Helsingin Sanomat - 24.05.02
An interview with the Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki, whose Man without a Past subsequently took this year's Cannes Grand Prix
By Helena Ylänen in Cannes
This is already the second time in Aki Kaurismäki's life when he has walked along the famous red carpet to a showing of one of his films in the Cannes Palais du Festivals.
It is possible that this time will be an even more pleasant occasion than the last. There are distinctly good vibrations in the air.
Kaurismäki's entry in the 2002 Feature Films Competition Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past) got an ecstatic reception. The applause went on and on, and there were tear-stained faces to be seen all over the place.
Also present at the event was a sizeable Finnish delegation, spearheaded by Minister of Culture Suvi Lindén.
The critics' voting, regarded as part and parcel of the Cannes routine, actually put Kaurismäki right up there as a favourite to pick up the cherished Palme d'Or.
The review in The Hollywood Reporter bordered on being a paean of praise ("...a sublime work, at once comic, melancholy, meditative, liberating and philosophical. It contains not one false note..."), and the other daily bulletins have written about the film with such gusto that even Tähti the dog (who plays the role of Hannibal the hopelessly friendly killer guard-dog and enforcer) has merited his own special mentions.
In the French morning papers, the plaudits keep on coming. The main headline in Libération's Cannes Update is "Aki Charismatique", which surely must win its own festival prize for squeezing a pun out of nothing.
In order to secure an interview with the man himself, it is necessary to join the scrum of reporters from big French dailies. This is an unaccustomed event; in most cases Finnish participants at such affairs are surrounded only by their own.
When we get down to talking, the first incident of crossing swords is over whether the hero of the piece, cryptically known only as "M", actually dies in the emergency room, or whether he simply gets a nasty bang to the head from which he recovers, albeit with amnesia. In the end Kaurismäki says quite firmly that there was nothing whatsoever in the script to suggest that the man has died.
The subject then comes up that the film contains one scene from an earlier project that he abandoned work on a couple of years ago. Kaurismäki, who often writes his own scripts (and did so on this occasion), says that he does not have many different ideas on the boil at any one time.
"I am very self-sufficient, or perhaps it would be better to say my subconscious is. I toss in all sorts of themes and visions to see how they shape up, kind of like into a chaff-engine on a farm. Then something comes out the other end, if there's anything to come out. The intention is that the idea should be ready when I start writing."
Aki Kaurismäki has directed 14 full-length feature films (though many are on the short side by international standards), half a dozen shorts, one TV-drama, and a documentary.
He says that in around a half of these projects there has been a formal script to work with, and in the others things have gone ahead by improvisation on the set. "Those films that had a script, they were made precisely according to the letter, right down to the individual lines of dialogue. There is no in-between format for me."
"When we improvise, it means in effect that I improvise. The others don't. The actors are not improvising. It is not that kind of group work. I could borrow a line from Jean-Luc Godard. He never improvises, he just writes it all down a second before he starts to shoot."
"An actor doesn't need to get a script in his hands a year before filming starts. It's quite enough that it comes five minutes beforehand. That gives you all the time you need to get a few lamps put up."
At the press conference on Wednesday morning, there is some confusion amongst the gathered reporters at Kaurismäki's clipped one-liners, particularly the remark that he only uses one take. Conversely, he says, everything that is got on film gets used.
The interviewers try to fathom what he is saying by asking if in that case he rehearses scenes before the camera is switched on, and they get the answer that he "shoots the rehearsals".
Actress Kati Outinen, who plays the role of a Salvation Army officer in Man without a Past, interjects that Aki has sometimes accused his actors of rehearsing in secret behind his back. Cinematographer Timo Salminen assures us that if a scene is retaken, it is only because of "some technical fault".
It all starts with the wall that the actors are standing in front of, Salminen and Kaurismäki attempt to explain. A large section of the audience think this is meant to be another Kaurismäki joke.
When I bring the subject up again face-to-face, Kaurismäki says that actually he and Timo are really more interested in set design than in direction and filming.
"The first thing is always the set, then the lights, the actors, and the dialogue. It always starts from the space. Always."
"From the set and the colours. The light is always white. Well, at least it has been ever since we've had the money to buy daylight floods", grins Kaurismäki.
A good deal of Man Without a Past is shot in a container village occupied by the homeless on the shores of Kyläsaari, just north of the centre of Helsinki.
"Those containers may look like they are sets put there for the purpose, but they have been the year-round dwellings of homeless people", says Kaurismäki. "We didn't do a thing to them. People who either choose to be without a home or cannot get one, they have lived in them, and the containers have been shaped in the image of their occupants."
All the crew did was to remove a few partition walls in places.
Aki Kaurismäki has another film on display in Cannes. It is the short Dogs Have No Hell, and it could be found as a segment in Ten Minutes Older - The Trumpet, showing off the work of seven major directors, and featured in the Un Certain Regard category at the festival.
Dogs Have No Hell is arguably a missing link between Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds, 1996) and Man Without a Past, parts one and two of Kaurismäki's "Suomi" trilogy.
He said he used it to test out the band, the music, the style of shooting, picture sizes and how Markku Peltola (who plays M in this year's Cannes nominee) and Kati Outinen worked together. "Subconsciously, mainly", he adds.
Man Without a Past is an optimistic and colour-drenched portrait of poor people who have fallen through the cracks, and as such it is slightly reminiscient of Akira Kurosawa's rather underrated Dodes'ka-den from 1970, a portrayal of lives in the Tokyo slums.
When I comment that it was not a very good Kurosawa picture, Aki replies sharply that if we were to watch it today, it would probably seem rather better: "It was a softer film, so Kurosawa's social perspective comes out more strongly."
"In all his movies, Kurosawa was an absolute moralist. I've only picked up on this later, but it was only after he gave up on the Samurai sword-wielding stuff that the moralism came out more strongly, and then everyone rejected him. It is all too easy to go bashing a guy who has a genuine concern for the state of mankind."
In the publicity material for this latest film, Kaurismäki has written that he hopes those who go to see it will hereafter "regard me as normal".
"Perhaps it is because Juha (1999) was so grim and depressing, I tried this time to make the all-time optimistic movie."
Of Kaurismäki's full-length feature films, every second one is made in black and white. He says the black and white films are made for his own amusement, and the colour ones are "commercial" The order is broken only by The Match Factory Girl from 1989, which is in colour.
"Those b&w films are very private. Match Factory Girl is of course so grim and gloomy that it really ought not to have been in colour, but the problem was that I saw it so much in colours", he adds.
And now that he can look back on twenty years of making movies, is it what he thought it would be when he started out?
"It's a killing ground", he replies. "It came as a complete surprise that it is such an enormous physical strain."
"But then again it contains all the ingredients - literature, poetry, the pictorial arts, architecture - that I woulkd have liked to work with in any case. There's certainly no shortage of satisfaction. But making films is work. And to a surprising extent it's hands-on, manual work. Not really so very different from running a kennel."
Kaurismäki has gone on record in the past as saying that no decent films have been made since 1962. So what happened back then?
He replies that Joseph Losey had just got Eva in the can, and Godard had just released À bout de souffle. Kaurismäki believes that Godard's breakthrough picture was the last innovation developed in film narrative. And even that only emerged out of the director's pique.
"The producer demanded that Godard cut the film radically. Out of spite, Godard chopped up whole scenes, but he let the music continue across the seams he had created. After that, everyone has aped the technique."
"I watched it again not so long ago, and it is still brilliant. Godard is the last genius in this business. These days the 60-year-old geezers, they just make jungle adventures where the characters shoot each other with toy guns."
Kaurismäki confides that he has always felt that he was just drifting through life, but now he is having second thoughts.
"When I look back, I can see I have been very stubborn in the things I've done. I've gone in a dead straight line. It's been a movie after all."
"And I do love cinema. Well, I loved it while it existed. I mean, nobody can watch something like D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms without a handkerchief."
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 24.5.2002
Note: This article appeared before the announcement that Man Without a Past had been awarded the Grand Prix, and that Kati Outinen's performance had won her the Best Actress award.