After the screening of Underground, Professor Emir Kusturica and Reinhard Brundig held a workshop dedicated to Karl Baumgartner, the producer of the film. At the very beginning, Kusturica pointed out that Baumgartner was a man fully devoted to film and elaborated on the role this remarkable producer had during the lengthy filming of Underground. The Professor described the producer as “an activist of the ’68 student movement, interested in movies which have a historic perspective”. He talked about the work on the film in great detail, which “started off as a small movie… and escalated into a monstrously large project”. Deadlines expired and the budget was often exceeded. The director recalled that he was surprised at the producer’s patience, saying that he never cared for budgets and deadlines because he made films so as not to be as the majority of his generation – people who traded revolutionary spirits for positions in the establishment.
Kusturica also depicted the sociological and historical context of the time when Underground was filmed. He described it as an end of an era that preceded the information technology revolution. At that time, “big investors built their prestige by sponsoring films, as they do now by sponsoring football clubs.”
Brundig added that the authors of today find plot and revenue to be more important than aesthetics. According to him, production as it is today does not allow the screenplay to be further improved by fresh ideas on the film set.
Talking about Underground, they looked back on the present-day society and agreed that this 1995 film predicted what the world would be like twenty years later. They emphasized that the film was not intended as a critique of the Yugoslav regime, but a “study of perversion”, somewhat similar to today’s reality programs since they are about people confined in a closed space, and their reality is defined by fabricated information about the outside world.