The following interview took place on 17 August 2007 at the Helsinki office of Kaurismäki’s production company Sputnik Ltd. The interview was in Finnish, and has been translated and edited for concision by the author.
Audience
Andrew Nestingen (AN): As a foreign viewer of your films, it’s interesting to note that although many of your films are regarded as instances of national cinema, they have found an audience throughout Europe and around the world. Who is your audience?
Aki Kaurismäki (AK): Of course you have to take your audience into consideration. The premise is that you have to hoodwink the viewer, get them go along with a story that they assume is true. But I couldn’t give a shit about a target audience, in terms of numbers or ages. I don’t think about that. For me it’s mainly about the viewer; you have to make her laugh and make her cry. So you could say that in that way there is an abstract sense of audience at work in the development of my films. You’ve got to lead them around by the nose. In Finland my audience tends to be young people and cultured older women. Outside Finland it’s more diverse.
AN: Are there differences by country? For example in France and Germany do you think there’s a different breakdown than the one in Finland?
AK: I don’t really know about statistical differences between countries. When the films play well there tends to be a diverse audience. I think that the consistent audience for my films is younger in Europe than in Finland. But I don’t know. About the Finnish audience, I can only say that I have heard many times that there’s a remarkable number of cultured older women. And that’s a wonderful thing, if that’s the case.
AN: What is the cost of making a film in Finland? You have to pay salaries, of course, but what kinds of costs are involved in location shooting? What are the most expensive items in your budget?
AK: You don’t really have to pay for location shots in Finland. Well, you do have to pay for interior location shots, but it’s not much. But they don’t charge for location shots on public streets. In the capital city, you can get a general photography permit. And then you go where you want – as long as you don’t block traffic on major thoroughfares without permission for very long.
Things are pretty clear budget wise: half goes for salaries and the other half gets divided into various production costs. About a third of that is for sets, a third for laboratory costs, and a third for everything else: lighting, costumes, coffee, rolls, posters, and whatever else is in there. Of course it’s not quite so straightforward, but about half goes to salaries. I don’t use much on material or supplies, so that cost is significantly less for me than for others. I don’t spend much on sets. We pretty much use recycled and used stuff on our sets – whatever happens to be lying on the side of the street when we’re shooting and whatever leftover paint is sitting in the corner. If you want to sum it all up, we’re talking about 1.5 million US dollars.
AN: A glance at the credits for your films shows that the films are made with funding from many different sources in many different countries, production companies, television channels, as well as film institutes. How has this system developed for you?
AK: The productions have really been Finnish-German-French cooperation for years. The Germans and French have their funding sources, which they want included in the credits. In practice, they don’t have a relationship with me in my role as producer. I maintain one hundred percent control of the films’ rights, despite the number of parties involved. They only receive distribution rights.
AN: Does that mean that when production commences, the money is in place, but no one but you is responsible for final production decisions?
AK: I am the producer. If there’s a script, I let people read it, but usually there’s no script. Sure, I give them a scenario of the film. But these are relationships based on trust. This is the way we’ve done it since the 1970s and 1980s; we’ve worked with the same people. I definitely know exactly what budget I need, as well as the amount or revenue a picture will produce, and how much it’s wise to use on production. I make films so cheap that no one takes on a large risk. The budgets are really insignificant, since we have to cover all our costs.
AN: You’ve spoken in previous interviews about musical decisions you’ve made on the basis of budget concerns. You included some recordings of Shostakovich, if I remember, in order to avoid rights costs. Have you made decisions in order to maintain your low budget, while trying to preserve some freedom of choice?
AK: I did use Shostakovich years ago and had to pay like hell for it, but I switched to Tchaikovsky who had the sense to die earlier. Musical rights ownership is concentrated in the hands of a couple of big firms. Almost all Finnish music is controlled by Warner, which bought up Fazer and the smaller firms, which Fazer had rolled into itself. I don’t even have the money to use Finnish tango, because the Yanks control the rights, and they’re brutal. Their bids are just brutal.
AN: Wasn’t there a tango-sequence in Lights in the Dusk?
AK: Yes, it’s Carlos Gardel.
AN: So you had to pay for that nonetheless? Are the prices in the same class as the Finnish tangos?
AK: I didn’t actually have to pay for that one, since Gardel died in 1935, and copyright had expired on 1 January 2006. But that wasn’t the reason I used Gardel. It was just a coincidence.
AN: But expensive rights could be an obstacle?
AK: Sure, but in the Gardel case, the recordings are so old they are in the public domain. Of course I don’t try to find music that’s free. But the bids on some of the music are such that one song would use up as much as I have budgeted for all the music in the film. It doesn’t really work. So now I scrape things together from here and there.
AN: Here’s an interesting musical question for me as a foreign viewer: What do The Renegades mean to you? What were they as a phenomenon? They have featured frequently in your films.
AK: They’re the toughest rock-n-roll (rautalanka) band of all time.1 In comparison to The Renegades, The Shadows belong in a sandbox at the local daycare. When I was a kid and there was only one coin to put in the jukebox, it was always went to The Renegades. They were an English band who became famous in Finland and Italy, but nowhere else.
AN: Do you know why it was only Finland and Italy?
AK: What I do know is that they came to Finland and got an explosive reception here. They even recorded their albums here. They had two LPs released by a Finnish record company during the 1960s.
Finnish Cinema
AN: In your view, where is contemporary Finnish cinema in historical terms?
AK: Throughout the 1950s, it was the idyllic countryside and the sinful city. Then there was a sort of new wave in the 1960s, which flew off every which way, as new waves tend to do. Then things got stuck: it was portraits of great men and grandiose national themes during the 1970s. We kicked up a little more speed in the early 1980s, but we were pretty lonely in our kicking. In the 1990s film started to win popularity with audiences again. But nothing substantive is going on there. Finnish cinema is a bitter pill. Or rather, if there’s passion for it, then it’s Finnish passion, so it’s not easily visible.
AN: You spoke about the idyllic countryside and the sinful city. In your films, a man often arrives from the countryside to the city. Does the source of that narrative lie in the history of Finnish cinema?
AK: Of course it comes from there, too. I myself moved from the country to the city, to Helsinki. I know what it’s like to be a newcomer. The films I was thinking of involve a different kind of story. Usually it was something like a farm daughter falling in love with a hired hand, which created a scandal, until the hired hand was revealed to be an agronomist or the son of a wealthy family in the city. And then it wasn’t such a big deal. There were about thirty excellent films made in Finland before 1960 and perhaps about the same number since then. That totals about sixty.
AN: You have spoken in the past about Valentin Vaala, Teuvo Tulio, and other figures from Finland’s studio period. What do you find in their work?
AK: Nyrki Tapiovaara, too – if he had lived.2 He could have done whatever he wanted. But Tulio is special, a real master of melodrama. Amazing stuff. It approaches costume drama social-democratically, although they do it skillfully. Vaala’s People in the Summer Night [Ihmiset suviyössä, 1948] is an excellent film, I have to say. Tulio’s melodramas are amazing films even when you compare them with an international standard. It’s a shame that their technical level was quite a bit more developed than their screenplays. The writing could be pretty elementary. On the other hand, staging, cinematography, costumes, and the other technical elements were pretty good on a European level.
AN: What do you mean that the scripts were flawed?
AK: Well they were a little bit like Finnish summer theatre. I don’t know who actually did the screenwriting for those films. The dialogue is sort of fluffed discussion, and it can also be exaggeratedly rigid. When the characters are in the city, the dialogue is just so fluffy there’s nothing left, and when they’re in the countryside you don’t hear anything but grunts.
Melodrama and Film History
AN: You mentioned melodrama, which is something you yourself dip into. What does melodrama mean to you?
AK: In American cinema, it means Douglas Sirk at his purest, but these days you can still find more than a few melodramas. Melodrama is life’s actions and events taken to the second power. Quotidian occurrences are taken to their extreme, and the music too. When it storms, it’s a booming thunderstorm. When the sky darkens, the clouds are black and there’s a lot of them. Melodrama doesn’t differ from naturalism, except for in its exaggerated quality.
AN: Towards what end?
AK: So that the spectator can feel that the massive expression of feeling represents herself. It’s an exaggerated reality. In a sense it’s the opposite of naturalism, or naturalism to the third power.
AN: In Juha there’s the wonderful moment in which Shemeikka’s Corvette arrives, and we see that the hood ornament alludes to Sirk, a central figure in melodrama, as you noted.
AK: His original German surname was Sierck. It’s of course an allusion for the couple of people who know the German surname. If you want to amuse yourself, find it there.
AN: But Douglas Sirk is also known for his excessive irony, which on the one hand creates emotional intensity, but on the other criticised the contemporary notion of the American dream in the United States in the 1950s. Is Sirk’s tradition of irony also a part of your films?
AK: Yes, the reference is certainly a hint in that direction, that, look out, Sirk’s repertoire is in use here. In both the irony and the exaggeration. The entire figure of Shemeikka is based on playing that card. You can’t really take the character seriously.
AN: In your essay on Robert Bresson, ‘The Wolf’, you describe Bresson as the opposite of Douglas Sirk. What do you mean by that?
AK: Bresson is nothing more than Douglas Sirk. I wrote something like that, it’s true.
AN: You see Bresson as a melodramatist, then?
AK: What I’m driving at is largely a formal distinction between Bresson and Sirk. The only difference separating them is form. They tell the same story, but with completely divergent forms. One is a minimalist, the other blows things up to their maximum.
AN: Bresson was known for his inexpressive and silent actors, too. Could you talk a little about what Bresson signifies for you?
AK: I’m a lot nicer than Bresson. He was mean. The actress who appeared in L’Argent, in the final sequence, in which everyone is murdered. She washes clothes in one scene. Bresson made her wash clothes all day, made her practise for hours, until he was satisfied with the way she was washing clothes.
AN: What do you think of that kind of method-acting technique?
AK: I don’t believe in aerobics. Take hold of it and go. Ten minutes to practise dialogue, then we take a look at it. I shoot the first practice run, and that’s it. If there’s a mistake, then I’ll shoot a second take. But in general it’s one take.
AN: It reminds me of old John Ford, for whom one take was enough. He built the films in the cutting room.
AK: I sincerely believe that the actors already act in the first take. Of course as a producer, I also see it as the least expensive way to make a film. But I’ve never noticed that the scene gets better with more takes. If there’s some technical mistake, then of course we’ll do it again. Otherwise, once is enough. It’s unusual to do a scene twice. Then again, if the scene involves a number of people and it would be expensive to set it up a second time, we’ll do a second take just in case, but we’ll nevertheless use the first take.
AN: Many commentators argue that your films have an important relationship to the history of cinema. It’s obvious that the films are built on a knowledge of film history, and that they often allude to other films. In Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses, for example, there’s the scene in the factory in which you yourself imitate Charles Chaplin in Modern Times, working on the assembly line.
AK: Actually, I’m Chaplin and Buster Keaton at the same time. That scene came about when we were shooting in a tractor factory. We were shooting images of the machines, and so they let the workers take an early lunch break. There was nobody to man the machines, so I had to do it myself as the lone worker.
AN: Are there specific figures in films, or directors, to which you return frequently as a viewer or in your thoughts, for example when you think about how you might resolve a sequence in one of your films?
AK: I don’t think of anything when I make films. Directing is automatic writing. So many thoughts scuttle through your head, compress in your head; you can’t really know what you’re thinking. Otherwise I’ve noticed that I keep going back to the comics, Chaplin and Buster Keaton and others. They really had it all together.
AN: What about Harold Lloyd?
AK: A little bit, but I’m not enamoured with him.
AN: Why not? What makes him different?
AK: He’s so upper class. He had his own car and everything.
AN: And a very large house.
AK: He really managed to cash in, and he didn’t lose it, not even in the stock market crash. He was one of the few true businessmen. Most everyone else lost everything. Or were wager-workers at heart.
National Nostalgia
AN: Many media accounts of your career mention that you have been politically active all along the way, from peace marches to the Kirsti Paakkanen matter. In such instances, ethical and moral issues are at stake. Is there a relationship between such issues and your films?
AK: I don’t know, since film is a lousy vehicle for saying anything. Or you have to be so subtle. I guess it should tell you something that my films haven’t paid any attention to people in power, or to the upper class. They’re completely irrelevant; at most they’re caricatures who play the fool for a maximum of thirty seconds. There’s no political reason for that, they’re just such dull characters, all of them.
AN: Not far from your offices here is the memorial to president Urho Kekkonen, and I noticed his picture hanging there on your wall, as well.3 A lot of people have talked about your films’ nostalgia. How would you characterise Kekkonen’s time?
AK: What can you conclude from my office? Whose picture hangs highest? Kekkonen was not without his flaws, not even in that neighbourhood. But nowadays it’s easy to miss a real politician when you take a look at the herd of cattle and children romping around up there in parliament. Even that business, that groping around, requires sufficient professional skill to spare the nation unceasing humiliation. They’re so lousy at corruption that it’s obvious to everyone.
AN: What corruption?
AK: It’s a quid pro quo principle. If someone leaves politics, well then a position needs to be arranged for him. It’s not even called corruption, but I have no idea why Esko Aho is head of SITRA, collecting a handsome salary and spreading around capital to his friends at Nokia.4 What happened to Sinikka Mönkäre, after she drove through Finland’s fifth nuclear plant?5 I wondered, how many weeks will this take? Sure enough, three weeks later she was the newly appointed head of Finland’s Slot-Machine Association (RAHA-automaattiyhdistys). Ministers lose their posts; and what happens? Let them run the postal service or the lottery. That’s the way it is, laundered corruption. None of these people has any professional competency for these jobs. But when someone has been a minister of government, well then he can run the railroads or the postal service. These people can’t do anything but collect a big paycheck. As if Finland is the least corrupt country in the world.
AN: I read an amusing remark by a Czech writer who settled as a political refugee in Norway following the Prague spring. He remarked that in Norway there’s no corruption, everyone just went to the same secondary school. Are you saying that Finland works on the same principle?
AK: Well, Norway is an even smaller country than Finland. The Finns didn’t go to the same secondary school, but the same school, yes. It’s clearly a quid pro quo system. One party gives tacit approval to some questionable decision, but that just means that next time it’ll be their guy or girl. This has been going on as long as I’ve been following things, which is some forty years.
AN: So in Kekkonen’s time, too?
AK: Yes, of course, more openly, but also more honestly.
AN: So now there’s more effort spent on concealment?
AK: Right, like I just happened to end up in this job.
AN: A perfectly natural arrangement.
The Political Economy of Food
AK: Kekkonen’s contemporaries fought in restaurants. They knew how to drink and have a good time. But nobody wants to pay attention to today’s anaemic broilers. And besides that, they make such poor decisions. At least the old-fashioned politicians made bad decisions with some flair. The lying has increased. Lies are told to the nation every day. Any statement you can imagine begins with a lie. Now they’re talking about genetically-modified animal feed. They’re beginning to import genetically-modified soy products to feed swine in Finland. Of course there was a big outcry. But Farmer John says this is the only way that Finnish meat production can remain profitable. And then they just trot out the lies, plain as can be. There’s supposedly a five percent price difference per kilo between animals fed with regular feed and those fed with cheaper, genetically-modified feed. I don’t really think it matters whether the price per kilo is 10.70 or 10.80 euros. But then they get all upset that people raise food-safety questions. Of course the farmers raising the livestock wouldn’t want to eat dangerous food. And a third of Americans have eaten meat produced with this kind of feed in the last ten years, they say.
AN: Look at us Americans.
AK: I want to ask them – since the argument raises certain suspicions – when four in five Americans are overweight, shouldn’t some alarm bells go off? There should be fuller analysis of the safety issues.
AN: The American journalist Michael Pollan has written on this topic, especially in a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma – super book. He takes four meals and explores their political economy, from the soil to the plate. The first is a McDonald’s meal, which he eats in a car with his family. That’s a meal subsidised by cheap oil, which contributes to the fertilisers necessary for farming high yields of cheap corn, which is one of the main sources of calories in American food and especially meat production. Yet corn famers can barely survive, because the price of corn has been driven so low.
AK: What were the other meals?
AN: One is an organic meal, what he calls industrial organic. It’s a big trend these days. There’s a national grocery chain, Whole Foods, which produces organic food by a similar industrial system to mainstream food production. It’s just as dependent on oil. Then there’s a meal of what he calls deep organic, farmers who’ve opted out of the system for local farming, no chemicals of any kind, etc. Finally, there’s a hunted and foraged meal, wild boar and mushrooms, which the author acquires himself in the forests of California. Interesting book.
AK: I just saw some study that stated that organic farming could feed the world population. Organic methods are actually more efficient in the developing world than industrial methods. Particularly in the developing world.
AN: The food industry tries to break up the circle of life and insert their products, since it’s more profitable.
AK: Apocalyptic companies like Monsanto. It’s right out of a horror movie, right out of Hitler’s vault.
AN: When you study little things like food packages you can discover quite a bit about how the system works.
AK: That’s about it. I’ve been thinking, should it be obligatory to label pork products produced with pigs that have been fed genetically-modified feed? The EU doesn’t currently require it. They argue that the genetically-modified feed is not actually a part of the consumer product. Of course a pig is what it eats. Hopefully the agricultural producers themselves will demand that kind of labelling. I’ve done my thinking about this, and I said to myself, I can get out of this dilemma right away. I don’t have to eat pork, and I don’t have to eat meat. So they get their five percent savings through feed, but they lost one customer for all of their products. The companies that initiated the change in feed all ended up being boycotted. So a couple of percent savings ended up being quite a twisted ankle for them.
AN: Hog farming seems to be the worst offender, since pigs can be fed just about anything.
AK: There was a farm in France that got shut down because they fed the pigs human waste.
AN: There’s that scene in Veijo Meri’s novel The Manilla Rope [Mannillköysi], which describes an escaped herd of swine during the Continuation War, which started eating human remains, Russian soldiers.
AK: They ate some Finns, too.
Finland and Its Others
AN: About the relationship between Russia and Finland, it’s noticeable that in the opening sequence of Lights in the Dusk, there are some Russians walking down the street talking about Pushkin and Gogol in Russian. (The sequence is not subtitled in the Finnish release.) It seems that they are presented as stereotyped outsiders, meriting suspicion, even though they are talking about literature in a humanistic way. You yourself live in Portugal part of the year. What does otherness and being a foreigner in a foreign land mean to you?
AK: Living in Portugal is easy, since I’m not dark skinned, even though there’s not much racism there. It hasn’t been that difficult, it’s a small community. They finally figured out my job, and that, OK, the guy has some job. Then they were happy that I had a job and that I wasn’t just loafing around, a good-for-nothing. He’s got a job, seems like a nice guy. Fine. The commonplace advice there, which I pass on to others, is that if a big BMW with tinted windows drives in and out of your place, someone’s going to keep track, and maybe break in. Not the neighbour’s office. Or they’ll burglarise some little café. That’s normal. Great. People don’t expect that in Finland. So when someone gets flown in from some devastated place, and he thinks he’s acting normal out in some Finnish town, Finns can have a tough time relating. And the language only makes it worse. But racism will disappear from Finland. It’s not a part of people’s worldview here, it is an expression of fear of the new and unknown. And it’s just as quickly directed at Norwegians and Swedes, as at people of colour. The real disgrace here is Finland’s refugee policy, which is shameful. We refuse refugee status on the flimsiest of grounds and send people back to secure places like Darfur, Iraq, and Somalia. ‘It’s perfectly safe, go ahead.’ Our policy is a stain among the Nordic nations. Shameful.
AN: You’ve said a lot about the Finnish state and nation. Your films are often held up as an example of Finnish national cinema. But on the other hand, you relate very critically to any number of aspects of Finnish politics and society. Is there a contradiction there?
AK: One can’t equate my films with my person, but when the films received awards outside Finland, Finns thought it was just grand. This nation is so insecure that it’s just the greatest thing ever if some foreigner says something nice about Finland, or some Finn jumps or hops or bounces further than anybody else. In that sense, when you have some success internationally, then that success is accepted here, too. Before that, my films were part of the freak show. And of course the films are more exotic to foreigners than to Finns, since for Finns about half of what the films show is everyday life, which is exotic to everybody else.
AN: In looking at the reception of your films outside Finland, it often seems that critics categorise them as expressions of Finnishness because they can’t think of another way to categorise them. They don’t really know what Finnish film is, but don’t what else to say about them.
AK: There is no national cinema in Finland. It’s spread out across a couple of groups of people, who do whatever they do. I don’t see a national cinema in the US, either, unless you count that disgrace in Hollywood. There’s hardly anyone who’d want to declare that Transformers represents the national culture. I suppose there’s something to be found there, if you put some time into studying it, perhaps there are some deep seams of meaning. But you’d have to look for them in independent productions. There’s no sense in mixing up Hollywood and cinema. They’re two different things. Hollywood is business, the entertainment business. There’s no point in demanding anything else from Hollywood. If you ask for anything more complicated, you just get frustrated.
1 Kaurismäki does not use the term rock-n-roll, but rautalanka, which is a musical genre similar to the instrumental rock and surf rock popularised in the early 1960s by such bands as The Shadows and The Ventures. It was the first form of rock-blues music associated with youth culture in Finland, gaining a foothold through off-shore radio broadcasts around 1960, and agitating against the cultural edification programming promulgated by state-controlled broadcasting. Rautalanka literally means ‘iron string’.
2 Tapiovaara was killed in action in 1940, during Finland’s Winter War.
3 Centre Party politician Urho Kekkonen dominated Finnish public life during his tenure as President (1956–1982). He is remembered for his pragmatically acquiescent relationship with the Soviet Union, which preserved Finland’s independence, but also for his strong and paternalistic leadership in domestic affairs.
4 SITRA is a venture capital fund established by the Finnish parliament in 1967 with the purpose of cultivating Finland’s economic growth. Esko Aho of the Finnish Centre Party served as Finnish Prime Minister from 1991 to 1995.
5 Mönkäre served as a Social-Democratic MP, as well as Minister of Commerce and Minster of Health and Social Services in several governments since the 1990s. While expansion of nuclear power has been popular on the right, the left and the greens have opposed it. Mönkäre’s ministerial-level support of permitting construction of a fifth Finnish nuclear plant proved decisive in 2002 when the matter came up for a parliamentary vote. Yet her position was unpopular in her party and on the left.