Director Juho Kuosmanen on Compartment No. 6
Winter sleeper: if train movies are a subgenre, this luminously shot journey stakes its place as a new classic
Compartment No. 6: An Interview with Director Juho Kuosmanen
By Nicolas Rapold
Set in the 1990s, Compartment No. 6 recaptures the feeling of traveling alone, truly alone, without the constant tethering of smartphones. Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, this new Finnish movie joins a young woman, Laura (Seidi Haarla), on the long train trip from Moscow to snowy Murmansk. She’s going a thousand miles ostensibly to see ancient rock carvings, but the journey grows into a way of striking out on her own, escaping a life and a relationship that aren’t fitting her well anymore. Not that the director, Juho Kuosmanen, and lead actress, Seidi Haarla, create anything so banal as a story of “finding yourself,” especially once Laura meets an ornery Russian stranger (Yuriy Borisov) who becomes an unlikely, unpredictable travel companion.
If train movies can be considered a subgenre, this wintry entry, luminously shot on film by J-P Passi, stakes its place as a new classic with its own look, undercurrents of feeling, and quick-sketch portraits of people and places in the post-Soviet wilds. (Among the film’s fans is Finland’s best-known director, Aki Kaurismäki, who reportedly gifted Kuosmanen a 1962 Volga after seeing it.) Kuosmanen’s last feature was The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, an affectionate, black-and-white chronicle of a well-known Finnish boxer in the 1960s. I spoke with the director recently about Compartment No. 6, which opens on January 26 and is on the shortlist for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.
Compartment No. 6 starts with the main character, Laura, feeling lost at her girlfriend’s party in Moscow. The sequence felt to me like a key to the film emotionally. Could you talk about this opening?
Yes, actually it was one of the hardest scenes. Usually I want to shoot films in chronological order, but this scene we wanted to do at the end of the shoot, because we felt that we didn’t really know enough yet who Laura is. It’s a really defining scene even though she’s not herself in the scene. She’s mostly hiding, pretending to be somebody she is not. This is the core of the scene. Even though she’s loved and welcomed, she’s not totally secure as she is, and therefore she has difficulties accepting this love that she is getting.
The book was inspired by the novel by Rosa Liksom. What was the process of developing the story for the film?
When we were writing the story, I felt at some point that I needed something more than just a writer to collaborate with this character. And then my friend suggested I meet Seidi, she’s an interesting actress, and maybe we could talk about this character. This was one and half year before the shooting. We met, we started talking about this idea of this film, this character, and started to develop this character. So it was not just my vision or my idea of the character. We talked about a lot of issues. I shared so many personal issues that I don’t really share with anybody, except with Seidi. I think that the best way to direct actors or the best way to build characters is to try to find a common ground of understanding between the director and the actor. The main thing is not really the ability to act the character, but to understand the core of the character.
What sort of emotional common ground did you find?
A lot. I can’t avoid going into personal aspects because that’s where they all come from. There’s this feeling of being an outsider, obviously. The difficulty connecting with people. And the love that you get when you feel that you really can connect with people. This feeling of solitude and feeling of connection—I think this is the main contrast of the film. And there is also this romantic mindset in Seidi’s character that I share and that I don’t actually like in myself. I have this romantic mindset that I’m always waiting for something beautiful to happen, and I’m mostly longing for something beautiful that is already gone. And I think the main character is always waiting for something beautiful to happen and missing something that is already gone. She has difficulties being in the present, seeing how it is when it’s happening at that moment.
The movie is set in the late 1990s. Could you talk about choosing that period and achieving the film’s particular sensations of time and memory?
Yeah, there are many different layers. One of the things is that in late ’90s, we weren’t so independent, because we didn’t have smartphones where we could have all the answers of where to go. We needed to ask the questions from people that we didn’t know. And I really like this idea that we were dependent on each other. We needed to find the courage to ask advice from people we didn’t know. I think this was the main reason to set this film in the late ’90s and not to step into 2000. We had already decided that the film was inspired by a novel that take place in ’80s, but we decided to make it slightly more contemporary.
Talking with my cinematographer [J-P Passi], we wanted this film to feel like a memory: not told in the late ’90s, but a story from the past that’s told in 2020. It’s something like when you’re going through your own diary and you are remembering things like, ah, yeah, I had this meeting, I remember this guy, oh, who was he? What happened to him? It’s like a glimpse of a memory that we wanted to tell.
What filmmaking choices go into creating the sensation you’re talking about? The decision to shoot on film seems related to that, as well as the quality of the lighting.
Yeah, the choice of film was really obvious, and that was the first choice regarding the look of the film. We tested different materials, but I think film still has this level of authenticity that digital format doesn’t have. I’m pretty sure it has something to do with the imperfectness of film material. Like a memory, film is not exactly accurate. It has this, I don’t know, softening tone, this... weird feeling which is not exactly true. It’s true like a memory is true, but it’s not really accurate like a live TV show from a football match or something like that. It has this romantic tone. And for the lighting, we said in the beginning that we were not going to use any LED lights. We tried to light this film with old lights, with mercury and this kind of industrial lights which people don’t use anymore in lighting film. So we tried to find old-fashioned technical elements to create this memory-like feel.
You shot the film on an actual train on a route. Is it true you were shooting on a track where regularly scheduled trains were also running?
Yeah, it’s true. For me as a director, that was easy, because I just needed to ask for it. And I needed to fight for it, a little bit. It was the production that needed to take care of it, and they actually rented a train. They hired a locomotive and three train cars.
How did a day of shooting work? Did you just get on a train and it was moving for a whole day?
Almost! The shoots on the train started at 9 in the morning from one station, and then we had 10- or 12-hour day in a train that was going around. We traveled depending on the scene: if we had a countryside scene, we had a countryside view, and if we had more of a city view, we had a view that was more like that. We did this for I don’t know how many days, two weeks or so. It was an adventure.
I think Compartment No. 6 qualifies as a new classic among movies set on trains. Are there other train movies that you’ve liked?
There are too many! Always when I’m asked about films, I get so worried about because every time I answer something, I feel later on that it’s wrong. I have to say that train films were not the reference [point]. There are train films like Strangers on a Train, but I wanted to avoid these films. I would say that the references for this film were actually Lost in Translation, the submarine film, Das Boot, and this amazing, beautiful Brazilian-German film, The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão by Karim Aïnouz. These films were more inspiring than the train films because the train films are in a way too close so you start to be afraid that you start to copy them.
I also thought of Richard Linklater’s Before movies a little bit.
Yeah, I’ve seen them, and I love them, but at the same time, I think they are playing in a different field. For me the first one, Before Sunrise, is the most accurate because I watched it in a way as a reference for a film where basically nothing happens but at the same time it’s so interesting all the time and so many things happen. But among train films... I like this Russian train film called Pechki-lavochki.
What was the last movie you saw?
Passing. I watched it yesterday.
Black-and-white like your debut feature.
It reminded me more of Ida, the Polish film.
Finally, I just wanted to recognize the unpredictable performance by Yuriy Borisov, who plays the stranger Laura meets on the train. You were talking about drama without anything happening—he’s terrific at just being there, holding this tension where you don’t know what he’ll say or do next.
Yes, he truly is, but actually the reason why I cast him was not the drama element but the connection between Seidi and him that I didn’t see in any other actors. In the original novel, his character is a 50-year-old guy, and when we were doing the casting, the guy was also around 50. But we couldn’t find the guy we wanted. Every time I wanted to pitch the idea of this film, it was a story of two totally exactly opposite kinds of characters who are sharing this compartment. And when I saw Yuriy Borisov with Seidi, I realized that this was not actually the story. The story is about two similar kinds of a character that are sharing this compartment but in the beginning they are so hidden behind social roles—class, nationality, gender, whatever—that they are not their true selves. But when the story goes on, they trust each other so much that they are ready to lose these roles, these shields. As can happen, when you are ready to show yourself.