Kaurismaki on the set of Moro no Brasil.
Kaurismaki on the set of Moro no Brasil. |
THE NAME KAURISMAKI IS SYNONYMOUS with Finnish cinema. It is the surname of two brothers who have revolutionized and legitimized Finnish film. Aki is the slightly more well-known of the two, but it is his older brother, Mika, who helped him get his start and is an intriguing director in his own right. Mika's aesthetic is as freewheeling as his films. Often the impetus to do a film arises from a real-life phenomenon, such as when he and Kari Vaananen decided to make Rosso because they both wanted to learn Italian.
A significant number of Mika's films are road movies with decidedly exotic locales, and he divides his time between Helsinki, Finland and Rio de Janiero, Brazil. He is the Wim Wenders of Finland and, indeed, he and Wanders are friends, part of a circle of associates that includes American mavericks Jim Jarmusch, and the now-deceased Samuel Fuller and Eddie Constantine.
One of his most well-known films is the documentary Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made, with an aging Fuller on a trip to the Amazon jungle, accompanied by fellow director and friend Jarmusch. In 1954, Fuller went location scouting for a John Wayne film in a remote region of Brazil, which was eventually scrapped due to Hollywood insurance companies' jitters about potentially hazardous location shooting. He befriended the Karaja Indians and shot footage of their rituals. Forty years later, he returned with Jarmusch to show the footage to the Indians. Tigrero chronicles the entire odyssey.
Mika also has experience making independent films with American actors and on location in America. He cast character actors Robert Davi and James Russo, familiar faces from mostly B action films, into relatively serious dramatic roles in Amazon. His latest film, set in the U.S., is a comedy of errors about an appealing young Scottish man who chases his dream girl, who's chasing her dreams of becoming an actress. The film stars newcomers David Tennant and Vinessa Shaw, with Vincent Gallo and Julie Delpy co-starring.
Helsink-Naples All Night Long |
He is also currently in post-production on a new documentary exploring Brazilian music in a similar vein to Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club. In 2002, Kaurismaki will shoot another road film, tentatively titled Natasha, which will reunite the director with actor Gallo. MM caught up with Mika during the recent Love and Anarchy Film Festival at the Andorra Cinema, a movie theater in downtown Helsinki owned by the Kourismaki brothers.
Kirill Galetski (MM): At what age did you decide to become a moviemaker and what led you down that path?
Mika Kaurismaki (MK): I grew up in small towns in the south of Finland. Normally, there was one cinema in town that played mostly American movies. I had a couple of friends in high school and we started making Super 8 films just for fun. I was 15. Directing was totally impossible to think of as a profession while growing up in a small city like that. But then in Kuovola, a city in the southeast of Finland, there was a film club. I think that the film clubs were the source of inspiration for me. I realized that there are many different kinds of directors. At the film clubs I watched Russian, French and Japanese films and I really realized that there's somebody behind them telling a story.
MM: You collaborated with your brother Aki on the screenplays of your first few films. Are there any plans to collaborate again?
MK: Maybe screenplays, yeah. We had our own production company. I quit because I'm living in Brazil full-time now.
MM: You've worked in several different genres. Is there one genre you haven't worked in that you would like to tackle?
MK: I've never made a period movie and I've never worked in a studio-all of my films are made on location.
MM: Can you talk a bit about how you've financed your films?
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MK: I'll start with school, because I made my diploma film for the Munich Film School, The Liar, which is a one-hour movie. It won the main award at the Tampere Film Festival and it became quite popular. It was available in only one or two prints, but it traveled extensively both in Finland and outside. It came at a moment when the old 70s cinema was very heavy on the Finnish national themes, and Finnish cinema was sort at its end. You know, in the end, nobody wants to see those Finnish films. The Liar came at a moment when the New Wave [had started] so I was lucky because after this film I could easily get money for other films.
MM: How did coming making films in America come about?
MK: I was asked to do Condition Red by this small New York company, except that it was a disastrous production. They said that they had the money for it but they didn't have the money. I like the movie quite a lot because of the actors, however-they secured the film. In the end, we didn't even let the producer come on the set. He owed everybody and we told him if he came on the set we would beat him up. We were shooting in a real prison, you know, and with no money, so we had to do it fast.
MM: Was LA Without a Map a better experience?
MK: It was shot in LA mostly, but it wasn't an American movie. It was an English-French-German-Finnish co-production, and the French part wasn't very good. I won't make any co-productions with the French again because they always complicate things. Of course, not everybody, but I've had bad experiences with the French. If they're in a co-production, they work against the project because they want to keep control of it. I have nothing against the French, but that was the only bad thing about L.A. Otherwise, it was quite okay.
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Moro no Brasil (2002)
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It was low-budget but had very nice producers from England. I mean, I didn't exactly enjoy working in LA. It's the capital of cinema, but it's the most complicated place to shoot. Everything that's behind the camera is so important-parking lots and transportation. You have to have these huge trucks and so you have to have a huge parking lot for them... It's crazy.
MM: How big are your crews in Finland?
MK: My smallest, on Rosso, was five people, but we almost always work with 10 to 15 people. They've gotten bigger. Twenty to 30 is maybe the size for an average Finnish movie. That's why, after LA Without a Map, I decided I do not want to become a filmmaker there. I decided I prefer small productions. You have less money and possibilities, but you have more creative freedom. If you have 100 people, you can't do any overtime. If you have a call sheet you have to shoot whatever's on the call sheet whereas, on a small production, you have the liberty of changing things-improvising. If something doesn't work on a big film, it's nearly impossible to change.
In LA, they don't read the script and they're not interested in the story. I mean, there are some really good people, and I have nothing against them, but it's not my cup of tea. I don't do it for money, I would do something else if I were interested in money. It's the capital of cinema, but nobody's interested.
MM: So how did the Brazilian music project come about?
MK: It was not my idea. It came from the French TV station, Arte, who had co-financed Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club. Hans Robert Eisenhauer was the producer from Arte, and after Buena Vista, he asked me if I was interested in doing a film about Brazilian music. So I was sort of hired to do that. They had three films planned: one of them was Buena Vista, the second one was Emir Kusturicas Super 8 Stories and the third was my film. They wanted to work with sort of established film directors.
They wanted something with a different point of view. I've been there 10 years, but I'm still an outsider. I'm sure if you’d asked a Brazilian director to do it, it would be different. They wanted somebody who would be "in," but still an outsider, so they chose me. I realized, however, that it wouldn't be easy-there's so much music. The challenge was actually in choosing what to put in. I shot 100 hours and the film is 100 minutes.
I decided I would show what I like a lot-having lived and traveled in Brazil for 10 years-so it's a very personal point of view. It tries to tell the history of Brazil though music, so it begins with the Indians, and goes though to the Portuguese and African influences, and ends with funk. So, it's a bit of a history, but there's no stock footage-all of the artists are alive and working. Of course, there are a couple of fairly famous people there, but they're not superstars. It's about roots. It's kind of a melting pot of cultures, so I try to show this, a slice of life of the Brazilian people.
For them music is a way to survive, it's a ritual, it's a religion. It's entertainment also, but it's part of life. It's not like here, where we buy a record and listen to a piece of music. It always comes with some sort of dance, and this comes from the Africans and the Indians. There are so many films about Brazil showing the problems, and it's true, there are lots of problems, but there's more to life than that. MM
