00:26This is Tim Wasper from Fast Track on CERC TV.
00:29I'm here in Austin, Texas for fantastic fact.
01:05You know, and obviously, you know, the squirrel, you know, just as it's just, it's more of a metaphor.
01:11It's a physical thing, which beautiful work on blending all that stuff technologically.
01:16But, you know, it's interesting because it's chaos within a world of control in this movie.
01:22Can you talk about that?
01:23Because you is using that as a sort of jumping point for everything else.
01:27I kind of felt that it's, I saw this person who has basically built a life that is perfect in
01:35many ways.
01:36That it's, I wanted to go against this, you know, like traditional dystopian thing that the world is somehow controlled.
01:46And you can understand from the first frames that this is like, ah, it's not a pleasant place to live
01:52in.
01:53So I kind of wanted to make it as pleasant as possible to have this character really kind of believe
01:58that everything is okay.
02:01Like that the needs are fulfilled and, and, you know, there, you shouldn't kind of like start to, you know,
02:10fool around with anything else because basically you have everything.
02:14And, and, and, and also one major thing was that they have kind of chosen this themselves, that it's not
02:21given from some upper level of, I don't know, authority, authority, but they have like the, they have the freedom
02:31of choice and they have chosen this, this kind of life.
02:34So from this, this kind of like thing that the, the, the, the world that, that the humans have built
02:40themselves, which is perfect.
02:42And that has kind of like gone too far in that sense that it has became clinical and kind of
02:48got ridden of everything that is controlled and somehow, or got ridden everything that is uncontrollable and somehow that, you
02:58know, has the element of danger.
03:00And those are kind of like, when you get rid of all of those, you get this life, which is
03:04pleasant and safe, but at the same time it can be really boring and I don't know, like lifeless from
03:11our perspective and, and about the humor, I think the main engine of the humor is that from our perspective,
03:19it is, you know, tragic in many ways, but they don't, you know, see it that way.
03:24The characters in that, that, that world don't see it that way.
03:28So I think from that, the squirrel is kind of like, that is the, the thing that breaks it, that
03:34kind of like brings this, because I think to, to Pasi, this life he has built has led to also
03:40this life where basically things aren't real.
03:44You know, there isn't anything actually real from, from our perspective and, and the squirrel is the thing that kind
03:50of breaks this, this thing and, and shows Pasi that the, the, the kind of other dimension in a way.
03:58Also like the dimension of connection and, I don't know, sensitivity, emotions, and this kind of human or animal or
04:08whatever, like, sensory world.
04:39Could you talk about, obviously, the architecture,
04:44architecture, the design, the liminal space, all these things, once you get later in the film, there's a complete other
04:50environment that's very unique in the way it's done.
04:54Could you talk about the notion of environment, but using both the architecture, the sets, but then also nature in
05:02that way?
05:02Yeah, it's a great question.
05:04And I think going back to the, kind of the whole feeling of the world and the concept I felt
05:12before even finding the locations, I felt that I kind of want to make a film that, that as I
05:18was like writing it, I felt that I want to have two levels.
05:22I want to kind of want to kind of have this, like a step back, bigger picture of the whole
05:27kind of species, human beings as kind of animals or ants or whatever they are in this system.
05:35But I also wanted to have this intimate level where we are actually like feeling the, the arc of these
05:42characters as they are starting to get to know their feelings and emotions and kind of this sensory level.
05:51And I think this, this was, to me, the kind of starting point of the visual approach also that I,
05:59I felt that we, I want to have this kind of huge perspective where we can show these really wide
06:07spaces and have the characters really small there to have this kind of, to give the audience also the feeling
06:14of, of their human experience in this environment.
06:20And, and, uh, so I think that's already led us to look at, you know, big spaces and minimalistic spaces.
06:28And, and I knew that I wanted to have this, like I said earlier, that I didn't want to do
06:33this like traditional dystopian science fiction.
06:38So I felt that also with the locations, I really felt that I, I wanted to have this pleasantness in
06:45them also that I kind of felt that, you know, I find this visually pleasant and I,
06:49I could live there, you know, I could live there, you know, and, uh, so we were looking at that
06:54and, and also, you know, avoiding, avoiding maybe some places that, that had this, you know, brutalist architecture of power,
07:05you know, we, we kind of wanted, because those were available also in Europe as, for the reasons that we
07:10know.
07:11But we kind of wanted to steer off of that also, and find something that is, you know, somehow, you
07:17know, timeless.
07:18That was to me the thing that I wanted to somehow make it timeless also, that you don't really know
07:23what is this architecture, but you somehow step into this world that is feeling, you know, that it's in the
07:29future.
07:29Maybe it's in close or far, I don't know.
08:05So we were building that and, and I don't know, the minimalism is just something that, of course, it comes
08:12from the content that, you know, they have, they want to keep it clean.
08:16They want to keep it so that they don't touch anything.
08:19So that already led to this, these spaces where people can kind of move without crashing into each other or
08:25packing into, you know, some, some like, uh, I don't know, small subway or something.
08:31So that was one thing.
08:33And, and, um, and at the same time, I remember talking with the DOP, like the, we have like the
08:40great DOP, Max Metz, who shot this film is, he said like from the really, I don't know,
08:46first meetings that he wants to do this kind of beautiful, beautiful science fiction and, and to have some kind
08:54of, in a way, natural light, which is actually artificially done in these environments, but they have kind of subconsciously,
09:03uh, you know, built like a beautiful soft light in these environments.
09:08So we wanted to kind of do that and, uh, to have the contrast come more from the, from the
09:15nature versus the CD or the man, be a human built environment.
09:21And this will be kind of the contrast more and not, you know, not do everything formalistically.
09:28So, you know, to have like, I don't know, to have to, because the already the, like you said, the
09:34contrast to the forest and everything, the chaos that is going on there was to me like more important than
09:40to kind of, you know, do the contrast with light or something like this.
09:45So we also wanted to keep many things same in the way we shot them and the way the camera
09:50acts and everything.
09:51We didn't want to kind of change everything because I felt that the characters also don't change so quickly.
09:58You know, I think one of the part of, of the whole humor was also that we are going, stepping
10:02into the forest and to the chaos, but the, actually the characters are really like, you know, scared about that.
10:10You know, it's like, they have never seen anything like that.
10:13So I didn't want to also, you know, romantize it too much.
10:40See you then.
10:42Bye.
10:42Bye.
10:43Bye.
10:43Bye.
