The director of 'Sisu' sits down and talks about one-man armies and superheroes.
If you ever somehow happen to stumble onto parts of the internet about nationality jokes, you'll find a surprising amount of Finnish jokes.
The majority of them speak of how taciturn and introverted they are, and how they like to drink. A lot. While we can't speak to his drinking abilities, we can say that director Jalmari Helander is a man of few words. You've got to understand how rare that is for a director.
Generally speaking, directors are often the most verbose of interviewees. They're nowhere near as guarded as actors, and they're very often eager to go into detail about how they made their movies. Jalmari Helander sits in silence at the beginning of our interview behind a huge poster of 'Rambo' in his office. "That film had such a huge impact on me. When I was a kid, when I saw it for the first time, I was basically running in the forest with a knife every day after that," Helander says. I'm hoping he's being deadpan. He probably is. "Well, I'm lucky enough to make my own 'Rambo' movie with 'Sisu'."
When I press him on 'Rambo', he's probably the most animated he's been the entire interview. "Well, the first one is definitely the best movie. But there's a lot of good things with the rest of them. We don't talk about 'Last Blood'. It's like something went wrong, for me. But the first one, I really like films that films about like, like basically a dude, you don't want to fight with that you realise in some point, what is this guy capable of doing? Something very cool about that."
Helander is open about the fact that a Finnish movie has almost no Finnish dialogue, and that this was done primarily to secure financing. Yet, it also serves a purpose. "It's more Finnish to do it this way, where there is no dialogue, where they are forced to speak English only once or twice. I really enjoyed the process of writing without dialogue, and then when you're on set, having to explain the ideas without dialogue. It's so satisfying. It forces you to do more cinematic ways of dealing with problems."
On the topic of cinema, and specifically superhero cinema, Helander is just as direct. "I don't like superhero films all that much and all that green screen stuff. I'm almost, like, allergic to green screen," he says, again in a deadpan. Is this because he prefers to shoot in real environments, where the options are limited but more inventive? "In Lapland, it's a really hard place to do anything. But it's so satisfying to be in that open landscape and everything is there for real. It of course helps the process and helps actors and helps everything, like cinematography and everything because you have it all there," Helander explains.
'Sisu' is in Irish cinemas now.