Finnish film production

 

I think that national film production is very important and I have an extremely good reason for that. For example, from an American perspective Finland is a tiny outback in the armpit of Russia. Do you think that the Americans in Hollywood are interested in making a movie which tells about Finnish culture, history or phenomena? I doubt it strongly. If we don’t make movies which tell about things related to our country and culture ourselves, who will then? Besides, who can portray these things better than us?

 

 have noticed that we practically never make pure action films, horror films or thrillers here in Finland and I can’t see why. Perhaps they make such good films in Hollywood and it’s hard to make these kinds of films in Finland so that they would differ from their American counterparts in a good way. Action films are also very expensive and we certainly don’t have tens of millions of dollars to make them. This is one thing where American and Finnish movies differ. Americans spend a lot more money on making films than we do. Even American comedies can have enormous budgets, for example a film named There’s Something About Mary, which you may have seen, It’s just an ordinary comedy, starring Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz, The film quite good, it doesn’t look expensive and hasn’t special effects, but its budget was roughly 23 million dollars! Can anybody even believe it? It takes skill to waste so much money on that kind of a movie. A big budget doesn’t always mean that the movie is good, but it certainly helps to film epic movies successfully, like The Lord of the Rings trilogy (budget $281 000 000, box office $2.92 billion).

 

Finnish film production is strongly based on dramas, comedies and historical movies (often related to war). I have noticed that Finnish dramas quite often have comical elements, even if the film’s theme is serious, like Hellsinki (Rööperi) and the original Vares movies, starring Juha Veijonen. Finns obviously like to laugh. Everyone must have noticed too, how movie makers recycle the actors. Every movie must have Kari Hietalahti acting a more or less simple and hilarious character. I think that this “recycling” has gone too far. They use star actors even in very minor roles. For instance, in Vesa-Matti Loiri’s comeback movie, Tie pohjoiseen, there’s a scene, where Loiri’s character robs a supermarket. And guess what, Krista Kosonen plays the cashier, who is seen in the movie only about five seconds and doesn’t even say a single word! How much did she get paid for that? Finland has plenty of talented and aspiring new actors and actresses. Movie makers should give more responsibility to them. Tie pohjoiseen is still an awesome movie, but that is ridiculous.

 

I think that we are quite good at making movies and our movies are of a quite good quality although the budgets aren’t very big. Finnish movies have won international awards and the rights of some movies have been sold to other countries. A couple of Finnish actors and actresses have even made their way to Hollywood, like Irina Björklund and Samuli Vauramo. And director Renny Harlin has been there for several decades already.

 

In my opinion, Finnish and European movies have a lot in common. Of course British and German movies usually have bigger budgets, but not as big as the American ones, not even close. I think that the box office of a movie is more important to Americans than Europeans. Here in Europe we pay more attention to the storyline of a movie. In America a geek creates as many new action scenes and special effects as possible and another dumbass writes a weak screenplay, where all the effects and scenes can be included. Then they hire a muscular man to handle guns (Stallone, The Big Arnie etc.) and a beautiful woman, who has used more Botox and silicon than water in her whole life to play the leading roles. I’m fed up with action movies so I watch them very seldom these days. I like the Finnish movies, but I don’t know if I prefer them to American ones. Both Americans and Europeans have made fantastic movies.