The train is already leaving the station when “Compartment No. 6” begins, though neither Ljoha (Yuriy Borisov) or Laura (Seidi Haarla) have got on just yet. The latter is en route to Murmansk, but her planned companion Irina will not be joining her, having the many hours of the cross-continental trip from Finland to wonder what went wrong with the woman that inspired her to travel to the Arctic circle in the first place to the ancient petroglyphs as one of just a handful of places where the earliest drawings of man can be seen. It says something about Ljoha that’s he’s actually unwelcome as a distraction when Laura sits cramped in coach, her mind even more cluttered with unhappy thoughts about being spurned by her lover. By attrition, she’s the last one left with the boorish miner who looks about as drunk as Laura wants to be, if only she could let herself go like that, but that’s about the only thing she can admire about him as he starts to needle her about where she’s headed.
Although the destination is clear for both, what it will take to get there becomes the central question in Juho Kuosmanen’s marvelous third feature about the strangers in the night who eventually come to recognize they might not be as alone in the world as they thought. The director of “The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki” had known for years himself that there was something special in Rosa Liksom’s novel after looking over his wife’s shoulder as she was reading to ask whether it might be ripe for adaptation, but beyond the logistics of constructing a shoot around an actual moving train, the intricacies of connection made that wasn’t necessarily romantic yet deeply emotional between the pair, particularly when that bond was forged in a language other than the Finnish director’s foreign tongue. (Lead actress Haarla was actually initially brought into help with the translation before the director realized his lead actress was right in front of him.)
The stars may take some time to align for Ljoha and Laura to break through to one another, but it’s magical how everything falls into place in Kuosmanen’s enchanting drama as the aspiring archeologist finds that her greatest dig may not involve the petroglyphs at all, but getting to the bottom of her seat mate’s clearly troubled past. After the film became the talk of Cannes last summer, eventually sharing the Grand Prix Prize with Asghar Faradi’s “A Hero,” “Compartment No. 6” is now arriving in Stateside theaters after being shortlisted for Best International Feature at the Oscars and the director spoke about what first attracted to the novel, working with the combustible elements at hand throughout the production and the unrequited love he’s experienced in this time when it’s difficult to share the film with audiences.
You’ve said you read the novel a decade ago, what kept you coming back to you about it as an idea for a film?
This film was, as usual, the landscape and the characters. This is the core of the film always. When I read the novel 10 years ago, I really fell in love with it. I felt there was so much potential, but at the same time I was really worried because I felt there are so many things that we needed to leave out. It was the moment when I met Rosa Liksom, the author of the original novel, and she said that you can do whatever you can use the novel as material and this was the core moment that really led us to the film.
In the book, Ljoha is much older. When you saw Yuiry and Seidi together, did it change your ideas of what this could be?
Really a lot. I really love actors and I want to give them freedom to develop their characters. That’s why Seidi was already involved in this film a year-and-a-half before shooting. We talked about a lot about a script, about personal issues and everything, but then we had real difficulties to find the Russian character. In the script, as it is in the original novel, the guy was around 50 years old and I pitched the idea that it’s about two opposite characters that have to spend this time together in this small compartment and little by little, they are seeing something similar in the other. When I saw Yuriy Borisov and Seidi Haarla in same casting room, I realized that this is not the case. This is not the film.
The film is about two exactly similar kind of characters — they are almost like twins that they didn’t know that the other one existed — but in the beginning, when they first meet each other, they’re hiding behind these roles of social class or role of nationality of a being a Russian guy or being a Finnish woman. That’s why they are so disconnected. But this is not the truth of these characters. When I saw them together, I felt that the end of the film actually works perfectly with these characters because in the end they are melting together. They are the same. They don’t have any more of these social differences. They don’t even have the different gender because the gender doesn’t matter when you are not having a sexual relationship, but you are having only a connection.
You actually couldn’t physically be in the same space as the actors when the train compartment was so small, but were there things you could embrace of creating a space like that for them and operate at a remove?
We had a lack of space in every way. The scenes are mostly recorded with hidden microphones that were all over the place. We tried to use as much as we could the existing lights and we changed the bulbs, but it was not enough so we end up using also lot of artificial light in hidden places. It was really a big puzzle. But the fact that I had to be in compartment number seven when directing them was the main obstacle because when I’m watching a monitor, I’m seeing a 2D reality and I start to direct the actors as they would be objects, not living human beings. I start to focus on wrong issues like the way the image looks. It’s not easy to feel things through a monitor and this was the main difficulty for me shooting in a train, but luckily I had a film photographer [Jani-Petteri Passi] who is extremely precise and his gaze towards this actress is really a big part of the whole film, the way he looks at them, so he was there with them in the compartment and that helped a lot.
What was it like figuring out where this train was headed geographically?
When we started to do the location scouting, the script was actually set on this Trans-Siberian train track and I had done that train trip, so I knew this is not really suitable for our film. Then our location manager told me to scout these different train tracks and we felt that the best ones were from Moscow to Norilsk. Then we decided, okay, even though the original novel is on this Trans-Siberian train track, we don’t have to obey that. We can set our film on another train track and it’s so much better actually. It ends up next to the sea, which is nice. We also found such great places next to this train track that we wanted to actually replace this script on this track.
Was there anything that happened during filming that changed your ideas of what it could be?
There were small things that all the time affected, as always. When we are talking about the creativity in filmmaking, it’s not what you are creating beforehand. It’s about creativity that you can use when the shit hits the fan. That’s the moment when you really need to be creative. And on our production, the main moment like this was when this extremely hard snowstorm hit our [production] because in the north of Russia, we had a scene where we were supposed to just follow two characters walking on a beach, but during our lunch break, this extremely hard snowstorm actually hit our production and threw away our tents. At the same time, it looked so spectacular that I wanted to shoot something. When I asked the cinematographer and the actors to be involved in the [filming], they were all like, “Yeah, let’s shoot something because this is really a specific moment.” And then we shot the scene when they are walking away from these petroglyphs, which was not at all in the script.
What’s it been like getting this film out into the world? In spite of the pandemic, I know you’ve been able to travel with it a bit.
That really means everything. Cinema is something that happens between the audience and screen, so without the audience, there is nothing. There is no actual the film because the film is just a question in the air. I’m really devastated about this situation that we are going through at the moment, because for me, cinema is something — it’s a question that needs to be answered and without the audience the cinema doesn’t really exist.
“Compartment No. 6” opens on January 26th in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal and New York at the Angelika Film Center and the Cinemas 1, 2, 3 before expanding wider in the weeks ahead. A full list of theaters and dates is here.
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