Juho Kuos­ma­n­en: ​‘Steal from many dif­fer­ent places and you can’t get caught!’

Anti­ti­pa­tion lev­els were high when it came to clap­ping eyes on the sec­ond fea­ture by Finnish direc­tor Juho Kuos­ma­n­en. He had already wowed the audi­ence at Cannes, win­ning the Un Cer­tain Regard Prize in 2016 for his lov­able tale of small­town Finnish box­er – The Hap­pi­est Day in the Life of Olli Mäki. Then came his new one, Com­part­ment No. 6, anoth­er charm­ing com­ic peri­od piece, this time tak­ing us on an epic train jour­ney and chart­ing a rela­tion­ship that blos­soms in a num­ber of strange and endear­ing ways. We spoke to Kuos­ma­n­en when he was in Lon­don in Novem­ber of 2021 to present his new film at the Lon­don Film Festival.

LWLies: Was Com­part­ment No. 6 filmed on a set, or was it an actu­al train? Both even­tu­al­i­ties seem very difficult.

Kuos­ma­n­en: It’s an actu­al train. But film­mak­ing is always dif­fi­cult – you’re always try­ing some­thing that you’re not sure you can achieve. That’s why it’s so inter­est­ing. You can’t and you shouldn’t avoid dif­fi­cul­ty. If you want to make things easy, it means that you don’t care. For me, it’s real­ly impor­tant that it stays inter­est­ing. If I went to a stu­dio I wouldn’t real­ly know what to do, because the stu­dio envi­ron­ment doesn’t give me any inspi­ra­tion. But when I’m on a real loca­tion, I’m much more inspired, full of ener­gy. I’m see­ing things that I can use for the film. That’s why it’s obvi­ous that we want­ed to shoot on a real mov­ing train rather than the stu­dio with a green screen.

You can real­ly tell. It’s one of those things that would have made it a total­ly dif­fer­ent film.

Total­ly. And I would have been a total­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tor. And JP (cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Jani-Pet­teri Pas­si) would have been a total­ly dif­fer­ent cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er. Because it’s based on con­trol­ling things. And this is based on accept­ing real­i­ty and tak­ing what it gives to you. The old woman they vis­it – it’s her own house, we found her when we did the loca­tion scout­ing. It’s so much nicer to go to a loca­tion, do some tun­ing but not real­ly chang­ing any­thing, because the real­i­ty is so much more inter­est­ing than any ideas that I might have. The night scenes are shot in a train hangar, because we had to stop mov­ing. We had smoke and dust and fake snow and water out­side and lights. The prac­ti­cal dif­fi­cul­ties of shoot­ing in a train were the lights, elec­tric­i­ty, record­ing – we had to use hid­den micro­phones because there’s no room for a boom. For me as the direc­tor the biggest chal­lenge was that I couldn’t be next to the cam­era when we were shoot­ing or rehears­ing the scene.

Were you off the train? 

No, I was com­part­ment num­ber sev­en. In num­ber six there was JP, the cam­era assis­tant and the actors. I had to watch on a mon­i­tor, and I real­ly don’t like it because it affects the things that I’m focus­ing on. I’m focus­ing on the sur­face of the image and I start to see these human beings as objects. You’re a bit annoyed and you’re focus­ing on the detail lev­el of things and then you start to direct like, ​‘Could you sit a bit more this way.’ It’s an annoy­ing way to direct, and a real­ly bad way to direct actors.

One thing that’s so great about your two films – Com­part­ment No. 6 and Olli Mäki – is that they are quite idio­syn­crat­ic. They go against the grain of things, includ­ing the way that they’re shot and the pro­duc­tion design.

That is true, because it is some­thing that you can avoid. Some­thing you’re attract­ed to, or that affects your way of see­ing things, of think­ing, and your way of doing your own films. At the same time I feel like I don’t have that strong a style – like some­one who has their way of doing films.

I think two films is not quite enough – you need three to tell.

Yeah, exact­ly. But in this film we had ref­er­ences. Usu­al­ly with cin­e­matog­ra­phers we don’t real­ly have a ref­er­ence. I’m watch­ing more films and I’m tak­ing parts of dif­fer­ent films but we are aware that we shouldn’t do it from the ref­er­ences because then you are copy­ing or deal­ing with some­one else’s style instead of talk­ing about what the film is about.

I hate to ask the ques­tion ​‘Who are your influ­ences?’ because it implies that the film­mak­er has stolen their ideas. But…

Truth is, I think if you steal from many dif­fer­ent places you can’t get caught. I think in the case of this one, it was train films. We didn’t real­ly have any ref­er­ences from train films. Even though I watched a lot of them. But I was watch­ing them for fun, at some point because I want­ed to see when this illu­sion of being in the train, the feel­ing of being inside the train, as a view­er when it hap­pens and when it doesn’t hap­pen and what’s the rea­son. There were ref­er­ences for dif­fer­ent aspects of the film, like Lost in Trans­la­tion was some kind of ref­er­ence with the script writ­ers – we talked about the connection.

What about genre con­ven­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly the clas­sic off-cou­ple screen romance. How did that play into your writing?

One of the biggest chal­lenges of this film was to avoid the expec­ta­tions of a roman­tic love sto­ry. I felt that if that’s the expec­ta­tion from the begin­ning then you don’t see the film. When you are watch­ing a film and wait­ing for some­thing to hap­pen, you’re prob­a­bly going to be star­ing at the wrong point. Even though it’s a roman­tic film and there is love between these char­ac­ters, I want­ed it to be more of a con­nec­tion between two strangers than a romance. So in that sense the rela­tion­ship that they have in Lost In Trans­la­tion is sim­i­lar. I was also inter­est­ed in peo­ple who are from dif­fer­ent places being thrown togeth­er like this. If I had to say three films, Lost in Trans­la­tion, Das Boot, and The Invis­i­ble Life of Eurídice Gus­mão, espe­cial­ly the end­ing. I real­ly love the film, it has a lot of emo­tions, but it doesn’t feel like it’s forc­ing them. I enjoy films that are strong emo­tion­al­ly, but I hate when I feel that they’re forc­ing the emo­tions. You’re just moved by the film even though you didn’t want to be. When you feel the manip­u­la­tion it’s disturbing.

Have you start­ed on any oth­er projects?

Yes I’m try­ing. I already have some projects: one is a small TV series that we did in August so we’re edit­ing it – it’s almost done. There’s eight episodes all togeth­er and they’re ten minute episodes. There’s three direc­tors. Now I’m try­ing to work on a script that’s in devel­op­ment. And I’ve also had my own film fes­ti­val in Sep­tem­ber, so after Cannes I was real­ly freak­ing out…

What’s your festival?

It’s called Kokkolan Kino­juh­lat. After Olli Maki – because I’m from that place as the main char­ac­ters in that –, we had a huge out­door pre­mière in Fin­land, in this place called Kokko­la. After that the city asked if we could sup­port film cul­ture in gen­er­al, because they have a cin­e­ma but it’s just two screen­ing rooms. It’s a nice old fash­ioned cin­e­ma but the pro­gram­ming… You only see the most pop­u­lar films. A film fes­ti­val is some­thing we were dream­ing of, but we nev­er had the time or ener­gy or mon­ey to make it. But when the city of Kokko­la asked what kind of ways are there to sup­port film cul­ture in town we decid­ed to start this film fes­ti­val. This was the fourth year. It’s a nice thing to do with friends, it’s small enough so it’s not tak­ing too much ener­gy and we are focus­ing on one coun­try at the time and we show ret­ro­spec­tives of films. Nordic films, new Euro­pean films as well, but the main pro­gramme is from cer­tain coun­tries every year.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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