Wuolijoki, who works between New York and Helsinki developed the idea for Christmas Story with experienced scriptwriter Marko Leino (Matti: Hell is for Heroes) and Aku Louhimies (Frozen City). He spoke exclusively to Nordisk Film & TV Fond.
Tell us about your own film story and Snapper Films...
I graduated from the film University of Helsinki in 1995. I was working in Finland but directed my first short film Paulie in New York in 1996. Snapper Films (set up in 1998) invested and formed a partnership with a small US company in 1999, Open City Films. We produced the film Three Seasons which won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance. That was roughly the time when I moved to the US. So we have Snapper Films in Finland and Snapper Films LLC in New York. I own the company with another private investor. In Finland, it's quite unique to have a company like ours with strong contacts in New York.
How do you use exploit your US/Finnish contacts?
For everything we do, we try to combine the US and Finnish film worlds in some way. We're looking at Scandinavian films with Sandrew Metronome (with whom we have an output deal), and lower budget English language films (under €5m). Before Christmas Story, we did Gourmet Club for television which won many awards. The original script came from the US, and we adapted it with Finnish writers. The executive producer on the TV film was Ben Barenholtz (producer of the Coen brothers' Barton Fink) and one of the actors Michael Badalucco. Our asset is that we can access the Finnish Film Foundation (FFF) with certain projects, even if they are not 100% in the Finnish language. We can use a Finnish composer, sound designer on a US independent project and bring it to the FFF.
Tell us about Christmas Story. The original idea was developed by Marko Leino with Aku Louhimies and you...
That's correct. We had the idea of Santa's childhood. We were sure there had already been stories about that with prequels made in Hollywood. But after we did a lot of research, we realised that there hadn't been any other film about Santa's childhood. Of course, Christmas is celebrated differently in each country, but we wanted to make it a Scandinavian story based in Finland. We didn't want to make a Hollywood type of Christmas holiday comedy with Tim Allen. These films are not for Scandinavian audiences. We wanted to promote the Christmas values, with a classic story. We were inspired by Astrid Lindgren's children stories. Marko did the writing and as I directed the film, I wrote the last draft with him. Aku was briefly there at the beginning of the process.
How did you choose the cast?
The casting of the children was very difficult. We started that September 2005. Very early on, I had the lead actor: Hannu-Pekka Björkman (For the Living and the Dead) who had worked with me on Gourmet Club before. He helped me a lot to choose the kids. He plays an adult Santa. We basically have three actors playing Santa at 10, at 13 and then as an adult. One of the big things we wanted to achieve was to make the film look grand. We needed money to bring in that kind of fantasy look.
You used a lot of special effects?
The film is not a special effects-driven film, but there are over 100 special effects shots, starting from small things like creating stars in the sky etc.
This is your first feature film. How was it to work on such a major project?
It was quite wacky to direct and produce. But this was a long process which was two years in the making. We started shooting in September 2006 in Lapland and did the principal photography between mid-January to mid-March 2007. In total, it was 40 shooting days. We had to build Santa's village 1,000 kilometres away from Helsinki, in Lapland. We were shooting in -46?! There is a saying which is that if you have animals, or children, or crazy weather conditions on a film, you're in for big problems, and we had the three things combined!
Did you keep the set for future Santa's home visits?
Santa's house was built on top if the mountain Levi in Lapland. Levi skiing resort, one of the corporate sponsors of the film said: Let's keep it! It's so great! So it is still there for children from around the world.
How did you finance the film?
We had financial support from the FFF, TV pre-sales to MTV3 Finland and Canal +, Sandrew Metronome for Scandinavia and the MEDIA Programme. Sandrew Metronome Finland is releasing the film this Friday (November 16) and Sandrew's other Nordic branches will probably wait for a dubbed version and release it at Christmas 2008. We just closed a deal with the Canadian sales company Delphis Films specialised in family films. For them, we will do an English language dubbing in 2008.
The amount of corporate funding on the film was exceptionally high, covering €1m of the €2.5m film...
Yes, that's correct. The FFF support per film is capped at €700,000 maximum. That's okay for a small film, but for a film like Christmas Story, we had to find more money from somewhere else. We were still very careful in choosing our partners because as it is a family film, we never contacted alcohol brands etc. The money we received was real production money, but it took two years to put the financing together. To convince the various corporations, our idea was to say that Santa Claus is from Finland (the Swedes will disagree...). That's been a key for a lot of our corporate deals. So with around 70 corporations (including Finnair, The Finnish Tourist Board, Levi skiing resort, the city of Turku), we set up the Santa Claus Foundation and created a joint brand: Santa Claus Land Finland. Finnair for instance will use it on its planes.
But none of those corporate financiers had any influence on the script, and there is no production placement, no logos in the film. We were still able to raise over €1m. We tried to create something that would truly affect their business.
What's the plan for the Finnish release?
We are going out with 60 prints which is pretty good for Finland. Because MTV3 is one of our financiers, we have a very big TV campaign the size of a Harry Potter film. So far, it's the biggest Finnish film release of the year.
Other projects in development?
Yes, we're developing Hella W. Hella Wuolijoki was a very famous writer, business woman and CEO of YLE (Finnish public broadcaster). It is a big period piece set in the war time from 1932 to 1947. There have been many biographies about important Finnish men, but never about important Finnish women. Her plays have been performed the most after Shakespeare.
The pre-production is very heavy. Hella is the typical product where I hope the FFF will be able to put more money on the table. I have a deal with Sandrew Metronome, and YLE would be the natural TV co-financier, but it's still an expensive project of around €3m. We also have a lighter comedy in development: Flight Attendant Academy.