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.
Guest Theremin on Enochian Crescent’s NEF.VI.LIM
Last summer I had a great time at the Tuska metal festival playing theremin on the stage with Enochian Crescent. They liked what they came up with for the song Muistoja Sorkasta and earlier this year they asked me to record it for their new album, NEF.VI.LIM.
The album is now out, theremin and all, and currently on the first place of Finland’s mid-price top-10 list. If you want to check out some quality black metal for Finland, go get it!
Enochian Crescent – Lyijysiipi
Cave Diving – Kaatiala Quarry
Susi and I had barely got our diving gear dry from our trip to Zenobia before it was the time to leave for another dive, this time to check out Kaatiala Quarry and try out some cave diving. The quarry was operational in 1942-1968 and it produced quartz and feldspar, but after it was closed down people still collected stones that were used for jewelry. The quarry is about 200 meters wide and 30 meters deep, and it has a small cave system that reaches some 85 meters into the stone horizontally, about 40 meters deep.
Our old colleague and study pal had invited us to visit the quarry and stay overnight in a nice cabin next to the place, which is favoured by divers. There was also a bunch of guys doing the IATND Cavern Diving course staying in the cabin, so we got to overhear a little bit of what we can expect when we do that course in the future.
We were originally meant to stay there over the weekend and do a couple of dives on Saturday with our single tank gear, and try double-12 bottles and a Hogarth rig on Sunday, but unfortunately Susi developed some ear trouble (and our car developed some ignition trouble) so we had to abandon Sunday’s plans. I had also masterfully forgotten to charge my lamp battery and also forgot the charger home, but luckily one of the guys had bought a spare lamp that was bright enough to use a primary. Getting a loaner lamp was great, since without it we would have had to forget our plans of peeking into the caves.
(See the full photoset in Flickr)
Susi peeking into the smallest entrance to the cave system.
CERTIFICATIONS AND SAFETY
Susi and I are certified to go down to 40 meters and we just got our wreck certifications, which means that we can go inside wrecks to within 40 meters of the surface, or as far as the daylight carries. This means that if the wreck is 30 meters deep, we can enter 10 meters into the wreck on our own, and so on. In Finland the daylight requirement is a bit harsh, though, since the water is usually so murky that every dive under 15 meters or so is a night dive.
We try to be quite careful about diving within our certifications, since the surest way to get a lungful of water is to overextend yourself, especially by going into an overhead environment underwater without good training. There has been one fatality in this dive location too that was the result of pretty much just that – ignoring safety rules and certifications.
We talked about our plans and decided to go and see the caverns and decide, if it looked safe enough before going in. Our estimate was that it would be as safe as we could make it if we did it like a wreck dive, following the same protocols.
CHECKING THE QUARRY
When I went down to the quarry, the first surprise was the visibility, which was several meters. According to the people who’ve been diving there more, this was bad for the place, but even as it was it was quite nice. The second surprise were the glimmering rocks and rock walls down there. Going down to the greenish black darkness I was surprised to see the rock walls gleam in the lamp light. Both the walls and single rocks in the bottom of the quarry had metallic facets and veins in them that reflected the dive light and flashlight like little pieces of mirrors. As a movie prop or computer game graphics it would have looked a bit contrived, but seen live it was really beautiful.
Some of the stones looked almost like movie props.
On our first dive we checked out the cave entrances and did a tour of the quarry. There’s all kind of weird junk down there, ranging from a broken laptop to self made small bathysphere (or a diving bell, rather) and a model plane that’s about 4-5 meters long. There’s apparently a car of some sort down there too, but that one we didn’t find. Susi did a good job navigating, because after a largish loop we ended up right under the wooden pier we used coming down to the water.
A four by five meter model plane made of metal - a perfectly logical find in a depth of 30 meters.
INSIDE THE ROCK
After the dive we felt confident enough to try and check out the cave. After some food, coffee and recuperation in the cabin we headed back to the quarry. There are three entrances to the cave system, all of which come into the same antechamber, which has several entrances deeper into the rock. Our plan was to take the rightmost entrance that is the largest, tie off a line and go in about ten meters, which we measured and marked on the line with a knot. There were fixed ropes in place which one could follow, but we didn’t want to rely just on them, because we really didn’t have a clear idea of where they went.
All in all, our first time inside a rock went reasonably well. There was some hassle on the entrance when Susi was looking for a suitable place to fasten the line, and we managed to kick up a bit of silt. Following the rock wall there weren’t many chances to do secondary tie offs that we recognized, so I was doubly careful to keep the stationary rope in sight all the time. Additionally if we covered our lights, it was possible to see a very faint glow from the entrances. We made it around the corner and into the middle entrance into the cave system before our 10 meters was up and we turned around.
It's easy to believe people kept finding rocks for jewelry here even after the quarry shut down.
As cave dives go, it was just a little peek in, but still impressive. The caverns were wide and the water was clear enough to reveal the jagged rock above and around us, the metallic veins and facets gleaming in our torch lights. I didn’t have a camera in there, since I wanted to concentrate on diving completely. All in all, after the dive it was clear how much more training and equipment is needed before it’s even time to think about going any deeper into a cave like this.
After coming out of the cave we spent the remaining bottom time exploring the quarry. We veered a bit off course, and since part of the quarry was still covered with thin ice, we decided to get up immediately. There was no real danger there, but better to be safe than sorry. So we surfaced some 40 meters away from the landing, in to a nice evening sunshine peeking over the fir trees.
Like little shards of mirror.
(See the full photoset in Flickr)
IN THE FUTURE – MORE WRECKS AND CAVES
It was clear for both me and Susi right from the beginning that diving in wrecks and caves is what we’ll want to do in the future, and now within a week we got to try both of them. That initial impulse was not wrong: now it’s just a matter of time and money to go to the proper training and get the proper gear, and it’s back into the rock and rusting iron for us!
