INTERVIEW: ‘Compartment No. 6’ explores train connections and human connections
Photo: Seidi Haarla stars as Laura in Compartment No. 6. Photo courtesy of Sami Kuokkanen / Aamu Film Company / Provided by Sony Pictures Classics with permission.
The new movie Compartment No. 6, directed and co-written by Juho Kuosmanen, follows the unlikely relationship between a Finnish woman traveling to the northern reaches of Russia and the miner she meets on the multi-day train ride to her destination. At first, Laura (Seidi Haarla) is focused on her personal life and professional ambitions, including the girlfriend she left behind and the archaeological treasures she hopes to view in the port city of Murmansk. Then, she is paired with Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) in a small sleeping compartment on the train, and the two don’t see eye to eye on conversational manners and personal space.
However, the train journey, which stretches for hours and hours, begins to change them. These seemingly polar opposites begin to see friendship and commonality in each other. By the time they disembark at Murmansk, they are ready to explore the town together as two people who have shared many miles together.
Compartment No. 6, based on the novel by Rosa Liksom, features a script by Kuosmanen, Andris Feldmanis and Livia Ulman. The film has been short-listed for the Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars, and today, Jan. 26, it opens in theaters in the United States, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
“I read the novel that it’s inspired by,” Kuosmanen said in a recent phone interview. “It takes place in many time layers. It has a huge amount of characters, and I was worried about adapting it into a film because you need to lose so much. But even though I tried to put this novel aside, every time that I stepped into a train, I started to think about it again. It didn’t leave me alone, so that’s why I kept on thinking about it. A few years ago we started to write the actual script.”
For the director, these two central characters are the key to the narrative, but the screenwriters struggled to capture their essence on the page. It was only after Haarla was cast in the role fo Laura did they realize the motivations of each person riding on this train.
“I told my friend about this main character, and she suggested that I meet Seidi Haarla, who is in the end playing the main character of the film,” Kuosmanen said. “To give some more information, to give this physical appearance of the character, we started to work with Seidi, one and a half years before the shootings. I think this is the main thing of directing the film is to find this understanding between the actor and the director. This time we had with Seidi really helped us. It was easy to share these emotions and ideas about the character with her, and later on she started to be the character as well as being the actress.”
Kuosmanen, a Finnish director known for The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki, described Laura and Ljoha as similar characters who are disconnected at the beginning of their journey. They are hidden by their social roles, and they keep themselves separate from each other, almost as if they carried around a shield.
“My idea of humanity is that in a way we are different, and then when we go deeper, we are the same,” he said. “It really varies, but I will say this main issue is something that really connects us. Everybody wants to be loved as they are, as a whole picture, and at the same time, we are all different.”
Filming on a moving train was difficult for Kuosmanen and his team, but the director said filmmaking in general is a difficult endeavor no matter the circumstances. He would much rather have the obstacles he faced with Compartment No. 6 than the boring obstacles faced when working in a studio system.
“The question is what do you want to convey, and I personally think that if you are more interested about doing things easily, it means that you don’t care because all the time you are worried about the challenges,” he said. “Filmmaking always has difficulty. If you are working in a studio, you have certain kinds of difficulties. From my perspective, they are more boring than to shoot a film on a moving train. In a studio, you are more worried about illusion, but when you’re shooting in a moving train, yes, you have a lack of space, and you have a lack of air, and in a way a lack of possibilities, but in the same time, it’s all an adventure. It’s inspiring, it’s interesting and it’s somewhat more fun than to work in a studio in a controlled environment.”
The film has universal themes, but it’s also inextricably tied to Russia. The two characters, one from Russia and one from Finland, are coasting through the environment of the gigantic country on their way to a remote outpost that time has forgotten. For Kuosmanen, he wanted Russians to feel heard and seen in the narrative.
“Russia is a peculiar country,” he said. “I want to believe there is a possibility to see Russian people as human beings. … The people who are living there, they are human beings. They are beautiful human beings, and this is something that I really wanted to show in this film.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Compartment No. 6, directed and co-written by Juho Kuosmanen, is now playing in movie theaters. Click here for more information.
