Cinéma, de notre temps (1988–…): Season 0, Episode 0 - Aki Kaurismäki - full transcript
Is this the screenplay
for your next movie?
Yes, I have...
I started it this morning
and just finished it.
I was just going to rewrite it,
before you came in unexpectedly
and without knocking.
It is based on Knut Hamsun's
novel Dreamers
The international title
is something else.
That edition is so old
it doesn't have the original title.
What kind of a story is it?
I only have the screenplay.
I need to contact Hamsun's heirs to find
out if I'm allowed to shoot it or not.
It's a romantic melodrama,
Realistic in style, I guess
Of course it's a bit hard to tel
as I haven't had the time to read it,
seeing as you barged in through the window
I tried to concentrate on my work...
It's very seldom I get a chance.
So it was created in a matter of hours?
Exactly...
I'm such an impulsive person...
But... I've kept Hamsun
in my mind all these years,
because he is
one of my favourite writers,
and when you get to be my age,
your own ideas start to run out
or they feel too unimportant,
and then it's time to move on
to the classics of world history...
...world literature
Will there be much talking in this film?
Yeah, it's gonna be
full of revolver dialogue.
Will it be in colour or black and white?
It depends on which film stock
is cheaper when we start shooting.
The prices vary and lately
black and white has been more expensive.
When you produce your own movies,
you need to consider trivial-sounding
details such as this one.
They might seem like artistic
choices to the eyes of critics
or a possible audience,
but are determined by one choice
being cheaper by 20 pennies/metre.
That's what we go by.
Which is more important for
you? The story or the characters?
I must admit that I just
lied to you a little bit.
The ideas are born in
colour or black and white,
I go by the first notion
I have on the subject,
and that is either in
colour or in black and white.
The problem is that
black-and-white film
can't be developed outside
of Finland nowadays.
There are two or three guys
in Finland who can do it,
and they'll only do it on gunpoint.
Looking at a movie from the 10s
or 20s you and only cry enviously
looking at the wonderful
stuff they could do then.
But, everything being black
and white they could do the job.
Now that everything's in colour,
the craft of doing black and white
has vanished almost completely.
What kind of a person picks up
pieces of string on the streets,
can't part with anything,
keeps hats and stuff his dead friends
once wore in one of their roles?
What's the use of an old shower handle?
I can understand the squeezers.
This is too small.
You can use it to permanently
terminate your head.
A stamp from the previous millennium.
Electric wires with their heads cut off.
A current that doesn't flow.
Goethe on his death bed: "More light!"
Why all this junk?
Chainsaws... They belong in Texas.
Hats from movies.
French Connection.
An English tourist.
Eddie Constantine.
All this... this junk.
Apparently I can't stand
the warmth of people and
take refuge here,
amidst all these items.
Do you smoke?
Maybe it's because I agree with
Ingmar Bergman's statement that...
An ant society is
waiting around the corner,
other than that I'm a
regular social democrat,
holding on to these
reminiscences of lost worlds
I found this piece in the next room.
What about it?
Has it been used somewhere?
My wife
- Paula Oinonen, a professional painter -
painted that poster for the
movie Hamlet Liikemaailmassa,
Hamlet Goes Business in English,
Hamlet Boulot Business in Albanian.
And... ever since that poster was made
it's been hanging on the
wall of my cutting room.
Because... any humane creature
is moved by emotional despair.
Not me, though.
What's its name? - Baudelaire.
I'm out of coffee -
but I'll make some soup.
May I kiss your hand?
You are fast...
The sooner
to reach the goal.
Do you make many changes to your movies in post-production?
Post-production is when you eliminate the mistakes made while shooting.
There are film-makers who...
shoot 10 miles of junk and count on the editor to make it all right.
Me, being a producer too I do the editing myself
and I don't shoot much useless stuff since I can't afford it.
As I know I'll have to do the editing myself,
the less useless stuff I have the better.
The more the state saves its money, and me, and... YLE.
So... there's no sense in shooting limitlessly and...
thinking something will come out of it.
If you don't know what you want when shooting, find a new job.
How much?
-All.
74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 and 8000. Suit yourself.
Thank you.
The night arrives slowly, gushing in.
The windows light up.
Won't stay alone,
all along to the dark,
the lights chase the shadows away...
Just throw in the garlic.
Thanks.
Plastique?
Plastique, oui.
Check that out!
I've seen many bar desks in my life,
this is the one dearest to me.
It's been God knows where,
I've used it in four or five movies myself,
but now I've decided that its home is...
here in this hotel and it's getting so old that...
it need not move anymore.
One scene had to do with those buttons in the front.
I thought I'd do my Hitchcock-imitation here, but I don't think it'd work.
I was trying to come up...
with something to do for the repairmen in Drifting Clouds.
The only idea I got was
about that missing button in the front.
I told them to go buy Sisu-candies from a nearby kiosk.
sisu (=guts) of course signifies how Finland beat Russia in World War II.
Officially lost, practically won.
"Go buy Sisu-pastilles from the kiosk, then we've got pins...
We'll come up with something."
You can stick a pin in your own finger if you're careless.
Then I developed a scene where they put this...
The job is done, even if the hue is wrong.
But at this stage I got to thinking it's high time...
- Here I return to my objectophilia -
it's high time for that bar desk to find its home
- Now it has found one.
No one answers the phone, but it's found a home
and besides that's wrong hue,
but it has travelled through so many movies,
and before I got her who knows where she's been.
Getting trampled on by golfers.
Telephone!
Do you keep all the bar desks from your movies?
Hotel Oiva, Kaurism?ki.
Yes I do.
Always?
One can barely maintain oneself
and even that's difficult.
Sisu-candy helps with that,
it is a traditional Finnish product,
although the factory has been sold to the Dutch.
There's nothing truly Finnish left anymore.
Not even sisu?
Sisu signifies...
man's refusal to die.
The idea behind eating Sisu is
refusing to die while being prepared for it.
Do you think your movies provide sisu to others?
If God exists,
one day I will pray to him for one chance.
One chance to make one decent film.
I'm sure none of what I've done is that.
I guess the whole lot is a heap of junk.
But it'll be fun to be buried
knowing I've done my best.
Your movies display a particular fondness...
towards the margins of Europe,
the whole Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses-movie...
moves along Europe's fringes.
Ariel begins in Lapland.
How was this love of Europe born?
And what does it mean?
It's born like a cough,
you smoke too much and see too much and then...
If I knew a Borderless Europe-program,
I'd donate four Marks to it
to promote leisure activities, but...
It must be admitted that...
...the so called western world
is knowingly and willingly...
...starving people to death because...
..the level of our welfare is such that...
...one half must die.
What do you say to that?
I'll just say that...
...for example Tatiana...
...looks like it's been put together
left-handed in the woods.
Yet it shows more understanding...
of Europe than pretty much any other film.
...There's a kind of a real Europe in it and
you've been searching for it
and you have instinctively and...
wholeheartedly sought sense in being European.
Europe's borders are around Ural
if you roughly consider
the faces of peoples and stuff
which is ridiculous because we have
so to say a common world and goddammit if...
Isn't it pathetic, that
we're supposed to have a common world,
why isn't it a common world then,
but it doesn't seem to be
with one half starving to death
and the other prospering and
have a nice trip to Hell those who prosper but
geographically and genetically Europe
ends around Ural,
and in the west
it doesn't thank God reach America...
If I was for example a Tatar or a Kurd,
I'd know a whole lot about
customs I'd been raised with,
and a child sees the world
from the environment it is born to.
The first tree I saw was a birch,
not a stone pine or a spruce,
therefore I'm just on my way somewhere.
Towards my grave...
Well, being in Europe...
There's a guy who could answer.
What's Europe?
Jimi Hendrix?
Wine?
Of course.
Ice?
- Yes.
One or two?
-Two.
Ice cubes are more slippery than they used to be.
It's interesting that your movies are
appreciated so strongly all around Europe:
in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
and particularly because of
things that are almost hidden
from these viewers.
To us Finns they contain a whole lot of signs,
all kinds of secret passwords
from our childhood and adolescence.
They've never been told to anyone,
they are secret.
And that's why
the idea of a common Europe
regarding movies is born dead
and the idea of a movie
is nowadays born in Hollywood,
so it is dead, as well.
There's no difference between watching
a movie by Bu?uel or Robert Parrish
or Youssef Chahine or Kurosawa from the 50s.
They're all a part of the same international...
it doesn't matter,
a little ball, it's all the same story.
People trying to survive in the world
they are born into and
there's , if I may curse,
not a fox-tail's difference
where they are born because
the battle for survival is the same.
And movies are usually about it being cold,
let's start a fire and warm up and
make clothes, and then you get hungry and eat.
And that's it and when cinema is really frustrated
until it gets sick and mangy,
Hollywood is born where
they vomit trifling stories.
You haven't trodden on
- except for one filming trip -
on US territory
It's because Hollywood is a symbol to you.
I have even shot pictures on US ground,
but I haven't taken and
won't take a step in California,
cross my heart.
But that doesn't mean that
there haven't been people in
California and Hollywood,
whose work you appreciate.
For me, as a viewer,
the lack of dialogue in your movies
has been a very emotional experience.
It has carried a message, a secret message.
There was no talking in Juha,
because it's a silent film,
the last one of the century.
In The Match Factory Girl,
possibly your finest work,
barely 20 words are spoken in
the entire duration of the movie.
There's something...
I can't talk if you don't let me
Let me talk, yes
I can't talk, in that way I'm an autistic child,
you don't let me speak and
therefore autistic children don't speak.
Carry on.
I can't continue because
it's in my principles that
even an autistic child must be
able to speak and thus it's your turn.
We autistic children...
autism is a thing not to be discussed here
but according to my mothers testimony
I didn't talk anything during my first five years
except a language of my own
that no one understood.
In that sense...
...maybe...
making pictures might be closer to my heart but...
I understand very well a child who refuses to talk
because if a child watches
or hears,
the first thing it tells is
to run away as fast as you can
But how have you come to the conviction that...
almost-silence is the only possible state
I'm a Bresson-fan.
Bresson was a wise man
in that he never uttered a word.
You can't explain things,
you can't explain movies.
They are made well or badly or
horribly or mediocrely or brilliantly,
and it's useless to explain them.
Sometimes you fail and then
you get beaten up and you die and
kill yourself or something
but there's no explaining that
this went so-and-so but really
I'm a very talented guy etc.
You don't say that in conjunction with cinema.
There's so many people at work here,
succeed or commit suicide.
But to me personally cinema is nothing.
Fuck, personally,
I don't appear personally in this world.
Cinema is such that
I refuse to back down on
that cinema is a form of art.
It's a form of art.
Ladies and gentlemen,
if I had a heart, I'd give my heartfelt thanks
to Perttu Gustafsson, who has
carried us through many years.
Because Sakari is famous for his bad memory,
he probably can't remember the
lyrics to the most beautiful Finnish tango,
but Perttu'll do a bit of the start for him.
Every day, I go from morning to evening,
like waiting for a miracle,
and at the edge of the clouds I see my happiness,
get it afresh
Every day, I go from morning to evening,
like waiting for a miracle,
and at the edge of the clouds I see my happiness,
get it afresh.
Beneath the triumphal arch of love
I tried to stay long with you
my darling, my friend.
That's why I'm sorrowful,
when thinking about you,
you took so much beauty along with you.
That's why I'm sorrowful,
when tomorrow
could be so different for me.
They parade in front of me in dream images,
the moments we once spent together.
That's why I'm sorrowful
when I think of you,
you took so much beauty with you.
Whore!
Take it back.
How did you prepare for this role?
Did you visit a factory to see how they work?
Yes we started by working in a factory,
I actually worked at a conveyor belt,
making the matches.
For how long?
Two days.
Before the filming?
No, during it.
I learned each stage and then we shot it.
Did you practice a lot before filming?
- Not one bit.
Aki hates rehearsing.
I sometimes go through dialogue with
someone at a corner to learn it by heart,
and Aki always rushes from somewhere:
"Are you rehearsing? Stop it immediately!"
Watching Kaurism?ki films
one often gets the feeling -
- that women survive better in life.
How do you feel?
Sure, women do better in them, but I don't know...
Is it in Finland...
- Maybe it is so.
According to statistics men in Finland
die far younger than women.
There's something...
I don't know, this could be foolish.
I regret to tell you
that Schumacher and Fisichella
have spun off in the first curve,
while H?kkinen has taken the lead.
Really? Now we shouldn't be happy. Wow!
That was good news.
Characters speak oddly in Kaurism?ki's movies,
do you agree that an Aki-speak exists?
Yes, and I like it.
Actually...
I think Aki-speak is
such that it has humour and...
vocabulary that had disappeared from common use
before Aki began making movies.
Yep, I fell in love with
Aki-speak in the first film,
because it was Hamlet, and it had no script.
The first line, from Hamlet's mother Gertrude,
that I had to memorize,
contained such lovely words
and for example a description of love...
the first line,
where the mother tells about the man's love,
that "he liked me like old car tyres",
and it was humour to die by,
I thought it was lovely...
He simplifies everything funnily,
disposes of everything unessential in the table,
there's not much more than a phone,
if even that.
It's a kind of a Hopperian world,
and the colours and the
depth and forms are more important
than items or small details,
and it's always purifying,
and I love the rugged environment
that brings out the essential things
and that's that. Aki's point of view.
A visual point of view.
He sees well!
The purity is what I love.
An interesting picture, what about it?
Malevich's Black Square.
What about the other side..?
Now we are entering family history.
Well, first we were oppressed
by communism and capitalism,
now just capitalism,
nothing's changed except
Schumacher drove into a ditch.
And he got pushed by Fisichella
instead of it being his own fault.
Can movies still today somehow help
in this kind of rebellion?
Jean Renoir tried to prevent World War II
with The Grand Illusion but had to admit that
cinema lacks the power to stop wars,
because there naturally was precisely one reason
behind WWII, and that is money,
about which Bresson made an excellent film.
The war can only be prevented by...
...everybody raising their
children in the same spirit,
refusing to accept injustice,
however small.
If you accept small injustice,
you'll begin to overlook larger injustice,
and it all ends in a catastrophe.
So you think a righteous society
is no illusion even today?
It is feasible but
can't be populated with humans.
Maybe ants could do it, although they eat...
...eat half of each other, but...
...but I don't think humanity could do it.
The mankind wouldn't have survived without
the thug-like hunting instinct it had.
Not depending on the sum?
Half. For that you may continue living here.
If we get nothing?
There's a risk involved in every business.
When are the passports finished?
In the morning. I'll begin at once.
All right.
Half. We need the car in the morning.
Give me the gun.
Let's go.
I wasn't born poor,
there was always food on the table.
Not rich either,
there was food on the
table and books in the shelf.
In spite of that I worked all my youth,
for example as a warehouse man in this harbour,
and then for a while as a...
warmer in a hospital and at a paper mill and...
as a warehouse man here
and I washed dishes in Stockholm and so on.
40 professions.
Three years at a time.
I stayed as long as I was interested
and the reason I did it
was to be able to afford bread.
Nothing else.
Survival.
I got to know so many types of human that
that they lasted until the end of 80s.
the ones I met during the 15 years.
Now that I have made movies for 22 years
I meet practically no one,
so I've lost touch with reality,
which for a film director
is more serious than death.
To lose ones touch.
I've never had a Lubitsch-touch
but a touch of reality.
There was a part in prison in Ariel.
Have you ever been in prison?
No, but I regretted it during shooting.
It would have helped?
It would've helped nothing
because it can not be understood.
I spent my youth in jail,
got into conflict with the authorities.
I was in jail every other night,
but prison is different.
Which movies have you shot in this harbour?
At least...
Let's go from top to bottom... Tatiana,
Ariel,
Drifting Clouds,
maybe Hamlet.
I can't really remember because
I was so industrious in my youth.
We want to treat tea since it's
our last evening together.
You've been very kind, comrades.
You've been nice.
This has cemented the fellowship
between our two nations.
To your health!
Now I would like to take
a souvenir picture of you.
We're closing.
Hit the road, hicks.
Can it, creampuff,
or I'll clobber you.
Let's go, you dopes,
the boat's leaving!
How do we get there?
Follow those tracks.
Good-bye, comrades,
and thank you for everything!
Danke.
You ever been abroad, Valto?
Nope
Any cash? My wallet's a ruin.
Some. How come?
The first 7 movies I made
with the basis that the
protagonists were escaping...
from Finland.
And... then I escaped myself and...
gained many years.
And after I escaped my
protagonists stayed in Finland.
There's entwined so much
of my personal experience of this country
that you can't
love your fatherland
more than by leaving it.
I'm not very keen on cinema.
Life is very interesting,
I'd find it beautiful if
people treated each other better.
Probably fish are fighting it out in the water,
eating each other.
But that's battle for survival,
it's another thing
but people have literature, fish don't.
People should know better,
let's create a system where
people don't eat each other.
I haven't seen a sign of it.
But nature is beautiful.
And, this babbling
about how mankind should be better,
I'm coming to the conclusion that
humanity must exit.
It disrupts nature's development.
And it will exit.
But let's give
the already born a chance to live their lives,
then let's go.
Like I do now.
My friend,
although I ask you like this,
you know
hurrying is unnecessary.
Nights and days,
although I long to you
you still mustn't hurry.
Don't hurry,
for you know,
it would only bring pain,
us together.
Don't hurry,
to me,
the shadows would only
cover you
for your next movie?
Yes, I have...
I started it this morning
and just finished it.
I was just going to rewrite it,
before you came in unexpectedly
and without knocking.
It is based on Knut Hamsun's
novel Dreamers
The international title
is something else.
That edition is so old
it doesn't have the original title.
What kind of a story is it?
I only have the screenplay.
I need to contact Hamsun's heirs to find
out if I'm allowed to shoot it or not.
It's a romantic melodrama,
Realistic in style, I guess
Of course it's a bit hard to tel
as I haven't had the time to read it,
seeing as you barged in through the window
I tried to concentrate on my work...
It's very seldom I get a chance.
So it was created in a matter of hours?
Exactly...
I'm such an impulsive person...
But... I've kept Hamsun
in my mind all these years,
because he is
one of my favourite writers,
and when you get to be my age,
your own ideas start to run out
or they feel too unimportant,
and then it's time to move on
to the classics of world history...
...world literature
Will there be much talking in this film?
Yeah, it's gonna be
full of revolver dialogue.
Will it be in colour or black and white?
It depends on which film stock
is cheaper when we start shooting.
The prices vary and lately
black and white has been more expensive.
When you produce your own movies,
you need to consider trivial-sounding
details such as this one.
They might seem like artistic
choices to the eyes of critics
or a possible audience,
but are determined by one choice
being cheaper by 20 pennies/metre.
That's what we go by.
Which is more important for
you? The story or the characters?
I must admit that I just
lied to you a little bit.
The ideas are born in
colour or black and white,
I go by the first notion
I have on the subject,
and that is either in
colour or in black and white.
The problem is that
black-and-white film
can't be developed outside
of Finland nowadays.
There are two or three guys
in Finland who can do it,
and they'll only do it on gunpoint.
Looking at a movie from the 10s
or 20s you and only cry enviously
looking at the wonderful
stuff they could do then.
But, everything being black
and white they could do the job.
Now that everything's in colour,
the craft of doing black and white
has vanished almost completely.
What kind of a person picks up
pieces of string on the streets,
can't part with anything,
keeps hats and stuff his dead friends
once wore in one of their roles?
What's the use of an old shower handle?
I can understand the squeezers.
This is too small.
You can use it to permanently
terminate your head.
A stamp from the previous millennium.
Electric wires with their heads cut off.
A current that doesn't flow.
Goethe on his death bed: "More light!"
Why all this junk?
Chainsaws... They belong in Texas.
Hats from movies.
French Connection.
An English tourist.
Eddie Constantine.
All this... this junk.
Apparently I can't stand
the warmth of people and
take refuge here,
amidst all these items.
Do you smoke?
Maybe it's because I agree with
Ingmar Bergman's statement that...
An ant society is
waiting around the corner,
other than that I'm a
regular social democrat,
holding on to these
reminiscences of lost worlds
I found this piece in the next room.
What about it?
Has it been used somewhere?
My wife
- Paula Oinonen, a professional painter -
painted that poster for the
movie Hamlet Liikemaailmassa,
Hamlet Goes Business in English,
Hamlet Boulot Business in Albanian.
And... ever since that poster was made
it's been hanging on the
wall of my cutting room.
Because... any humane creature
is moved by emotional despair.
Not me, though.
What's its name? - Baudelaire.
I'm out of coffee -
but I'll make some soup.
May I kiss your hand?
You are fast...
The sooner
to reach the goal.
Do you make many changes to your movies in post-production?
Post-production is when you eliminate the mistakes made while shooting.
There are film-makers who...
shoot 10 miles of junk and count on the editor to make it all right.
Me, being a producer too I do the editing myself
and I don't shoot much useless stuff since I can't afford it.
As I know I'll have to do the editing myself,
the less useless stuff I have the better.
The more the state saves its money, and me, and... YLE.
So... there's no sense in shooting limitlessly and...
thinking something will come out of it.
If you don't know what you want when shooting, find a new job.
How much?
-All.
74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 and 8000. Suit yourself.
Thank you.
The night arrives slowly, gushing in.
The windows light up.
Won't stay alone,
all along to the dark,
the lights chase the shadows away...
Just throw in the garlic.
Thanks.
Plastique?
Plastique, oui.
Check that out!
I've seen many bar desks in my life,
this is the one dearest to me.
It's been God knows where,
I've used it in four or five movies myself,
but now I've decided that its home is...
here in this hotel and it's getting so old that...
it need not move anymore.
One scene had to do with those buttons in the front.
I thought I'd do my Hitchcock-imitation here, but I don't think it'd work.
I was trying to come up...
with something to do for the repairmen in Drifting Clouds.
The only idea I got was
about that missing button in the front.
I told them to go buy Sisu-candies from a nearby kiosk.
sisu (=guts) of course signifies how Finland beat Russia in World War II.
Officially lost, practically won.
"Go buy Sisu-pastilles from the kiosk, then we've got pins...
We'll come up with something."
You can stick a pin in your own finger if you're careless.
Then I developed a scene where they put this...
The job is done, even if the hue is wrong.
But at this stage I got to thinking it's high time...
- Here I return to my objectophilia -
it's high time for that bar desk to find its home
- Now it has found one.
No one answers the phone, but it's found a home
and besides that's wrong hue,
but it has travelled through so many movies,
and before I got her who knows where she's been.
Getting trampled on by golfers.
Telephone!
Do you keep all the bar desks from your movies?
Hotel Oiva, Kaurism?ki.
Yes I do.
Always?
One can barely maintain oneself
and even that's difficult.
Sisu-candy helps with that,
it is a traditional Finnish product,
although the factory has been sold to the Dutch.
There's nothing truly Finnish left anymore.
Not even sisu?
Sisu signifies...
man's refusal to die.
The idea behind eating Sisu is
refusing to die while being prepared for it.
Do you think your movies provide sisu to others?
If God exists,
one day I will pray to him for one chance.
One chance to make one decent film.
I'm sure none of what I've done is that.
I guess the whole lot is a heap of junk.
But it'll be fun to be buried
knowing I've done my best.
Your movies display a particular fondness...
towards the margins of Europe,
the whole Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses-movie...
moves along Europe's fringes.
Ariel begins in Lapland.
How was this love of Europe born?
And what does it mean?
It's born like a cough,
you smoke too much and see too much and then...
If I knew a Borderless Europe-program,
I'd donate four Marks to it
to promote leisure activities, but...
It must be admitted that...
...the so called western world
is knowingly and willingly...
...starving people to death because...
..the level of our welfare is such that...
...one half must die.
What do you say to that?
I'll just say that...
...for example Tatiana...
...looks like it's been put together
left-handed in the woods.
Yet it shows more understanding...
of Europe than pretty much any other film.
...There's a kind of a real Europe in it and
you've been searching for it
and you have instinctively and...
wholeheartedly sought sense in being European.
Europe's borders are around Ural
if you roughly consider
the faces of peoples and stuff
which is ridiculous because we have
so to say a common world and goddammit if...
Isn't it pathetic, that
we're supposed to have a common world,
why isn't it a common world then,
but it doesn't seem to be
with one half starving to death
and the other prospering and
have a nice trip to Hell those who prosper but
geographically and genetically Europe
ends around Ural,
and in the west
it doesn't thank God reach America...
If I was for example a Tatar or a Kurd,
I'd know a whole lot about
customs I'd been raised with,
and a child sees the world
from the environment it is born to.
The first tree I saw was a birch,
not a stone pine or a spruce,
therefore I'm just on my way somewhere.
Towards my grave...
Well, being in Europe...
There's a guy who could answer.
What's Europe?
Jimi Hendrix?
Wine?
Of course.
Ice?
- Yes.
One or two?
-Two.
Ice cubes are more slippery than they used to be.
It's interesting that your movies are
appreciated so strongly all around Europe:
in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal,
and particularly because of
things that are almost hidden
from these viewers.
To us Finns they contain a whole lot of signs,
all kinds of secret passwords
from our childhood and adolescence.
They've never been told to anyone,
they are secret.
And that's why
the idea of a common Europe
regarding movies is born dead
and the idea of a movie
is nowadays born in Hollywood,
so it is dead, as well.
There's no difference between watching
a movie by Bu?uel or Robert Parrish
or Youssef Chahine or Kurosawa from the 50s.
They're all a part of the same international...
it doesn't matter,
a little ball, it's all the same story.
People trying to survive in the world
they are born into and
there's , if I may curse,
not a fox-tail's difference
where they are born because
the battle for survival is the same.
And movies are usually about it being cold,
let's start a fire and warm up and
make clothes, and then you get hungry and eat.
And that's it and when cinema is really frustrated
until it gets sick and mangy,
Hollywood is born where
they vomit trifling stories.
You haven't trodden on
- except for one filming trip -
on US territory
It's because Hollywood is a symbol to you.
I have even shot pictures on US ground,
but I haven't taken and
won't take a step in California,
cross my heart.
But that doesn't mean that
there haven't been people in
California and Hollywood,
whose work you appreciate.
For me, as a viewer,
the lack of dialogue in your movies
has been a very emotional experience.
It has carried a message, a secret message.
There was no talking in Juha,
because it's a silent film,
the last one of the century.
In The Match Factory Girl,
possibly your finest work,
barely 20 words are spoken in
the entire duration of the movie.
There's something...
I can't talk if you don't let me
Let me talk, yes
I can't talk, in that way I'm an autistic child,
you don't let me speak and
therefore autistic children don't speak.
Carry on.
I can't continue because
it's in my principles that
even an autistic child must be
able to speak and thus it's your turn.
We autistic children...
autism is a thing not to be discussed here
but according to my mothers testimony
I didn't talk anything during my first five years
except a language of my own
that no one understood.
In that sense...
...maybe...
making pictures might be closer to my heart but...
I understand very well a child who refuses to talk
because if a child watches
or hears,
the first thing it tells is
to run away as fast as you can
But how have you come to the conviction that...
almost-silence is the only possible state
I'm a Bresson-fan.
Bresson was a wise man
in that he never uttered a word.
You can't explain things,
you can't explain movies.
They are made well or badly or
horribly or mediocrely or brilliantly,
and it's useless to explain them.
Sometimes you fail and then
you get beaten up and you die and
kill yourself or something
but there's no explaining that
this went so-and-so but really
I'm a very talented guy etc.
You don't say that in conjunction with cinema.
There's so many people at work here,
succeed or commit suicide.
But to me personally cinema is nothing.
Fuck, personally,
I don't appear personally in this world.
Cinema is such that
I refuse to back down on
that cinema is a form of art.
It's a form of art.
Ladies and gentlemen,
if I had a heart, I'd give my heartfelt thanks
to Perttu Gustafsson, who has
carried us through many years.
Because Sakari is famous for his bad memory,
he probably can't remember the
lyrics to the most beautiful Finnish tango,
but Perttu'll do a bit of the start for him.
Every day, I go from morning to evening,
like waiting for a miracle,
and at the edge of the clouds I see my happiness,
get it afresh
Every day, I go from morning to evening,
like waiting for a miracle,
and at the edge of the clouds I see my happiness,
get it afresh.
Beneath the triumphal arch of love
I tried to stay long with you
my darling, my friend.
That's why I'm sorrowful,
when thinking about you,
you took so much beauty along with you.
That's why I'm sorrowful,
when tomorrow
could be so different for me.
They parade in front of me in dream images,
the moments we once spent together.
That's why I'm sorrowful
when I think of you,
you took so much beauty with you.
Whore!
Take it back.
How did you prepare for this role?
Did you visit a factory to see how they work?
Yes we started by working in a factory,
I actually worked at a conveyor belt,
making the matches.
For how long?
Two days.
Before the filming?
No, during it.
I learned each stage and then we shot it.
Did you practice a lot before filming?
- Not one bit.
Aki hates rehearsing.
I sometimes go through dialogue with
someone at a corner to learn it by heart,
and Aki always rushes from somewhere:
"Are you rehearsing? Stop it immediately!"
Watching Kaurism?ki films
one often gets the feeling -
- that women survive better in life.
How do you feel?
Sure, women do better in them, but I don't know...
Is it in Finland...
- Maybe it is so.
According to statistics men in Finland
die far younger than women.
There's something...
I don't know, this could be foolish.
I regret to tell you
that Schumacher and Fisichella
have spun off in the first curve,
while H?kkinen has taken the lead.
Really? Now we shouldn't be happy. Wow!
That was good news.
Characters speak oddly in Kaurism?ki's movies,
do you agree that an Aki-speak exists?
Yes, and I like it.
Actually...
I think Aki-speak is
such that it has humour and...
vocabulary that had disappeared from common use
before Aki began making movies.
Yep, I fell in love with
Aki-speak in the first film,
because it was Hamlet, and it had no script.
The first line, from Hamlet's mother Gertrude,
that I had to memorize,
contained such lovely words
and for example a description of love...
the first line,
where the mother tells about the man's love,
that "he liked me like old car tyres",
and it was humour to die by,
I thought it was lovely...
He simplifies everything funnily,
disposes of everything unessential in the table,
there's not much more than a phone,
if even that.
It's a kind of a Hopperian world,
and the colours and the
depth and forms are more important
than items or small details,
and it's always purifying,
and I love the rugged environment
that brings out the essential things
and that's that. Aki's point of view.
A visual point of view.
He sees well!
The purity is what I love.
An interesting picture, what about it?
Malevich's Black Square.
What about the other side..?
Now we are entering family history.
Well, first we were oppressed
by communism and capitalism,
now just capitalism,
nothing's changed except
Schumacher drove into a ditch.
And he got pushed by Fisichella
instead of it being his own fault.
Can movies still today somehow help
in this kind of rebellion?
Jean Renoir tried to prevent World War II
with The Grand Illusion but had to admit that
cinema lacks the power to stop wars,
because there naturally was precisely one reason
behind WWII, and that is money,
about which Bresson made an excellent film.
The war can only be prevented by...
...everybody raising their
children in the same spirit,
refusing to accept injustice,
however small.
If you accept small injustice,
you'll begin to overlook larger injustice,
and it all ends in a catastrophe.
So you think a righteous society
is no illusion even today?
It is feasible but
can't be populated with humans.
Maybe ants could do it, although they eat...
...eat half of each other, but...
...but I don't think humanity could do it.
The mankind wouldn't have survived without
the thug-like hunting instinct it had.
Not depending on the sum?
Half. For that you may continue living here.
If we get nothing?
There's a risk involved in every business.
When are the passports finished?
In the morning. I'll begin at once.
All right.
Half. We need the car in the morning.
Give me the gun.
Let's go.
I wasn't born poor,
there was always food on the table.
Not rich either,
there was food on the
table and books in the shelf.
In spite of that I worked all my youth,
for example as a warehouse man in this harbour,
and then for a while as a...
warmer in a hospital and at a paper mill and...
as a warehouse man here
and I washed dishes in Stockholm and so on.
40 professions.
Three years at a time.
I stayed as long as I was interested
and the reason I did it
was to be able to afford bread.
Nothing else.
Survival.
I got to know so many types of human that
that they lasted until the end of 80s.
the ones I met during the 15 years.
Now that I have made movies for 22 years
I meet practically no one,
so I've lost touch with reality,
which for a film director
is more serious than death.
To lose ones touch.
I've never had a Lubitsch-touch
but a touch of reality.
There was a part in prison in Ariel.
Have you ever been in prison?
No, but I regretted it during shooting.
It would have helped?
It would've helped nothing
because it can not be understood.
I spent my youth in jail,
got into conflict with the authorities.
I was in jail every other night,
but prison is different.
Which movies have you shot in this harbour?
At least...
Let's go from top to bottom... Tatiana,
Ariel,
Drifting Clouds,
maybe Hamlet.
I can't really remember because
I was so industrious in my youth.
We want to treat tea since it's
our last evening together.
You've been very kind, comrades.
You've been nice.
This has cemented the fellowship
between our two nations.
To your health!
Now I would like to take
a souvenir picture of you.
We're closing.
Hit the road, hicks.
Can it, creampuff,
or I'll clobber you.
Let's go, you dopes,
the boat's leaving!
How do we get there?
Follow those tracks.
Good-bye, comrades,
and thank you for everything!
Danke.
You ever been abroad, Valto?
Nope
Any cash? My wallet's a ruin.
Some. How come?
The first 7 movies I made
with the basis that the
protagonists were escaping...
from Finland.
And... then I escaped myself and...
gained many years.
And after I escaped my
protagonists stayed in Finland.
There's entwined so much
of my personal experience of this country
that you can't
love your fatherland
more than by leaving it.
I'm not very keen on cinema.
Life is very interesting,
I'd find it beautiful if
people treated each other better.
Probably fish are fighting it out in the water,
eating each other.
But that's battle for survival,
it's another thing
but people have literature, fish don't.
People should know better,
let's create a system where
people don't eat each other.
I haven't seen a sign of it.
But nature is beautiful.
And, this babbling
about how mankind should be better,
I'm coming to the conclusion that
humanity must exit.
It disrupts nature's development.
And it will exit.
But let's give
the already born a chance to live their lives,
then let's go.
Like I do now.
My friend,
although I ask you like this,
you know
hurrying is unnecessary.
Nights and days,
although I long to you
you still mustn't hurry.
Don't hurry,
for you know,
it would only bring pain,
us together.
Don't hurry,
to me,
the shadows would only
cover you