In Cannes with the Moon Nazis
In the beginning of the year I mentioned that I got a job as the publicist of the Finnish-German-Australian scifi movie Iron Sky. I was involved in Star Wreck as Fukov/Festerbester and I’ve been interested in taking part in Iron Sky for years. This year was the first time the combination of schedules, finances and other everyday logistics made it possible for me to actually start to work for the movie.
Iron Sky is not a very traditional movie project, though, and a big part of the people behind it come from a completely different background than the traditional movie business. In a nutshell, in our production company we have our stone cold movie professionals from the more traditional side of the business, and then we have us geeks from the Star Wreck side of things who have a good handle on how the online world works. In the end it seems to me is that the project has managed to combine the best of both worlds.
The Cannes beach.
This month my job took me to the Cannes Film Festival, where filmmakers go to promote their movies to both sellers and distributors – and in our case strongly to the fans also. The traditional way to do this is to meet face to face with people in the innumerable cocktail parties all around the city and to lure people into your office, which you set up in an apartment or a hotel room for the duration of the festival.
Timo wrote an excellent recap of our Cannes escapades in the Iron Sky blog, so I’m not going to repeat everything in here – this is more about my vibes of the trip.
THE GLAMOROUS WORK DAYS
Our accommodation was a large apartment with a large living room, a yard with a pool and several bedrooms. Most of the rooms had double beds, so rather unglamorously me and Pekka, who is an another member of our social media team, had to share one.
Our apartment had a pool in the yard, but because Cannes was colder than a polar bear's buttplug, the only one that braved the waters was Timo.
My work day consisted mainly of waking up before nine, grabbing some instant coffee and toasts while trying to get the crappy wifi in our apartment to work (two things the French can’t seem to accomplish: a working wifi and halfway sensible locks on doors), and then heading off to the office. It was a nice 15 minute walk down to the seaside and the Grand Hotel where the Iron Sky Lobby was. If I wasn’t in a hurry and on the road alone, I often stopped to grab a tastier coffee on the way from one of the innumerable bakeries.
This is where I mainly sat at, handling our online publicity and showing visitors the new teaser on the TV that is on the right.
For me there weren’t that many cocktail parties, and this was by choice. For me they didn’t feel like the place and the method to get the word out in the way and volume I wanted to, so I stuck into what I knew and wanted to do. I spent most of my days sitting in our office and hammering out press releases and keeping up with what’s going on in the net with my laptop. I kept joking that the Cannes trip wasn’t in any way different from my ordinary work week, except that there were palm trees instead outside of my window instead of a brick wall.
People kept pouring in wanting to see our new teaser or to talk to the producer and the director about the movie. Most of them were buyers or distributors, but I did my best to rope in journalists also. One day Terry Gilliam dropped by unannounced, but unfortunately not to check on Iron Sky. I don’t go into a fanboy mode that easily, but Gilliam is definitely one of the filmmakers I really respect – Brazil is pure genius.
We had a huge banner on our office balcony to draw in people.
THE PAYLOAD
We had a figurative fuckton of stuff going on and big things to publicize. First of all, we released our second teaser, which was a pleasure to show around: you know you are in a good position when you are selling a product that you think is so cool it makes cold shivers go down your back even after seeing it forty times already.
There was also a big merchandising deal with EMI, we publicly announced that Laibach will be making the movie score, opened the movie for fan investments that really took off (220 000€ is the latest figure I heard, this in a bit over a week) and of course announced that we’ll be going to Australia to do the studio shootings.
Working with all this stuff was hugely satisfactory. My time was spent tracking who was writing about it and what, fishing out new contacts and sites where to promote the materials, trying to reach new journalists and other interested parties who haven’t heard about Iron Sky, and so on. Seeing the information percolate through the net and the world from the Western world to Africa, China and Russia was hugely impressive. When you know what you are doing, internet is one motherfucker of an information hose.
Also, yours truly managed to make it to the Mark Kermode blog about Iron Sky, and got in an Älymystö shirt too:
THE TIME OFF
One of the weird things about going to the movie festivals to work is that you don’t end up seeing any movies. I didn’t even get accredited, ie. get that pass that gives at least a chance to get into some of the screenings and other events. The only moment when I regretted that was when I found out that Lemmy the Movie was showing in Cannes. Turns out, though, that even if I would have had the accreditation, I wouldn’t have probably got in since I’m not a buyer or a distributor – even journalists had hard time getting in through the doors.
A park on our way to our apartment was a beautiful light show at nights.
I ended up going out to town only a couple of times, once when we arranged a happy hour in Iron Sky lounge, and the other time in the last evening before heading over back to Finland. On the first night I found out that rich people are suckers: the 15 euro gin & tonics they sell to people in the bigger beachside hotels don’t taste any better than the four euro ones. The only perk of the price seemed to be that when my credit card didn’t work and I started cursing in Finnish, in stepped this guy who had been standing in a corner eyeing everybody, and he just made the card work, really fast and hassle free. Had a great time talking with colleagues, our potential fan investors and all kinds of other people you run into in happenings like this – and very much needed zeroing out the brain after days and days of staring at the screen.
In the final evening, or rather morning, I had one of those enjoyable timeless moments – everybody else had gone to bed already, but I spent a while sitting in our balcony, listening to the night birds and Fever Ray, and watching the Cannes sky turn from black to deep indigo and break towards blue.
In the other days I was surprisingly happy to work through the day, then walk home, grab a bit of kebab to eat on the way and then just relax with New Model Army or Civilization IV which I got off of the brand new Steam for Mac. It had the added bonus of getting a bit of peace and quiet after a day at the office, where it often got quite hectic: at times there where three different sales or budget meetings going on at the same time, with more people pouring in through the door wanting to see or discuss one film or another. Iron Sky wasn’t the only film we were promoting and we were also sharing the office with another production company, so things didn’t get lonely there either.
So, this is what I do for a living nowadays. The work is satisfying, life is full of adventures and things are looking all around so great that I’m almost getting suspicious.
Our apartment yard.
The morning sky in our balcony.
Älymystö Album Release Tour & Iron Sky Goes Germany
I’m currently at home, reeling from the shock of the shock caused by my surroundings. In the last month I’ve spent about five days at home, the rest of the time being eaten by our diving trip to Hurghada, which I wrote about in the previous blog post, followed by Älymystö’s album publication tour and after that a week and a half in Germany with the Iron Sky crew.
The few days after we got back to home from Hurghada were full of activity. Started my new work week by fixing my brand new Macbook Pro to a working condition, and promptly getting a mild stomach flu on my first work day. My upset stomach kept me at home for the beginning of the week and slowed me up enough that I couldn’t get all the work preparation done before it was time to leave for the Älymystö tour.
As I’ve written earlier, Älymystö published its first release since Atomgrad and we went out to Tampere, Helsinki, Tallinn and Riga to promote it on a tour. In Finland the weather has been really wintery and blizzardy, bad enough to get trams stuck in the snow and ice in Helsinki downtown. Considering that our trip had surprisingly few mishaps in the Finnish end, and even driving around the Baltics was easy. The tour was incredibly satisfying: we had fun gigs, playing was fun and went well, we managed to stream live video from some of them to the net and we got to visit the coolest fucking underground club we had ever seen, Elektra in Riga. You can read more about our trip in Älymystö’s blog!
The only bad thing was that we got back home around midnight on Sunday, and Timo and I had to get up at four to catch our plane to Berlin for the Iron Sky trip. I had slept for three and a half hours in the previous night and spent the day driving us from Riga to Tallinn. When the alarm clock went off after another 3,5 hour night, I was sure I’d fucking die right then, right there.
So, my new job as the publicist and making of -producer of Iron Sky started off with a bang. On Monday we went straight into business, me with a new camera I hadn’t even touched before I got it in Germany. What followed was a week and a half of movie business, including everything from going through moods and set plans through checking out potential shooting locations and ending with casting new actors. I can honestly say that it was probably the most fun ten days I’ve spent so far while working from nine in the morning to nine or ten in the evening. The days just flew past, the couple of free nights we spent out were fun and the whole deal filled me up with enthusiasm about the work. Intrigued? Read more info from Iron Sky’s production blog!
On the hobby front Susi and I also started an intensive course in Arabic and the first lessons were today. So, yet another language with non-latin letters, and a rather difficult language at that. We started our studies with book Arabic, which is kind of useless if you want to use the language in a spoken setting. Then again, it gives your a good basis on learning one of the spoken dialects. Maybe in the future we’ll be having trips to Egypt which are composed half and half of diving and intensive language study.
In any case, check out the Älymystö and Iron Sky blogs for both blog posts and pretty pics. For me it’s time to hit the bed so I’ll have the energy to go through over five hours of video from Germany and a couple of hours of footage from Älymystö tour – so yes, there will be video too.
Rock Climbing Sunday
Rock climbing is one of the hobbies that’s pretty common in the circles I hang around in, and now and then people have tried to lure me to try it was well. I’ve been on an indoor wall once in 2003 or so, as a part of a company activity day. It was quite fun, but after that I’ve never got around to trying it again, neither in or outdoors.
This Sunday I headed off towards Haukkakallio, where Miri, Dare and assorted other people were busy crawling up a granite face. The day was excellent right from the start. The sky was deep blue and almost devoid of clouds, and the temperature was close to +30C. I gunned the car down the highway, blasting Eagles of Death Metal, enjoying the summer and the feeling that all is fundamentally well in the world.
On a tangent, Eagles of Death Metal is simply brilliant summertime music. It makes one want to strut down a sunny avenue, eat ice-cream, drink rum cola and have dirty and sweaty sex. In my opinion this is exactly what summer rock should make you feel like.
In any case, I finally made my way to the Haukkakallio rock face and found the rest of the gang busy up and around the rock wall. The forest was beautiful and the air was hot. There were big, fat and slow horseflies buzzing everywhere, but the scorching sunshine had driven mosquitos in the cool shadows of the caves, grottos and other nooks. The nature was really beautiful all around.
I got some loaner equipment and tried two different routes. First of them was pretty easy after I got past the first meter and half, but on the second one I got stuck two thirds up. I could have probably got further if I had swung my legs up and done some sinew breaking acrobatics, but my ankle was still sore from last Wednesday. I didn’t want to fuck up the joint and with it the next week’s three diving trips, so I did the sensible thing, which was to pussy out and get back down.
In conclusion rock climbing is something I’ll probably continue doing now and then with pals, but I won’t probably get hooked on it like with diving. Climbing was somehow a bit intimidating, but not for the obvious reason, which is the idea of hanging tooth and nail on a rock wall with just a rope between you staying up and plummeting to rocks and splitting your pelvis or heel bone (a completely fictional example).
In the end dangling up there didn’t bother me at all, which was kind of a surprise for me. Somehow the whole thing just felt kind of unforgiving. One missed foot or handhold and you end up with a skinned knee or elbow, and most importantly the realisation that but for the grace of the rope you’d be down in the rocks, busy counting your broken bones. I guess the division between being in control and losing it is a bit too narrow for my taste. Nevertheless, it was really fun and rewarding to get to try something new and get new experiences.
Afterwards we went to a nearby lake for a swim in a cool and surprisingly clear lake, and to barbeque some sausages. My fingertips were completely raw even after just a couple of climbs, which was a bit of a surprise. You tend to think of granite as smooth, but that’s of course the variety you get on shorelines or in buildings. In the nature it’s big grained, rough and surprisingly sharp.
When I stepped back into car, I was feeling happy, at peace and harmonious. Beautiful nature, scratches and sore muscles from physical exercise and that nice smooth feeling you get after washing off the sweat of a summer day in cool lake water. Small moments of perfection.
