Table of Contents
Read Part I here.
After the Finnish Film Affair (FFA) showcase awards ceremony was over, everyone involved gave a collective exhale. The week-long build-up was over, but even so, filmmakers and delegates hung around for the final day of workshops, screenings and a closing reception.
Among all the action, I stepped out for a break with the team of An Amateur consisting of director Olli Salmi and starring actor Samppa Batal. An Amateur is Finnish filmmaker Salmi’s break into feature directing, and is about a seasoned Finnish filmmaker making a feature film called An Amateur. Are you confused? Good. For their project, the normal conventions of reality that we tend to take for granted are intentionally fractured in a delightful way, evoking similar sensations of comical meta-absurdity as Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show.
For anyone wondering what creative pitching looks like, An Amateur is a stellar example. Their three-minute block opened with a scene from the feature where lead actor Samppa Batal (whose character is also named Samppa Batal) argues with his girlfriend (or is it his story-within-a-story girlfriend?) about making his movie. As the clip ended, Batal walked out onto the F-Weird stage, as though his character were emerging from the story. He then continued right into his pitch as Salmi filmed the whole thing, including myself in the audience. Maybe the footage will go in the movie, or maybe the whole act was just a demonstration. Either way, it begs the question: Am I in a movie?
We had planned to have our interview in the beautiful, nationally acclaimed Helsinki Music Centre but were derailed by an unexpected baby convention happening at the same time. I mean no hyperbole when I say the hall was full of infants, in and out of strollers, looking around as though we were the oddballs. On that surreal note, we found a quieter place to sit and talk about carefully translating the innate humor of real life events into art and developing their exciting F-Weird project.
What interests me in a project, above all else, is the writing, and I thought the writing of your synopsis itself was really well done, so that’s what initially peaked my interest in your project.
Samppa: Thank you to our producer Tuomas Kohtamäki – he’s really persistent with us to do enough work for the synopsis, to get the best out of us. We’ve had experiences for other projects where we thought that our synopsis was good and informative, but still without giving any spoilers, and then no one had any clue what we’re talking about.
Olli: Yeah, and this is a meta project so it needs to be very clear to the audience – to the pitch audience even – because they don't see the film itself so it has to explain itself in every sentence.
The synopsis ends with the line “He puts his personal life on the line while desperately trying to prove it to be a film of fiction.” Are you also trying desperately to prove that this story is fiction?
O: That's true, definitely. The movie is all about everybody in the film thinking that he is doing a documentary about himself, but he knows he’s doing a fictional film. So Samppa in the film is making the film that we are watching–
S: –Without giving any spoilers. That's where the meta comes along. There is this conversation of Are we watching the film that he made already, or is it in the making or what is going on?
O: But at the same time, it has to be very clear that everybody knows that they are watching a film. And that's the thing, people are watching films all the time but when you ask them, as a viewer how do you like the film? People answer, I don’t know anything about films. But yes, you do, you are watching films all the time, TV series, everything.
S: We learn how to watch them, we learn what to expect.
Like how you can feel subconsciously when the 1st act starts and when the 2nd act starts.
O: Exactly. And when we have learned how to watch them, then I think that everybody has some kind of language of film in their head.
S: For example, hero’s journey is a thing that is used in every film. And if you ask an ordinary person if they know about the hero's journey they will answer no, but inside they actually do know. They are waiting for it to happen without recognizing it.
O: So that makes this movie very watchable in that sense at least it follows the normal narration of the hero's journey, but the whole time it brings into deeper and deeper levels of watching film.
You are utilizing a traditional storytelling framework while also making something that is extremely untraditional, so it's a nice balance. And perfect for the F-Weird category. How do you feel about it now having gone through the process already?
O: Very, very happy about it. It went as good as it was supposed to go. We were really focusing on rehearsing it beforehand so I knew that Samppa would nail it, and he did.
S: There were quite a lot of sentences I needed to say in a very short time and that was a challenge. There were 3 minutes up on stage but from that 3 minutes we used 1 minute and 40 seconds for a clip that we showed before, so we had 1 minute and 20 seconds when there was enough stuff that I could have used 5 minutes to say.
O: But that's the thing, because I think as filmmakers we don't have to be perfect pitchers, so how can we make it as good as possible is to make it a scene. I was trying to approach it as if I’m directing a scene that he’s acting in.
S: He filmed the pitch from the stage.
O: We are using it as part of the film. It was a part of the pitch that we are doing the movie right here, right now.
I love that! Do you feel like the lines are blurred between your life and the movie?
O: That's a very good question because my girlfriend is asking me that, like are you writing about our life? And then at the same time I’m telling her stuff as a joke, like these people who are walking around us are just extras and we are just using it for the film.
It's meta but it's also a satire, because it has something to say about things that are weird around us. We really feel like we are living in a film all the time, trying to characterize other people or understand their motives, like a character in a film.
And you understand that this scene is going in the film
Yup, there’s a camera up there. And the baby convention was totally planned, just a bunch of hired baby extras.
O: Actually that's good material for the film, a baby convention and an interview. That's a funny thing that nobody would believe if it happened in the film. The reality is usually more funny than the films that we come up with.
Well I’m sold. I hope I get to see it. Do you feel like getting into FFA will have helped your project significantly?
O: For us it's very exciting. I think that everybody who was chosen is excited for the possibility to be present and bring the films that they are developing. It’s a long run, so whatever this event brings, it might not be seen in a few days or weeks or even months. It might be a few years before we see how it affected us– somebody realizing that we were the two guys here pitching the project that lit something in their heart.
S: Yeah, what he said. It’s a great honor to be part of FFA, it’s really comforting to meet other fellow filmmakers here. I think that's one of the main ways to keep the industry alive, not just making films in our own corners.
