Left Field Cinema

The following is an interview conducted by email on the 16th of April 2009 between Mike Dawson and Veiko Ounpuu, a thirty-seven year old Estonian national, winner of the Venice Horizon award for his feature film debut Autumn Ball which is currently touring festivals and has limited DVD release in selected countries. He also directed the short film Empty and a new feature film The Temptation of St. Tony.

Mike Dawson: Could you give us some more details of your background, did you always want to go into film directing or did you come to the industry in some other way?

Veiko Ounpuu: I studied painting. Then, while being almost a third time university drop-out and completely broke, I begged my friend Rain Tolk (who was and still is one of the owners of Kuukulgur Film) to let me make some TV commercials. I had “learned the ropes” while working in an advertising agency in the 1990’s. That’s how it got started. Plus I remember watching Spielberg’s Indiana Jones sometime in my late teens and thinking: “Shit, I can do better than this!”

MD: I’ve seen five Estonian films, but so far the only one to break into the international market is The Class (Klass), which has just been released on DVD in the UK. Do you think it’s harder for films from smaller countries to break into the international market?

VO: Autumn Ball has been released on DVD in Portugal and in Italy and might released in Spain and in UK in the near future. But of course it is hard to get the film out if it is not in English and without any stars. And it gets even harder as art-house cinema is losing ground fast to the more commercial film. This has been going on for a long time and pretty soon there will not be a single art house cinema left in Europe. You would only have your neighborhood multiplex with the easy fix ready for all the lame addicts of Hollywood junk. There might be hope for the rest of us in the Internet and in video on demand. Of course the cinema is the real place to watch a film but what can you do? Small underground film clubs have began to emerge to fill the void, the only bad thing being that the filmmaker ends up with nothing. Again.

MD: How do you feel about Estonian cinema in general? Have things improved or worsened in recent years?

VO: They’ve improved for me. In general the situation is bleak, as there is not nearly enough money for the real industry to emerge.

MD: What kinds of hardships have you come-up against whilst trying to secure international distribution for Autumn Ball?

VO: This is my producer Katrin Kissa’s area of expertise. I’m trying to keep at a safe distance from the business side of things. I hate commerce. I really do hate it in the biblical sense of the word.

MD: I noticed in Autumn Ball, a reference to Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, when one character deconstructs his partner in the same way as the Pastor Tomas deconstructs the schoolteacher in Bergman’s film. In your film the woman defends herself and mocks her husband saying he sounds like a character from a Bergman film. Was this a positive or negative reference to the Swedish director? Are you a fan of Bergman?

VO: That’s a sharp eye you’ve got there, Mike! I love Bergman, especially his 60’s films. I only added the comment in the dialogue when I discovered during the writing of the scene that I was ripping him off.

MD: Between your film Empty (Tuhirand) and Autumn Ball you’ve reused a number of key cast members. Do you prefer to work with the same actors? What sort of arrangement do you have with your actors?

VO: They’re mostly my friends from Von Krahl (an avant-guard theatre in Tallinn). To my mind the best theatre in town. As I only work with the people who are inspired by my material, it is great to use them because they look at things very much like I do. Making a film is always a collective thing. And I love actors in general, I like them as people, I like the emotional risks they take, the way they almost wear themselves down with their art. I’m proud to work with them.

MD: Who do you idolise in cinema? Which filmmakers inspired you to make films?

VO: Antonioni, Bergman, Bresson, Bunuel, Cassavetes, Cocteau, Dreyer, DeSica, Fassbinder, Fellini, Herzog, Jansco, Jarmusch, Kaurismäki, Lynch, Mizoguchi, Murnau, Ozu, Pasolini, Tarr, Tarkovsky, Vigo, to name just a few in an alphabetical order...

As the film thing is new to me I’m still learning... digging deeper. I like the artists like Cocteau or Vigo and then I like great moralists like Bresson or Tarkovsky. I like it when some films are going crazy creating some of the most fantastic illusions and then I like it when some films are sobering up to grasp reality even more intensely. And of course it is always good if a film is really talking about something of value. Not of some sociological issue as it is so often the case nowadays but of how to stay a human being in this fucked up madhouse of ours. I love old films a lot, it is so great to look at a work of art from a safe distance of couple of decades and realize that it still has everything you need.

With contemporary directors it is hard to say – there are so many shit films around that it is really hard to stay interested. Haneke of course is great and Mr. Ulrich Seidl positively blew my brain out with his latest film (Import/Export) I was so ashamed of my feeble attempt at great cinema after seeing his film. Roy Anderson is good. So is Alex Van Warmerdam. Of course Kaurismäki, Jarmusch, Lynch and Herzog have not yet died, or Bela Tarr... A Philippino guy who won last years Orrizonti prize in Venice, Lav Diaz, is great even though his film was over 8 hours long (Death in the Land of the Encantos) and it took some serious strength to endure the whole of it. I want to get more into contemporary avant-guard.

MD: Could you perhaps list a few of your favourite films? (A top ten would be great)

VO: Top ten is an impossibility. I could never do so grave injustice to others by just singling one or two and placing them on top. But then again... There are such films as Bergman’s Persona and Tarkovsky’s Mirror or Andrei Rublev that seem completely in a league of their own. I also like Passion of Anna and Hour of the Wolf by Bergman and basically all Tarkovsky’s films. I like Bresson’s Au Hazard Balthasar. I like most of Kaurismäki’s films. Cassavetes’ Woman under Influence and Love Streams were like revelations to me. Carl Dreyer’s Ordet and Renoir’s La Bete Humaine. Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Viridiana and Simon del Desierto from his Mexican era and almost all his French films. I’m not even talking about his first films, the man was a genius. Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew, Fear Eats the Soul and Chinese Roulette, Werner Herzog’s Strozsek and Even the Dwarves Started Small. What films! Pasolini’s RoGoPag, Medea, The Gospel According to St, Matthew. Antonioni’s 60’s trilogy, especially La Notte, L’Avventura and The Passenger. Man, I could just go on and on... Fellini’s 8 and a half, Satyricon even I Vitteloni. DeSica’s Lardi di Bicicletta. Great great stuff! These things can give you hope, give your life a meaning, it is absolutely fantastic what this kind of cinema can do.

MD: Autumn Ball and Empty seem to have a similar sense of humour to Aku Louhimies’ film Frozen Land (Paha maa). Do Estonians and Finns share a similar sense of humour? Is humour important to include in such down beat films as Frozen Land and Autumn Ball?

VO: I would have compared the Empty more to Aki Kaurismäki... I’ve seen some of Aku Louhimies’ films and sometimes I think he is too sentimental and may be too attached to the bourgeoisie aesthetics. He has had a lot of hard times from his producers though so I can’t be too hard on him. But about the humour – I guess we’re the same nation really, Finns and Estonians, just divided by a sea and with a different history because of that. Estonians are just bitterer (for the obvious reasons). But is humour important? I think humour is inevitable, inescapable, omnipresent and absolute (said with a smile of course).

MD: What’s the most important thing to get right in a film? (Story, characters, etc.) What do you concentrate the most on?

VO: Story is basically a vessel for a melodrama, doesn’t really make my heart beat faster. Plus there are only so many turns a story can take. I’m much more into mood and meaning, and may be also the character. I dream of making a really lucid film with no rigid structure (as David Lynch did in his Inland Empire), something that would really flow from one scene to another, but that of course takes a lot of guts and also some more practice.

MD: What are the most enjoyable / least enjoyable aspects of film making?

VO: Making a film is a lot of headaches; takes a lot and a lot of time and you yourself might change your views on the world and the state of things many times during the whole process... but you can create a world that has an opportunity to stand (at least for couple of hours) as equal to that world we inhabit. I believe that to be of some value.

MD: Could you tell us a little about your latest film The Temptation of St. Tony? (When is it out? What’s it about?)

VO: Allow me to quote the first phrase from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno: “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark”. It’s a film about a guy who is really completely lost in this “forest dark”. The film is probably out this fall. Where and when you might be able to see it is very much an uncertainty.

MD: Finally what advice would you offer aspiring filmmakers?

VO: Stop just talking about it and get with it! Steal a camera, rob a bank, extort the rich, do whatever you need to do, but get it going, start the work. Werner Herzog stole a camera from a film school and read about the technology in an Encyclopedia! And then he went out and made his first film. He was only 17 years old! And watch the old movies. Get in the tradition. Grow the roots in the real culture.

MD: Aitah! Thanks for your time, all the best with your new film.

VO: It was a pleasure.