@IRON SKY Interview with Timo Vuorensola

Gepostet von Philipp am 19 19, 2012 in fff, NEWS | Keine Kommentare

Interview with Timo Vuorensola the director of Iron Sky.  After the Premier at the Berlinale.

The First thing that came to my mind when we started talking about the project Iron sky was: “We have to get Udo Kier to play some part in it. Maybe the part of Hitler or whatever…” That was an idea that stayed alive during the whole developing process of the script. And when the script was done we send it to Udos’ agent. After that there was dead silence for a long time. We were sure he wasn’t going  to talk to me. Then one day he called and said: “ Hallo Timo this is Udo. I read your script and I definitely want to do it”. That’s when  I realized he would be in. His one request was for the character to be addicted to chocolate.  As a young kid growing up in Germany in the 40’s and early 50’s Kier had never tasted chocolate until an American GI gave him a piece. So there is actually a big back-story behind it.

Will there be any prequel or sequel?

There is already a prequel happening. If you go to ironsky.net you can read three prequel comics, one of which has already been released. It tells the story of Wolfgang, Udos’ character. The first comic is set in 1945 just as they have left for the moon, the second one takes place in 1969, for the obvious reasons, and the third one takes place in 2018 and ends with the first picture of the film. It is a sort of back-story for Wolfgang.

So you will make a Second Film?

For sure. Because I love space battles. I will do another film with even more Space battles.

Tell us a little bit more about your previous projects.

I made a film called Star Wreck. I released the film in 2005, on the Internet, for free and it became the most popular Finnish film in the history of Finnish cinema. Which a lot of people didn’t like.  They said stuff like: “Who are these dudes making some kind of creepy amateur science fiction film”, then the film became very popular all of a sudden and that was because of the internet. Before that I made a film called “Norwegian whore” It was my very first film. I promise you I am the only person who loves that film. In the future I intend to continue making science fiction films. I want to try one which has a more serious side and I also have some ideas for a TV-series. But definitely science fiction … as long as there’s space battles. I mean, it can be an ancient drama. As long as they visit space once and there’s a bit of fighting, I don’t care.

Why Nazis and not Communists or North Koreans?

Science fiction has always been based on Nazis. Take Star Wars for example. Look at the Empire: they’re Nazis. Or take Star Trek : The Borgs or Romulans, in my view they are romans. The whole idea felt crazy but if you google Moon Nazis and skip all the Iron Sky stuff, you will find a huge group of people who believe that there might be Nazis on the moon. They believe that the earth is hollow and that there is a colony of whatever on Aldebaran. And it is interesting that there is a serious discussion about this topic, interspersed with a lot of technological and historical facts. It is kind of easy to take these theories and make something out of it. But obviously when you bring the Nazis into the picture, you have to think about, why  Nazism specifically? And I think that the inherent evil of Nazism best exemplifies the fascism message. Not to say that it couldn’t have worked with Moon Communists. But the existing theory of Moon Nazis is so complex that it appears to make sense

What are we supposed to learn from this film?

This film is a hippie film. This film is all about Peace and love.

Where did you shot the film?

Thank you for asking where and not why! The why would be: I don’t know, I just like films. We shot all the on-location shots, the White House and all the New York street scenes in Frankfurt. The White House is actually the castle of the prince of Hessen. We shot all the green-screen shots at the Roadhouse Studios in Brisbane, Australia. We shot a little bit in Finland and some plain shots in New York.

Budget?

About 20% came from the fan community, from people over the Internet.  We were able to raise around one million Euros. Without that we would not have been able to make this film. So blame the Internet if you don’t like it. It was a struggle getting the money. I don’t know what it’s like in Germany, probably budgets are much bigger here, but in Finland a normal budget is one million Euros. I don’t know if you know much about Finnish films but budgets are generally not very big. So to gather six million is a huge job. The VFX was 900 000€ which is not a lot considering that the film had 890 CGI shoots, that’s the same amount of CGI shots as in the new transformers movie. I promise you, we wouldn’t even be able to pay the catering for their CGI team with the money we spent on our CGI shots. And I think they look pretty good.

How did you get the Laibach orchestra  to do the soundtrack?

I put a huge package together, with all my previous films, and the script, and all the merchandise, and I went to one of their shows and gave it to them. I later heard that they just tossed it all, together with my handwritten letter, in the trash. So that didn’t work out at first. But then I found this great guy from Slovenia who shared an office with them. He talked to Ivan, one of the guys from Laibach, and got them interested in finding out more about the film,so I re-sent the script and this time they said they wanted to do it.

You have already used Internet to collect money for a project. Will you also collect ideas for the next film from the internet?

For sure! The whole concept of working with the internet is a very nice one and we will definitely continue down that road.

Was it hard to get money from film funds? For example Hessen Film fond?

Definitely. When you first approach them with the idea of a movie featuring Moon Nazis they go “Ah ok, Yeah. NO!”.
But when they read the script, they realized that there is actually something behind it, that a lot of thought had gone into the project. We had a lot of problems convincing people to read the scipt.

What do you like the most about space battles?

They are so irresistibly huge. These unstoppable machines crashing into one another. There is a lot of strength and power in that.  And of course I like them because they are cool. And there’s a lot of explosions, which is another thing I like.

THX
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