A little something about directing Maria

by Iina Hänninen

The world of a movie should always or at least in most cases reveal itself to the viewer in the way that the characters see it. Even if the style is realism you can always support the characters and the story in many ways. The smallest details and choices can and will make a difference.

Maria is strongly a genre movie. This allowed us to step away from realism and enter deep into the reality inside Maria’s mind and her memories – The way she sees and remembers things.

When I write a script I sort of just sit down, close my eyes and let the movie play itself for me in my mind. I can stop a scene and walk around in the location. Sometimes I get really surprised by, for example, what my characters have in their homes. Very small part of what I see ends up in the scripts. Still it’s worth walking around in those imaginary locations since certain objects or details may give me clues of characters’ personalities, their pasts or their fears and hopes etc. Luckily I’ve always been a hopeless couch potato and spent loads of time watching movies and playing video games. Therefore my imaginary locations are professionally lighted and they have clearly been retouched by a color corrector and some FX artist. Weird but comes in handy.

When pre-production starts, it’s essential that the director has a clear vision of the movie as a whole. It’s important to be able to explain and describe everything to the members of the crew. However, it’s equally important to be able to receive others’ ideas and quickly try in your head if the new pieces fit the scheme and possibly make it a lot better (which often is the case when working with as talented people as we had in our crew). This ”piece fitting” becomes truly important when the shooting starts. To keep in the schedule I tried my best to correct only the kind of things that would have seriously harmed the end result. It’s perfectly okay to let the film to grow into what it wants to as long as it works. Don’t try to hold on to your original detailed vision if another clearly works too. If the pre-production has been done properly the movie will start to grow into something that is very close to what you had visioned it to be.

Im really thankful for the experience which I had working with our wonderful and truly talented actors and actresses. We didn’t have the resources needed to meet beforehand and talk about the characters. We didn’t even rehearse! Normally this would have been a catastrophe but not with these stars. I shortly and simply told them who their characters were and what they were feeling or wanting and why. In seconds before our eyes they became their characters. Especially Jenny. She simply was Maria. We didn’t have to retake a single shot due to the way she interpreted a certain situation or feeling. And I have to say that due to our ridiculous schedule we couldn’t have afforded to correct many things – so our perfect casting (mostly done by our production manager Jonna Vainio) was a life saver.

So… Now we have shot all the scenes and the material is being edited by Lauri Ahonen. I’m extremely happy so far. Everything has gone really well. When we were told the details about our schedule and our budget we basically just laughed and threw up and drowned in our own vomit. But everything just somehow turned out okay thanks to our amazing team. Seriously, see through the end credits of Maria and pick anyone to work with. They’ll be able to create pure gold out of thin air.

The only potential risk I see now is that the story is simply too big to be a short film. The rythm might be too dense. But if that will be the case, at least we’ll have the most amazing demo film for a long version, which should by the way be done in the USA with a real budget. Jenny would of course play Maria again – After all she IS Maria and has studied acting and worked in the USA.

Now I’m off to supervise the post-production. We have all sorts of dazzling plans. Oh, and remember to plan the post-production (including marketing) long before you start shooting!