Zombie Room

While in Cannes, I had a strange dream – I don’t remember which morning it was – with an image of a camel shoveling shit to it’s mouth. I felt so weird that I had to pull myself awake.

After spending few days in Cannes heat, drinking a lot of alcohol mixed with meeting a lot of nice, greedy, useless, fun, annoying or beautiful people, things start to get a bit weird. It almost feels like one doesn’t need as much sleep as back home, and you feel like you could go on endlessly – and then, suddenly, a moment of complete and total hopelessness, boredom and tiredness falls upon you, only to be lifted away the next minute.

We are right now heading home after 8 days in Cannes, and the trip was, to be honest, quite successful. We secured financing from Hessen Film Invest for Iron Sky, made a co-production deal with UK’s Film & Music Entertainment, received loads of offers for the distribution and world sales of Iron Sky, some of them extremely good ones. I didn’t have that much to do this year, since after last year most of the people had actually some idea of Iron Sky already, so I mainly just sat down and took some notes, trying to learn from Tero, Oliver & others negociating deals. And I did, I can say.

In addition to this, we also filmed a lot, made several episodes of Cannes Dailies, a mock-trailer for Inglorious Basterds (“Iroun Sky Basterds”, it’s coming out maybe one day), wrote press releases and got mentioned in the daily papers and had some absolutely wonderful dinners. I also got to talk about my next film after Iron Sky, called Das Dead – a 3D horror film, mine and Essi’s first film we work on together with, her being one of the producers and I’m directing, that seems to be gathering a lot of pre-interest around it. Nazi Zombies are quite hot topic now, and if you tuck them into a long-lost U-boat that re-emerges during the Cold War, I think you’ll get somewhere

I have to say this:

One thing I’m quite annoyed by, though, are certain, unnamed Finnish producers. For last year’s Cannes, we applied from Finnish Film Foundation a certain, quite a big amount of money for our promotional activities. That money we spent in Cannes to get ads, a good office, a lot of print materials etc. out, to really for the first time get the word of Iron Sky out to the international film world. And we succeeded, beyond what we expected!

Now, being a Finn, I’m not surprised that our quite visible activities annoyed certain other Finnish filmmakers, that felt left out for not having the money from Film Foundation, like we did. The only funny thing is, that nobody else applied. It was just us.

But that’s normal, Finns are a jealous bunch to the max, so this was expected.

Well, this year it got even a bit more idiotic. The Film Foundation was prepared to get a lot of applications for this support this year, given Iron Sky‘s visibility last year, and we also decided to apply for a much smaller amount of money this year. We got it, used it the best way we could to get Iron Sky to compete with big international productions with marketing budgets bigger than our small film in total, and of course expeceted to see Finns to pull out similar stunts as well. Nobody did, though. And eventually, we found out that nobody, again, had applied for this marketing money, only us, so Film Foundation obviously gave it to us. And again, we heard that some Finnish producers were angry at us for getting this support.

A support which is publicly available and applicable. What do they think that’s going to happen? Somebody dragging the heaps of euroes to their doors and begging for them to take it?

I mean it’s OK not to apply for the money – definitively! And it’s OK to apply to the money and get it and do a great stunt at Cannes, that’d be great! But it’s NOT OK to complain about it but do nothing about it… That’s what I hate.

But on the lighter side, there are right now three interesting film productions in production in addition to Iron Sky which we heard of in Cannes. First one is Snapper Film’s production of which’s name I’m not sure, but it’s basically Flight Attendant Academy – like the Police Academy but with Flight Attendants. I was delighted, it felt like not maybe exactly the film that I would’ve done, but definitively a film that has a lot of international potential. Hot chicks, fun jokes, maybe a bit of VFX and slapsticky jokes – a very nice step away from the stereotypical Finnish misery.

Another production is Toni Pykäläniemi’s Mothgirl, a film that they’ve been working on for quite some years, and it looks like it’s coming together. I just heard some thoughts of the possible casting, and.. well, it’ll be great! Moth Girl also has a teaser trailer out, and it’s quite damn good.

I’m also looking a lot forward for a Finnish nature horror film Carcass, which has quite a promising premise, and if done right, it could be something really great. It’s a story of an American nature photographer who comes to Finnish woods, to one of those small waiting cabins (they have a proper name, but you know what I mean) in Northern Finland to shoot bears (with a camera, you know). To attract bears, he uses a carcassa, but the carcass attracts something much different from the depths of the woods… Creepy, huh?!

All together, a great Cannes, a wonderful achievements and superb outcome.

- Timo (Mr. Zombie)