began to then see that more and more as I looked through the shows and begin to see also, for instance, in the show at Maison Margiela which is the fashion house where John is now, which is the show which we begin the film with, and we end the film with, and it's a really bizarre show, fascinating show technically unique because John put models on the stage, not on a runway, and he wrote dialogue. And the dialogue is said in a recording, and the models are mouthing to this recording. At the same time the models are being filmed and a film being created live on a screen above the stage. So he's creating a movie.<i>I don't know how long we'd been driving.</i><i>All I knew was that we were heading into the setting sun</i><i>and the desert looked all glowin' and orange in the dying light.</i><i>I knew we was running,</i><i>but I didn't know what from. And hell if I knew where we was running to.</i> And I thought, what is this? This is so strange. And then I began to realise, oh... this is his reaction to having somebody making a documentary about him.<i>Don't ever imagine you can flee from his wrath and judgement.</i><i>Don't be misled that he won't ever forgive the iniquities of his peoples.</i> He's refracting through the experience of making the documentary his own life. That's the inspiration for what he's doing. He's not, he couldn't rationalise it like that. So I began-- that was the thing that really, that really sort of was an a-ha moment for me. I just thought, ok, so... the work is coming from somewhere really deep inside him. And that, to me, is kind of one of the qualifications of being an artist. It's not, it isn't just commerce. It isn't just about, oh, what can we different? I wonder if... let's make scarlet and pink the colours of this season, or no, it's not that at all. Kevin McDonald. By the way, John Galliano's runway show at Paris Fashion Week back in January was a huge viral hit. You can judge for yourself what that says about cancel culture, especially after you check out <i>High and Low: John Galiano</i>. It hits theatres in the US and UK this week, March 8th and rolls out around the world over the next month. Check the show notes for details in your country. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us so you don't miss my conversation with Wim Wenders about his Oscar nominated<i>Perfect Days</i> that's coming up. Meanwhile, leave us a five star review wherever you listen, won't you? It helps others find and love us, too. You can also send us questions, comments, suggestions or outrage screeds at podcast@mubi.com And now here's the credits. This episode was hosted written and edited by me Rico Gagliano. Produced by Ciara McEniff and edited by Christian Coons. Stephen Colon mastered it. Yuri Suzuki wrote our theme music. Thanks this week to Melis Uslu for taping Kevin. This show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. And, of course, to stream the best in cinema, curated by people who love it as much as you do, subscribe at MUBI.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, be safe and may all your movies be worth dressing up for.