Author: Timo Vuorensola

Everyone seems to be getting sick on the set now. The other day, Jonathan dropped off for few days, complaining he wasn’t feeling too good, and today Lei and Lotus both said they were feeling a bit off. I’ve had this constant feeling like someone rubbed my throat with a sandpaper every morning, but I put it to the count of the polluted few weeks we’ve had here in Qingdao.

Nevertheless, this kind of vibe affects the set right away. We started to do a big action scene with a lot of wires and stunts, and everything slowed down as it usually does. But by the time it was already way past lunch and we had only shot few b-unit clips I was starting to get worried. But then, my two hours of sleep last night turned against me, and I started to doze on and off at the monitors while the stunts prepped for the shots; I admit getting a fifteen minute sleep there, but that sparked me up. Although everything was dead slow, I tried to give us the last push and we did finish the one shot we wanted to get going, so all that ends well, is well I guess.

That was the sixty-seventh shooting day, which means we have eleven left to go – and after today as I’m writing, we’re under the magical ten. I would be lying if I didn’t think the end daily, but there’s still things to be done before we’re home scot free. But more importantly than that, as I’m writing this it’s only three days until Annika comes over, and she’ll stay here until the end, so it’s going to be a much better ending there.

The Turku shoot preparations are also in full swing. We’ve hired a bunch of actors from around the world and invite them over to Turku for the shoot. It’s going to be a great ending for this, with all my friends around, some of the best people I’ve worked with coming there too and wrapping up the production in Finnish style. Max will be there, too, and Tero, and Rhydian and Stephanie Paul from Iron Sky one and two fame… It’ll be a blast.

Ding-dong.

That’s the doorbell. Must be the room service, coming to clean my room. Fuck them.

“I’m still here!”

Ding-dong.

Goddamnit… “I’m still here, no cleaning, thank you!”

Ding-dong. Knock knock knock. “Timo, open the door. We have to go.”

Shit. What time is it.

Where’s my cellphone? In the living room! It’s ten past 12 noon!! My pickup for the airport is here, and I’m really late. Shit.

I scrambled my clothes and ran out of the door in ten minutes time, managing somehow to wash my teeth and jump into the shower in between, and rushed downstairs to find Mika, Jonathan and David waiting there for me. Yeah, the party last night went a bit late and I had forgotten to put a buzzer to wake me up, so there I was, 30 minutes late. Sorry guys.

We did make it to the airport in time. It was time for our every-60-days-trip to Korea again. Small plane, thousands of people everywhere… We didn’t even get to leave the airport after we arrived to Seoul, because we had to wait in lines for so long. Just grabbed some food and headed back again. Well, that’s my day off.

I did manage to write few crucial emails and started to read a new book (Gösta Sundqvist’s biography), but mostly the day was just wasted in the airports. We did enjoy some long overdue McDonald’s meal (they only have Burger King in Yellow Island…) at the airport and returned back to the hotel around eleven.

Luckily, that’s the last of its’ kind, no need to do that stupidity again. I do like Korea, though, would love to visit there one day for real. The people look cool there. You also see much more western faces around. That makes a difference. I find myself staring hungrily at every Westerner who walks past these days, they are so rare here in Qingdao.

Man, I’ve learned to love China, but I also miss home. This is what it looks like back in Finland this time of the year:

Yeah, it’s been a long production and we are all getting tired. It’s now more visible than ever before, especially yesterday, which was the last day of the year and everyone knew there’d be a day off the next day, so everything somehow happened at half speed. And although me and Mika had had one day off last week, the crew had actually been working on Christmas Day on 25th, so they hadn’t had one day off in nearly two weeks, so I understand they were tired. So me and Lei decided to not to go too long tonight, everyone had some plans for the New Year’s Eve party, so we decided to do what’s necessary but not drag the day long, wished everyone a nice day off and went our merry ways.

Me and Mika’s New Year Eve party started at a local pub called Knuckles, which serves also a fantastic selection of very Western foods like pizzas, burgers and so forth, plus huge kegs of ice cold Qingdao. As we chomped them down our throats, Rhydian called us and told us to head over to the KTV, where the three remaining actors were having a good old time – Rhydian, mr. Duan and Vivienne, plus of course their assistants (who were mostly on the phone and kept bringing in more drinks as the night grew longer). We sang and drank a lot, and had a hell of a time, and it was around 5 am when we finally made it back to the hotel.

So, that wrapped the year 2017, which was in many ways the hardest year of my life. My brother’s death dominated the beginning of the year and ended with his funeral; then, the Chinese production started to blast full speed and separation from my family took a hold of me. I did have some great times, too – visiting great film festivals, having great times with my wife exploring our relationship more and finding out how much more I love her than I can even put to words. Also, wonderful times with Pekka my great friend, from Huhtamo to Georgia and back. So if anything, the year was both hard but also very giving, probably a year I’ll never forget as long as I live.

I have, to be honest, no idea what to expect of the next year. One thing is for sure: I’ll release Iron Sky The Coming Race, so that will dominate quite a lot of the year, also post production of Iron Sky: The Ark will be in full swing.

But what I hope for? I hope I get to spend more time with my family. That’s honestly the only thing I hope for 2018. And yeah, maybe finally learn to play guitar. That would be great, too!

2 am. I’m listening to In The Nursery’s amazing album Man With The Movie Camera and contemplating the night. I just watched the new Blade Runner, and while I enjoyed the visual beauty of it, to me it felt soulless and uncharming on the inside. Compared to the original one, it didn’t bring anything interesting new to the table, save the advanced visual world, and the things that worked were already working in the first Blade Runner, making the sequel quite a redundant work.

I decided to go see a movie after a slow and slumpy shooting day. I was dead tired thanks to my current insomniac phase, but so seemed to be the whole crew. Maybe it’s because the lack of rest for them (me and Mika had a day off but the production had the crew working even on our rest day to do some stunt action last week) or the fact that it has been quite a long shoot already, but the set was slow like a snail and everyone was doing dumb, simple mistakes constantly, ones they wouldn’t do normally. The light cues were off, the camera focus was constantly somewhere else than on actors’ face, the makeup and costume took forever with the actors – and the actors were all slightly slower and slightly harder to work with than usual. Just one of those days. One more day to go this week, then there’s a day off and a new year looming ahead of us.

But I did find some moments of peace and solemnity on the set today. It was one of the endless waits, when the camera was ready and we were waiting for the actors to arrive to the set. Iiris had given me a birthday present, a notebook to which I had started to doodle during the shooting day. So there I was, doodling away, listening as behind me Lotus the Continuity, Chris the VFX supervisor and my assistant David were rattling on quietly in Chinese. Mika was zipping past the monitor view as he was placing lights here and there, Lei was wandering somewhere around with the megaphone in his hand… But the set was peaceful. There was a good feeling around. People were enjoying their work, there was no unnecessary pressure or hurry at that moment, there was laughter and chatter all around. It’s hard to say but I did feel pretty good at that moment. Like, this is my job.

I get to do this for a living. Sit in this big-ass moonbase set, with all these amazing people all working together to realize a dream.

It’s a nice thought.

I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m unable to sleep anymore during the night, and during the day I’m shooting, so I’m mostly just a walking dead for the most part of the days. It started about a week ago, and after that I haven’t been able to really rest in the night properly. This leaves me with a constant nagging headache which I’m trying to cure with coffee and painkillers, but that’s not a really good recipe for anything.

Insomnia has been a problem with me for quite a many years. Not sure how it works with others, but in my case it’s just the inability to sleep. The business of the day goes rattling in my brains at high speed when I try closing my eyes, the scenes we shot keep popping back up and I start going through the list of possible missing closeups, glances, bits of dialogue and so forth… Or going through the list of things to do, the ideas I forgot to write up, it doesn’t matter what, but it just means my brain doesn’t want to let go the day’s work.

I’ve tried everything (well, not everything) from melatonin to some a crude version of autosuggestion, meditative music and so forth, but nothing really works. And even if I get so tired that I fall asleep early in the evening, I wake up one hour later head buzzing with things.

But what I’ve also learned, interestingly, is that it happens twice a year, around the same time of the year every time. It lasts few weeks and then I get to reset my sleep rhythm again. So, all I can do is just sit back and wait for the sleep to come, and the rhythm will come back at one point, sooner or later.

So yeah, that’s what’s going on with me now: sleepless nights. Last night was quite rude: first time I really got to sleep was 6am, with wakeup call at 9am. With this three hours under my belt I was really cranky the whole morning. The day itself seemed quite impossible to reach – a lot of pages of script with endless amount of location- and makeup changes around the studios, small splinter bits of scenes to fill up and so on and so on, and in the end we were shooting two scenes simultaneously in two different rooms – while setting cameras for the other one, the other set was filming, and vice versa.

It was the shooting day 64. That leaves us only just a little over ten to go, out of which two are in Finland, so I can nearly see the finish line. There’s still the most complicated stuff coming up, so no need to celebrate just yet…

Oh! There’s one interesting thing I’ve noticed with the Chinese actors, something that I haven’t seen anywhere else before, and I wanted to talk about it. There’s always someone behind the camera recording with a cell phone the monitors as we shoot, an assistant of some of the actors, and after the take the assistant runs back to them and shows what we shot. Then, the actors take a look at their performances and makes assessments on what to change based on what she or he sees.

That’s kinda understandable, sort of. It’s not news to have an actor come over to the monitors and requesting to see a playback of something and depending on the actor I’m happy to show what we shot, maybe even sometimes inviting them over to show what to change and how. But this kind of sneaking behind the monitors and recording takes is really getting on my nerves, and I’ve had to say about it a few times over to the actors. I learned that it’s typical in Asian film industry, especially if you are a bigger star, but there’s few reasons I don’t like it at all.

What’s problematic about it is that first, it distracts the actor to think every take as a take, and forget the role they are playing. It heightens their insecurities and even if they claim they only look it to see what’s our framing, it also prompts them to perform to the camera and alter their performance based on what they think is relevant to the character, not what the director thinks. That’s easily a very poisonous loop, since the whole basis of director-actor -relationship is that an actor trust the director to guide them the right way so that it serves the story. In many cases, “perfect take” is not what you are looking for – it creates a very unorganic and staged feeling on the film quickly – but the natural one, born from the moment of playing the scene out.

Of course, it’s also slowing things down: while we would be getting ready to take another take, some actors are sitting and judging their performances on their phones.

And the last thing is, actually the sets are a no-film -zones for anyone else but the appropriate people – that means the actual camera crew, and maybe making-of. Even if these materials are not distributed anywhere, what if the assistant loses his or her phone, and suddenly half of the actors’ takes are out there on YouTube a year before the film comes out… It’s also a security issue.

But, like I said, it seems to be the norm around here. Right now, with mere two weeks left of the shoot it makes no sense for me to make a full set of new rules but if I come back here to shoot another film, that’s the first thing I will demand from the actors to not to do.

That’s what it’s all about, the director’s work, blocking a great scene. Rest comes easy.

I’ve learned quite a lot on blocking during this production. Before, I’ve been used to block in very great detail every scene, directing everything the actors do with utmost care, but this production has taught me that the best way to block a scene is to keep an open mind, unless you’re absolutely chasing for something very specific.

The best way is to get the actors in the scene, tell what needs to happen, what kind of mechanisms the set might have and how do you want to end the scene, and then let them come up with the blocking by themselves. This gives the actors the possibility to experience the scene through their characters, find organic solutions and create a scene which feels natural, flows nicely and is fun to play. Of course, there will be moments when the scene gets stuck and you ask the actors to do something very specific, but by keeping the mind open for the blocking suggestions results in a much more interesting performances.

Oh, yeah, and blocking itself, it’s the time the actors and director spends together going through a certain scene and how to play it out before shooting it. Usually it’s also a chance for the DOP to check the scene out and come up with good camera angles to tell the story. After you’ve blocked, all they have to do is just to repeat it some ten to fifteen times, depending on the camera angles and camera setups and it’s done. In those terms, directing is quite an easy job.

But it can be also hard. In addition for the actors and the sets and everything around them, we have now also our writer, mr. Yu on the set, supervising the Chinese dialogue since it’s truly out of my control. Having a writer around has some advantages, but it also creates easily a very confusing situation with the actors. Director starts directing the scene, but if suddenly a writer pops around and suggests changes into the characters, lines and actions, the messages for the poor actors get very muddled. I had to stop mr. Yu from directing the actors few times, saying that the only person I allow to direct on my set is me, and if he has suggestions, they need to go through me. It’s not really about the power struggle between a director and a writer – the board is already quite simple in that respect (director interprets the writer’s text and turns it into a movie) – but more it’s just about the actors and the work you’ve done with them during the production, building the character out of the lines on the paper into a real-sounding human. Some decisions are made based on the kind of a character you have created during the shoot, which may differ from what is exactly on the paper, meaning some actions, dialogues and reasoning doesn’t really work anymore. We had our clashes during the first few days he was around, but as soon as we managed to set the boundaries right, it’s actually great to have him around. The film has few very logical challenges which we have been solving as we have been shooting, and he’s good to be around as the second pair of brains thinking the whole big picture as a story.

Anyway, Wednesday shoot was surprisingly smooth. The blocking found the right rhythm instantly, and we were shooting a great scene. That’s the best feeling for a director in the world: knowing you’re working on a great scene. Sometimes, you know instantly that no matter what you do, the scene isn’t going to be the highlight of the movie, and covering that kind of material pisses everyone off. You may even find yourself shooting material that you already know won’t end up in the movie, and that’s quite a depressing thought.

But yesterday wasn’t like that. Yesterday was great fun, for everyone. We didn’t finish the callsheet, but luckily we still have many days in the same set so we are not in huge troubles even if we didn’t manage to go through everything.

Once I’ve finished Iron Sky The Coming Race and Iron Sky: The Ark, I bet I can apply for Guinness Book Of Records, becoming the film director who shot the biggest amount of fiction films set on the Far Side of the Moon. All these three films take the characters to the Moon sooner or later, and shooting at the Moon conditions can be quite a challenge indeed.

I’ve spoken about the costume issues, the spacesuits and so forth, but there’s more than that to it. Gravity, for example, is always a big challenge. Watching the NASA astronauts bouncing around the Moon looks weirdly fake, and simultaneously, it’s irreplaceably realistic. Moon gravity, being one sixth of what we have on Earth, affects on everything, but shows only on a falling or accelerating motion, but anything to do with muscle power, that’s when things get tricky.

For an actor, it’s easy to remember that you fall down slowly, because there’s a wire assisting you: the question is just to find the right counterweight and you’re all set, but wires only balance your body, not your legs or arms, which you need to control yourself. Hands are pretty easy, but legs are the hard part. Falling down wire-assisted is easy, and controlling your hand motion is possible, but legs tend to be the really big issue, they usually reveal the fake effort you’re trying to do.

Just like with the first Iron Sky, we have a lot of wireworks ahead of us. Our action director mr. Liu has been rehearsing with the main cast for months to get the basics of the movement into their backbone, but really, when you have to first do the movements, wire-assisted, then remember your lines, then try to be natural and creative as an actor and finally fumble in front of few hundred people, it’s not a surprise it takes a while to get the right kind of weightless motion working.

The other issue is, of course, that today we’ve seen such amazing displays of weightlessness in films, like the namesake picture Gravity, and many others, plus news footage and Youtube are full of clips from ISS where astronauts float around singing Space Oddity and whatnot, so people expect quite a good display of correct weightlessness.

Not only that, but we also have fight scenes coming up in 1/6 g gravity. That’s going to be quite a big scene, a fight scene we shoot for good five days.

The other thing is the vacuum. Obviously, vacuum is an unpressurized space which works funny way on humans. First, although it’s nearly impossibly cold for human to exist in the vacuum of space for a long time, it also has some surprising effects on human body. There are very few people who have actually experienced vacuum in the world, and much of the effects we see in movies are usually pretty far out there (like, Total Recall – nope, your eyes won’t burst out in space…). In practical terms, the moisture on your tongue would start to boil, your eyes would soon freeze over and of course, you would lose consciousness. Interestingly enough, also the gasses released from your stomach would probably lead to a simultaneous defecation, urination and vomiting. The latter hasn’t been portrayed in the movies before (and I intend not to be the first one).

Nevertheless, following some of these facts creates a fun playing field, but complicated to explain to the actors, and to act out in addition for the troubles of trying to look like you’re weightless.

Having said that, the actors seemed to enjoy their time, hanging around in the wires and following my instructions on getting the movements and actions right. At least it’s something different!

I was dead tired after a really nice hotel room Christmas day with Iiris and Mika (we had some Finnish delicacies Iiris had brought from Finland with her, watched It’s A Wonderful Life and enjoyed the day off), but for some reason I couldn’t catch the sleep. I tossed and turned around until three am, and then Annika popped online and we had a long talk about our kids until way too late. It was not before 5am until I finally hanged up and fell asleep, only to be awakened in mere three hours time.

Not surprisingly, the day went in a zombieland. I was staggering through the first half until lunch, as we were doing some stunt action shots, and after lunch everything just jammed: the actors didn’t come to makeup, the costumes were (again) broken and needed a lot of adjustments, the wireworks needed rehearsals… It was already five pm when we managed to really get the first thing we needed to do done. A day nearly wasted.

Well, not wasted, we did have some good shots with everyone, especially with Rhydian, with whom we’ve struck quite a good companionship off-screen. We probably share a bit of a same taste in music and sense of humour so we seem to find ourselves having good chats while waiting for the light or camera to set up.

In other news, we have decided to go back and tweak one scene, which will add one additional day to our shooting schedule. This scene, an opening of the male lead character, is a challenging one for me, because it’s a very traditional Chinese, to be more specific Beijingese, and more specifically Hutongese scene circling around a very local setting – one, which I have of course no idea of.

I directed the scene the way I interpreted it from the script, but now as we’ve started to look at the scenes put together, Max pointed out that there’s nothing wrong with the scene, only that it’s not finding the right tone in this style which is very typical in Chinese films, the same way as if a Chinese director would come to Finland to direct a scene set in Kallio… I just don’t know all the subtleties of such a setting.

We decided, quite drastically, to reapproach the scene and reshoot few bits of it to find some more Chinese undertones to it. This is by no means a small task, we have to rebuild the set and make it match the original one, but we’ve done it already once so no problem doing it again. The bigger issue is to really try to perk up the scene to make it more accessible for the Chinese audience – but still, I’m a Helsinki-born Finn who only spent six months in China so far… I really don’t know where to go with it.

But we agreed with Max and Lei that they’ll be there to consult me, so we try to dig out the small details that make the scene alive, details only a Chinese can find in a setting like this. At first, I was a bit against the idea, first and foremost I’m pretty happy with the scene as it is, plus I really am not looking forward extending the shoot any more, but at the same time… There’s a point in it. For the Chinese audience, to whom we make this movie for, we have to make it believable. Much of the movie takes place in crazy settings, on the Moon and secret military bases and what not, and those locations are already by definition so far out that we get to set the rules the way we want, but with a very local scene like the one in question, there is few hundred years of traditions to follow, and we are expected to hit those marks.

So, one more day of production added to the shooting days. As long as it results in a better movie, it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to do.

Wake up, it’s Christmas mourn
Those loved have long since gone
The stockings are hung but who cares
Preserved for those no longer there
Six feet beneath me sleep
Black lights hang from the tree
Accents of dead holly
Whoa mistletoe
(It’s growing cold)
I’m seeing ghosts
(I’m drinking old)
Red water
Red water

Red water chase them away
My tables been set for but seven
Just last year I dined with eleven
Goddamn ye merry gentlemen
Whoa mistletoe
(It’s growing cold)
I’m seeing ghosts
(I’m drinking old)
Red water
Red water
Red water chase them away.

– Type O Negative / Red Water (Christmas Mourning)