1. To begin, could you tell us a bit about yourselves and your backgrounds before Giant's Kettle?

 

This is our first feature. Neither of has background in either art or film. Markku is a kind of polymath who happened to drift to computer science research and eventually put up a company of his own. But there was a growing urge to break free. Thus he seized the opportunity to sell the company and pivoted to art and philosophy. Mari works as a professional coach with a special interest in creative collaboration and has academic background in Finnish literature and woman studies.

 

2. You worked together for six years on this project. How did the partnership come about, and what motivated you to create this film together?
 

We had known each other for years. Combining our analytic and intuitive biases we had been exploring various philosophical, psychological, spiritual and ecological issues. When our friendship eventually broke into love something was bound to give birth.

 

Markku had already left the business and had been experimenting with short films. Writing was a way for him to tap into his unconscious. There was one script that Mari found particularly strong resonance with. That was the seed.

 

We didn’t have the required experience, connections or funding, but we decided to go all in anyway. When you are in love, everything is possible. Even things like putting your savings in an art film. It was this opening that allowed us to work on the film and go against the grain of capitalist rationality of pure self-interest.

 

3. How would you describe Giant's Kettle to our festival audience? What do you want the viewers to know before watching?
 

Giant’s Kettle goes back to the very roots of cinema but takes off from there to a new direction. In a sense it is a very traditional narrative feature, but at the same time it presents an alternative vision of cinema breaking many conventions of the tradition.

 

Some say it’s a dark fable on the limits of rationality and lack of human connection. There might be some truth in that. There is lot of room for interpretation, but the film shouldn’t be taken as an intellectual puzzle any more than, say, a piece of music.

 

Like a song, it is to be experienced directly. It carries a message in the form of resonance between something the musician feels within him and something within the listener. There may be understanding between these two even though it may be hard to put it in words.

 

4. In the film, you explore the idea of characters who suppress their spontaneity to fit into a "rational" world. How does this connect with your view of contemporary society?

That’s an excelent question. People are roaming unhinged on social media and politics and destroying the whole planet with unrestrained consumption. On the surface it feels we have already broken free from rationality and the solution would be to get more rational again.

 

But that’s not true. We may have done away with the singular rationality of modernity but that has just been replaced by a plurality of rationalities to choose from. We still need to adhere to the systemic assumption of rational self-indulging agency. This system penalizes everyone who doesn’t conform. A company executive who doesn’t put profit above all else will be replaced by another who does. An artist who follows an inner voice needs to beat the algorithm and will turn into yet another content creator. Our so called freedom is just food for the algorithm. What we can do is to pick the color of the walls of our prison cell.

 

This prison is internalized in each of us. True authenticity is not about rational self-interest. There is something much more profound within each living being. We are suppressing all that to fit in the system, to fullfill our roles as self-indulging agents.

 

5. Your director's statement mentions that the film is a "cinematic journey into the unconscious." In practice, what does it mean to create a film based on intuition rather than a traditional script or linear narrative?
 

There actually was a script that we followed quite diligently. But it was not developed top-down to communicate a concept, story or idea. The script originally came about by going deep within and reporting the events that unfolded in that mental interior, like writing down a dream. And like a dream it didn’t make sense at first, though we both felt there was something important in it.

 

The script was very sparse and thus there was lots of choices to be made during the production. We used the same process there, using the script as the key to re-establish the connection to the original source. We learned to trust the script and noticed how we constantly had to keep giving up the so called “good ideas” that come from the head and to develop sense of what feels right in a more deeper way.

 

This may sound fancier than it is. It’s quite an orinary and plain way of doing things really. We have all had these experiences when we are listening to the deeper currents of our minds and hearts, and choices made from that position feel more meaningful and obvious. Maybe the remarkable thing was that despite our distinct points of view we were always eventually agree upon what we saw at the source.

 

6. You speak about renouncing knowledge and surrendering to the unknown, both as filmmakers and in the viewer's experience. Can you share a moment during production when you had to truly surrender to the process and trust your intuition?
 

In one scene of the film a doctor is checking the reflexes. According to the script everything seems to be fine but people get distressed. For us that seemed backwards. It would have made more sense for the story if there was something wrong with the patient. Or so we thought. But we decided to trust the script – and our intuition – instead of our thoughts.

 

We realized only later that this scene relates to one of the thematic undercurrents of the script, the way society works by supressing the spontaneous response of its people, the reflexes.

 

We hadn’t consciously planted this symbolic content in the script. But it’s even more subtle than that, because if we had intellectualized the scene too early we could have accidentally constrained ourselves to a narrow perspective wiping out other important meanings, all of which work together to communicate something.

 

7. Markku, you have a background as a computer science researcher. How did this influence your work with cinematography and your use of digital technology to make the filmmaking process more personal?

 

We decided early on in the preprodiction that we were to shoot each scene in one take from a fixed camera engle. That was the cinematographic style I was most fascinated with anyway but also the decision that allowed us to go without crew. For most shots we had a month to prepare and build the set. On the shooting day everything was set and sometimes there was just me and Mari at the set with the actors.

 

Static camera angles allowed a lot of tweaking in the post-production. We used a lot of green screen and rotoscoping too. I painted the backgrounds by hand, composed from photographs, or animated in 3D software. The fluency with computers may have helped in trying to get in terms with various professional software suites, which tend to be incredibly complicated, unintuitive to use, and full of bugs. I didn’t knew any of that software in the beginning, so although I am a fast learner it took several years in the edit.

 

Wearing all the hats from set designer to cinematographer to editor to animator to compositor and so on made the process nimble. I had to keep switching between different software all the time, but it was doable, and most importantly I was able to carry the same artistic intention and intuition to every detail. This would not have been possible if the process hadn’t relied so heavily on the use of software.

 

8. Mari, you work as a creative coach and teach leadership and group dynamics. How did your academic and practical experience shape the team dynamics during the film's production?
 

I don’t think I would have had the courage to embark on the journey of making this film with Markku, had I not had the experience in creative processes. I felt that to be able to make this impossible work we would really need a strong container for the forces of uncertainty and despair inherent in a process like this. And I was willing to build that container since I wanted to see this film done. That is what I consider to be my most important contribution to the film.

 

9. The trailer for Giant's Kettle mentions a world where "the past is forbidden, the future foreknown, and the present concealed." How did this central idea guide your direction and editing choices?
 

Those lines are somewhat adapted from what the Finnish writer Paavo Haavikko wrote about 1960’s Finland. Amidst the unspoken trauma of the war there was a sense of progress and almost absolute belief in rational problem solving. But that line is something that we came up after the fact. It was intuition rather than ideas that guided most of the direction and editing choices.

 

It’s always fun to find intellectual justifications afterwards though. That’s just how the reason works. Reason is more like a lawyer that comes up with the story to cover up your mess.

 

The line seems to capture something of essence though. We’re not old enough to have lived through that time, but maybe something had carried over. It’s also a reflection of rationality in general. We, as a civilization, are still insisting that we’re going to get out of our crises through reason alone. Like if we just outsmarted ourselves with better battery technology and solar panels then everything would be all right.

 

10. The film is described as an "epic tragicomedy of the mundane." How did you balance the surreal with the ordinary to create this atmosphere of discomfort and mystery?
 

By the use of static camera and other compositional means the film creates a witnessing position in relation to the unfolding events. The film doesn’t pull the audience in. That was a very conscious choice. We draw the attention to the frame and the space within that frame, not the characters within the space. The camera always stays indifferent to the people entering and leaving the frame and there is plenty of empty space around the drama.

 

When you look at life from a distance like that a certain comic aspect of human condition is necessarily revealed. But at the same time this position of unwavering witness also brings forth certain time- and space-transcending qualities of experience itself. It allows for conflicting polarities to co-exist, polarities such as tragic and comic, or epic and mundane.

 

We also had an epiphany early on in the development when we realized that if nothing much happens it tends to be boring for the viewer but if nothing at all happens then there is suddenly an immense tension within that moment. This needs to be done right though and of essence is the actors’ ability to be present in the moment. It is still quite a mystery to us why some people have it and some have not. We were very lucky in that regard.

 

11. The concept of "feeling safe with the film" is intriguing. How did you navigate the challenge of provoking the audience without alienating them, maintaining a safe space for them to surrender to the experience?
 

If you truly open yourself to experience that’s a very vulnerable place. The last thing you want is to be emotionally manipulated by anyone. This is why we, as filmmakers, needed to refrain from using cinema as a manipulative tool.

 

Right from the beginning we had felt our position as filmmakers was like that of a midwife, bringing a newborn from the depths of the subconscious to the light of day. Our job was to report from that place and provide a safe space for the audience to experience the experiences they need to experience given that testimony. Thus, we needed to refrain from manipulative tactics. That may be part of the reason why music didn’t work at all for this film. Every time there we tried to introduce musical harmony we felt that the film became less instead of more. In the end there was only one scene where we felt that music added to the film instead of taking away.

 

We find some of the scenes very funny, sad or gruesome ourselves. Sometimes all at the same time. In many cases the audience is likely to experience something similar to what we have experienced. If so, a kind of resonance is taking place. But someone may have a totally different kind of experience. That is just to be expected. It is perfectly plausible that someone from our audience understands our film much better than we do. Should that be the case we have either managed to be honest about our experience or bad at trying to hide our own predispositions. Maybe a bit of both.

 

12. Finally, what is your view on experimental cinema today? What changes do you think are necessary for this art form to reach a wider audience and gain more recognition?
 

Despite the good reception, awards and recognition we haven’t been able to secure any distribution outside the festival circuit. And our film isn’t even that experimental. So maybe there’s not that much one can learn from us in this.

 

But what we do believe regardless is that indifference towards the audience is still the best gift an artist has to offer. Trying to reach a wider audience would come with a significant risk of losing onself in the process. We live in a word where people have difficulty going through a yoga class without reaching the phone. This race of ever-shorter attention spans is a losing game. What you can do is to do your thing, and do it as well as you can. Things that prove out to be important are not necessarily the ones that gain the biggest traction. Experimental cinema should remain a place where meaningful things are possible despite niche interest.