The Film Experience

By Jose Solís.

In 1962, a young Finnish boxer faced featherweight champion of the world Davey Moore in a match that would go down in sports history as one of the most bittersweet for the tiny European country. Director Juho Kuosmanen has captured the event from the perspective of the challenger (played by Jarkko Lahti in a breakthrough) who finds himself vanishing among the excitement and pressure of the fight. The Happiest Day In The Life Of Olli Mäki is a bittersweet tale about our need to create larger than life personalities that help us fulfill our desires, but fail to fulfill those who are actually participating in the experience. We see the sensitive, but quiet, Olli light up when he’s with his girlfriend Raija (Oona Airola), even though his manager Eelis (Eero Milonoff) suggests she will only make him lose the fight. Despite that the film is about a boxer, it has more in common with melancholy romances like Jules and Jim and Roman Holiday, than with Raging Bull. The film premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival where it picked up the Prize Un Certain Regard, since then it went on to become the Finnish Oscar entry, so I spoke to director Kuosmanen about the parallels between the film and his life, shooting in black and white, and entering the craze of awards season.

Read the interview after the jump.

JOSE: I felt I watched film about its own making. We see the documentary filmmakers following the protagonist around, and we see him trying to create his own art in the form of a fight. Were you trying to show the process of filmmaking?

JUHO KUOSMANEN: You’ve got it exactly right (laughs), it’s based on a true story but basically I did it for a very selfish reason, which is because I felt identified with this guy who gets the opportunity of a lifetime and has everybody sayin “you got this”, and the big contradiction about how you feel about your personal goals, and the expectations others put in your career. From my personal point of view it’s an allegory for filmmaking, and it’s what kept me interested in telling this story because I had started so many other screenplays and never followed through. I’d done a short film called The Painting Sellers, which won the Cinefondation prize at Cannes in 2010, so by the time I was making my first feature I was regarded as this brilliant young filmmaker which put me under pressure. I was writing and didn’t feel like “the promising young director” and didn’t know if I’d be able to fulfill expectations. Even if I didn’t want to think about the response from Cannes I couldn’t stop, so when I found this story I saw the parallels and decided to deal with my emotions through this story. I realized even if the film was a catastrophe, I’d still be standing in the end.

JOSE: Is Olli seen as a story of failure or success in your hometown?

JUHO KUOSMANEN: When we wrote it we advertised it to raise the money, and we promised no audience members would be disappointed (laughs), but we got calls and emails asking why we were concentrating on the fight he lost, rather than his triumphs. I told them I was more interested in him as a person rather than a boxer, he said this was the happiest day in his life even though others felt it should have been the opposite. I felt moral responsibility to him, I’m not making fun of him losing the fight, I’m just portraying his idea of what success is in the end.

The director and stars in Cannes
More than Rocky and Raging Bull the film made me think of 8 ½. The black and white gives it a lyrical quality, why was it important to shoot like this?

I love those boxing movies but I’m very happy you thought of 8 ½ because it’s a film about filmmaking. We had to ace two obstacles: the boxing drama and the period piece, we were afraid of doing either of those, so when we started talking about the period we realized we were good at having small details, like using the poetry of everyday life and using things in the environment. We knew we had to build everything from the 60s, we needed to find materials from the era, we wanted the film to look like it was shot in the 50s or 60s, especially documentaries of the time, which look like fiction and reality at the same time. We shot in one stock and we realized after removing the colors in one stock everything felt like the 60s, we didn’t need to underline anything for the audience. It wasn’t just an aesthetic choice, it was about the way it felt.

I read that you’d worked in the past with Jarkko Lahti, is there any parallel between your relationship with him and the one we see between Olli and his manager Eelis?

I think the dynamic was more between Jarkko who is doing his first leading role in a feature film and Eero Milonoff who plays Eelis and was the most experienced actor in the film. The dynamics between them and Oona who was a newcomer too had more similarities than the ones with me. My producer was worried the manager would be seen as an asshole though (laughs) because he felt related to that character.

Davey Moore died a year after the fight. Was it difficult as a storyteller to bring a sense of freshness to the character especially knowing he’d die so tragically so soon afterwards?

There’s a shot in the party where we see him alone and we wanted to show you feel the same whether you win or lose, I also wanted to have a few images of him one last time before he doesn’t exist anymore. I think that’s why Olli said that was the happiest day of his life, maybe he thought that might’ve been the fight where he died too. Olli continued boxing but he was set free of this world in this particular fight which was all about money and fame. Davey Moore in a way was a victim of this.

Olli has Alzheimer’s now which is very sad. Did his current condition make you feel stronger about the importance of film as a preservation of memories?

Nice question, I didn’t think I was making a melancholy film, I knew there were some funny parts. The melancholy in the film comes from things that already are in the past, if we think of Olli as not living in the present anymore there was something so beautiful and sad about it. It’s like an old picture, they remind you of death and things we already lost. Did you notice Olli’s cameo in the end of the film? We see the characters walking by the river and an older couple walk past them and they ask “will we become like them?”, that was the real Olli and Raija, I wanted the film to be about the people, but also for it to be about the memories. I’m not much for nostalgia but I end up doing things like this (laughs), there’s always beauty and sadness in things.

I thought the scene where the reporter’s camera doesn’t work when they’re shooting the documentary as Davey Moore arrives was hilarious for instance.

(Laughs) Yeah, you can see that in the real life in the documentary, Miss Finland showed up to welcome Davey Moore and she ends up kissing him over and over for the photographers. It’s a very funny documentary, I watched it and already knew how Olli felt about the fight, so it was very helpful to see how they tried to build this guy into a hero even if he didn’t want to be that.

Apologies then for asking a question about the pressure of awards expectations, but how do you feel about Oscar season and campaigning for the film?

I’m very excited about this, I think because I was dealing with this as I made the film, I don’t think I let things like these mess with my head anymore. I didn’t get any professional help (laughs) but I think I got through many issues, I’m mostly happy people are seeing this film which is so personal to me. It feels nice to be understood as a filmmaker, awards are nice and I hope in my next film I can also enjoy the making of it, rather than feel pressure, that’s the one thing about making this film that I really want to hold on to.

Other Foreign Film Oscar Interviews
Singapore - Boo Junfeng on the prison drama The Apprentice
Cuba - Pavel Giroud on the Havana HIV drama The Companion
South Korea - Kim Jee-woon on The Age of Shadows
Austria - Maria Schrader on Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
Italy - Gianfranco Rosi on the prize-winning Fire at Sea