The Stage Whisperer (2019/2023)
(English subtitles)
In the academic year of 2018-19, when I was at the Audiovisual Vocational Programme of Voionmaa Institute of Tampere, the school organised a screenwriting course, open to everyone, which I participated in. Petri Männistö, the teacher in charge of the Programme, who was one of the teachers on the course, asked me if I would be interested in directing a short film that would be made from one of the screenplays completed during curriculum.
The text was called The Stage Whisperer (in Finnish “Kuiskaaja”), and it was written by Maarit Saarinen. The main character of the romantic comedy is Kaj, a socially awkward but intelligent art history student who gets hired to become the stage whisperer and caretaker of Ye Olde Stars Theatre. The story is, perhaps a bit like Federico Fellini’s films, full of heavily caricatured characters and farcical comedy. There is also a supernatural element when Kaj encounters the theatre’s ghost. I agreed to join the project and pre-production began at the end of March 2019. At this point, I also edited the original screenplay with some additional text.
Actors were cast both from Voionmaa’s Acting Department and amateur theatres in Tampere, such as the Legioonateatteri and the Musiikkiteatteri Valkia. Many of the actors who appeared in the short film had already been involved in our miniseries called The Resilient Heart (“Sitkee sydän”), which had also been filmed at the school earlier that winter.
My trusted actor Antti Matikainen, who had already appeared in my film The Letter 2: Testament of the Boss (2017), was cast in the lead role of Kaj. I had suggested Antti to join The Resilient Heart series, which was produced by my fellow student Timo Kivinen and for which I wrote the screenplay together with Timo. As an actor, the self-taught Antti Matikainen is a real gem who has gone largely unnoticed, perhaps even sharing some similarities with the legendary Vesa-Matti Loiri, Antti also being a physical performer who perfectly captured the shy Kaj’s uncertain body language and his transformation into a stage hero.
The making of The Stage Whisperer began almost immediately after the filming of The Resilient Heart had been completed. I shared the directing credits for the short film with Maarit Saarinen. Her own responsibility was to direct the actors, whereas I did the visual implementation of the film. At school we rehearsed with the actors all through April. We were looking in Tampere for a suitable filming location for Ye Olde Stars Theatre. We contacted a couple of different performance spaces in the city. As it happened, the amount of money asked for the use of one of them was so exorbitant that we happily passed on that location.
After a couple of hiccups, we got in touch with Anu Panula. She ran a theatre for actors with developmental disabilities called La Strada on the edge of Pyynikintori Square, in the premises of the former Pirkka cinema on the corner of Pirkankatu and Sepänkatu. As a minor, I had once sneaked into Pirkka, which always smelled of old tar, to watch my first James Bond, and later I also frequented the film clubs and Finnish Film Archive screenings there. We made an agreement that we could film at the theatre in the mornings and afternoons before La Strada's own rehearsals began.
La Strada was a perfect location for filming. Not only could we film there all the scenes in the screenplay that were set on the stage, in the auditorium or in the dressing room, but the theatre also had plenty of winding, dark maintenance tunnels that were perfect for the haunting scenes of the story. The actors' shindig scene was staged in a stylish corridor-shaped space with red curtains and tables, where the audience had once waited for the film to start. Only the scene of the Theatre Director's office had to be filmed in Voionmaa’s premises, in Petri Männistö's own office room.
Filming began in early May 2019. We filmed for five days in La Strada. The theatre’s lighting engineer Oiva Suonio had given us a tour of the premises when we first visited the theatre.
The former cinema projector room, which now served as a control booth with its lighting boards, looked down onto the auditorium and stage. Surprisingly, Oiva told us that there was a ghost not only in our story, but this theatre was also haunted, actually, and that he had himself once seen a ghostly figure in the corner of the control booth. This coincidence confirmed my belief that we had indeed found the right place to film.
The Shakespearean costumes for the thespians in the film were rented from the Tampere Workers’ Theatre’s costume department. The finishing touches to the characters were added by the clever application of some fantasy make-up. The costume department also provided us with a conservative, vintage-style everyday suit with a vest that suited Kaj’s stiff character. Kaj’s orange work overalls were courtesy of me. I had inherited them from a previous year’s student film made as the school’s final project, when I had been cast in the role of a janitor for a fellow student’s own short.
At the beginning of May, we were able to start the actual filming. The Theatre’s Ghost was played by dancer Suvi Moisio from the Pyrokratia fire performance group. One day, the Ghost's dance was filmed on stage. She was dressed in a La Belle Epoque-style bell skirt from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Overall, however, the ghost character's external appearance had been updated to resemble a bit of Japanese Cosplay style. The day's filming also included the scenes where the Ghost appears to scare Kaj in the dressing room and in the maintenance tunnel.
The stage area was transformed into a misty space with a smoke machine. As a valuable extra, complementing our film crew, with the La Strada Theatre's own stage lights, Oiva Suonio conjured up lighting for us that perfectly suited the film’s atmosphere.
The preparation for filming the dance scene in particular, including setting up lighting and finding camera angles, took a long time, which caused the acting students to get irritated when they had to wait a long time in the dressing room to film their part. One morning, for some reason, I had overslept. As the only member of the crew, I had been entrusted with the keys to the La Strada Theatre, so the angry actors were already waiting outside the front door when I managed to get to the theatre, which was a short walk from my home on Satakunnankatu.
I finally encountered La Strada’s theatre ghost myself. At least I believe so. Once, while filming a scene in the maintenance tunnel behind the dressing room, I clearly felt someone lightly touch my shoulder with their fingertip. I thought that one of the crew members had something to say to me, and I turned to look. There was no one behind me. Later, I thought it was a shy ghost.
There was Club 21 on Puutarhakatu. The same premises had once housed the cinema called Royal in the 1980s. After that, there had been various dance clubs, one after another: first a disco for minors called the Bat Club, then L.A. Garage, the celebrity restaurateur Sedu Koskinen’s Tivoli, and what not. We filmed both the bar scenes and parts of the temperamental Pia’s apartment in Club 21. Overall, I was satisfied with the abundance of visual details that we were offered from all the filming locations we used without having to build separate sets for the film. Unfortunately, Club 21 closed down quite soon after the film was shot.
We filmed the final scene of the film in “Opintoputki”, a long pedestrian tunnel with a view over Tampere from its windows. It connects the Tampere University’s Pinni B building, completed in 2003, to the University’s Main Building, high above street level.
After the actual filming ended in May 2019, all that was left was to shoot the B-roll shots for the film.
Architecture has played an important part in all my work. The locations have been carefully considered and a specific local building has been chosen to be included in the film. The most important buildings have their own aura, a strong presence as if they were some kind of urban power places. Perhaps they also have the power of a fetish. Local landmarks tell their own story. They define the landscape and tie the story to history.
At the time, the La Strada Theatre on Pirkankatu was undergoing a façade renovation and was under scaffolding and tarpaulins, so the building was not used in exterior shots. Therefore, the old headquarters of Tampere’s Finlayson Factory was used instead as the façade of Ye Olde Stars Theatre from the outside. In May, scenes of Kaj moving around the building had already been filmed. The neo-Gothic building from 1895 had a suitably spooky style, especially at dusk. At the time, I lived in the city centre at the intersection of Satakunnankatu and Näsilinnankatu, which was a short walk from Finlaysoninkatu. On many summer mornings and evenings I brought with me a Sony Z-150 video camera borrowed from Voionmaa, taking plenty of B-roll shots of the building. One day, I also managed to film a historic horse coach carrying passengers in front of the building. The shot ended up at the beginning of the scene where Kaj visits the theatre for the last time.
Kaj’s home was represented by one of the student apartments managed by Voionmaa Institute, the location being in the direction of Kissanmaa and Ruotula districts, near Tampere Central Hospital. These apartment buildings on Ritakatu were typical of modern-day ugly and impersonal box-shaped architecture, so I didn’t want to use them in the exterior shots of the scene. Instead, I headed to Sotilaankatu in Turtola district with my video camera, where I filmed the Modernist residential buildings that were once used by the Finnish Air Force’s regular personnel. These buildings, from 1965 and '67, also sometimes called the “Pentagon” of Tampere, were designed by the architect brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen. Their most famous work is probably the Temppeliaukio Church in Helsinki. (I later cut a kind of experimental short film called Sotilaankatu, "Soldier's Street", from that leftover B-roll.)
Sotilaankatu (2025)
By no means do I consider myself a bona fide cameraman, by experience or skill, but if I have had the opportunity, I have always greatly enjoyed filming B-roll, usually meaning that supplemental footage in the film – street views, buildings, nature images and so on. By August, I had been roaming with video camera around midtown Tampere and, in addition to Turtola, my former home district of Kaukajärvi, filming street views here and there. Much of that material now remains in the archive (or was eventually recycled into other video projects), but at least there was now plenty of B-roll available for the film.
The story is set in the world of theatre. I filmed the facades of Tampere’s different playhouses around the time of the annual Tampere Theatre Festival in August. These images ended up in the opening credits of the film. They were inspired by the Jugendstil art or Art Nouveau of the 19th and 20th centuries, the psychedelic posters of the 1960s and, of course, Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations.
During the post-production phase, time was also spent on the film's soundtrack music. I composed the theme song 'Love Will Find You', which is heard in the opening credits of the film. The song was performed by Kompleksi, our own "eclectro" duo. Furthermore, Kompleksi's 'Battlestar Erotica' plays in the background of the bar scene.
The theme of the opening credits was varied during the film in both electronic and acoustic versions. We recorded the latter with the help of musician Sami Laitala at his home studio, which was at the time near the border of Ylöjärvi, Tampere’s neighbouring municipality.
Essi Tervonen, who did the sound editing for the film, then built an orchestration for the acoustic version, which is heard in the film during Ye Olde Stars Theatre's dress rehearsal scene. She also composed other music for the film, as well as an arrangement of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, which plays in the background during the dance scene of the Theatre's Ghost.
At the same time, editing of the film had begun, which took almost the entire autumn of 2019. The Tampere Short Film Festival was targeted: submission for the competition was required by December. In any case, the version that we were eventually able to send to the Film Festival was still unfinished, especially in terms of the sound work. Even though the sound had already been thoroughly edited in post-production. The hum of Club 21's air conditioning had been heavily heard on the original soundtrack, which meant that the voices of the actors in the bar scene had to be dubbed again in the studio. The lines of other actors had also been dubbed in Voionmaa Institute's radio studio during that autumn. All in all, a huge amount of work was done to create the soundscape for the half-hour film. In the end, of course, The Stage Whisperer did not make it through the Tampere Film Festival selection. Also, the first version that was uploaded to YouTube was by no means a finished film.
It was not until a couple of years later, in January 2023, that I had actually had time to properly finalise the film's post-production work, polish the color grading, and so on, and the corrected version now replaced the previous one. Of my own works to date, I consider The Stage Whisperer to be the most successful.
Later, when I re-watched the film, I was surprised to discover how much Freudian symbolism had actually crept into its images. However, it is better to leave the discovery of them only to those viewers who are interested in such things.
The film was dedicated to the memory of Anu Panula, who kindly gave us the permission to use the La Strada Theatre for our film. She passed away from a serious illness at the age of 64 in July 2021.
Kuiskaaja - trailer
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