Aki Kaurismaki: Finnish film-maker discovers a brighter side

A little after 10am on a Monday morning and Aki Kaurismaki is already cracking open his first beer. The Finnish director, 50 this week, is in London to promote his new film, Lights in the Dusk. This is the last in his so-called "loser trilogy", following on from Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past. It is a typically deadpan tale about a lovelorn security guard led astray by a femme fatale. Imagine Charlie Chaplin in Helsinki, drinking too much Special Brew and you'll get its essence.

Kaurismaki calculates that around half of his 16 features have been made when drunk. "When I write, I am sober. I can direct drunk. I can't edit or write drunk," he explains.

Kaurismaki once joked that the reason he doesn't like violent camera movements in his own movies is that they make him feel ill when he is hungover. "I have a drinking problem, if you call it a problem. If I drink, I drink too much." But whatever his alcohol consumption, Kaurismaki remains one of the few contemporary European filmmakers whose work bears comparison with that of auteurs such as Godard, Truffaut or his beloved Jean Vigo. He is the champion of the oppressed. In his films, the heroes and heroines are invariably small-timers who have been betrayed. Their lovers may have left them. Their bosses may have sacked them. They teeter on the edge of despair but the director (who has described himself as "an old man with a tender heart") generally engineers some kind of final-reel redemption for them.

The image Kaurismaki's work offers of Finland is very different from the tourist-eye view of an affluent Scandinavian country. In his world, brutality rules. "Nobody [in Finland] is happy," he growls.

Kaurismaki is from a middle-class background (his father was a salesman). However, he has never made a film about the bourgeoisie. "How can you write the dialogue for films about the middle class? They might have as hard mental troubles as anyone else, but the dialogue is impossible. It is easier to be a slave or to be a boss."

Kaurismaki can trace his passion for cinema back to the spring of 1973 when he he was a teenager and went to see a double-bill of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North and Luis Bunuel's L'Age D'Or. "This woke me up to understand that cinema can be art. I remember I was in shock. I went around the little village where I lived saying, 'This is great,' but nobody understood what the hell I was talking about. They haven't understood since."

He was turned down from film school on the grounds that he was "too cynical". His film education came instead from seeing as many movies as he could. Kaurismaki has a passion for British cinema and talks fondly about watching old Alec Guinness comedies or Powell and Pressburger movies on TV.

The Finnish cinephile began his directorial career with an adaptation of Crime and Punishment in 1984. "It was not because it was a great book, but because guilt was so near to me," he says, explaining why he was drawn to Dostoevsky's morbid tale about the impoverished student Raskolnikov and the pawnbroker he murders. "Every Finnish man has guilt."

Some of Kaurismaki's films are scripted. Some are improvised. "I have two methods. If I have a screenplay, I follow it. If I don't, I improvise. Nobody else improvises - not the cameraman or the actors. Just me." In his wondrously bizarre second feature Calamari Union (1985), which falls into the "improvised" category, there are 17 different characters called Frank. Kaurismaki was working on the screenplay in the bath, trying to come up with different names for the protagonists, and eventually decided it would all be much easier if they shared the same name.

As the producer of his own films, he is responsible for reining in his own spending. He is a famously economical director who rarely shoots more than one take and never wastes time on irrelevant dialogue.

In interviews, as in his films, the director is given to make deadpan jokes. He is self-deprecating and very ironic. Nonetheless, he takes his work seriously. He is especially proud of Total Balalaika, his 1993 film showing the Red Army Choir sharing a stage with renegade Finnish rock band The Leningrad Cowboys in front of an audience of 70,000 in a square in Helsinki and belting old rock songs. On one level, this is an exercise in kitsch. However, there a political subtext. For years, the Russians and the Finns had hated each.

"It was very important," he says of the concert. "It was the end of the Second World War between Finland and Russia. It's a long story, but there was a trauma. This trauma was rebuilt in the heart of Helsinki when the Red Army chorus came on. It was a big relief for both sides."

What next? Kaurismaki is mulling over whether he should start to "write bad novels" or continue making "bad films". One guesses he will opt for the latter. After all, Kaurismaki is a revered figure in world cinema. He is withering in his criticism of his own work, at least by comparison with that of masters such as Michael Powell. "The problem is, I have seen all the other films. All the serious films ever made I have seen, more or less. They are so good... and I am so bad. Very early in my so-called career, I knew I would never make a masterpiece. So I decided to make lots of decent films."

The best he can say about his work is that it holds up a mirror to the Finnish society in which it was made. Social historians wanting to know what it was like to be unemployed in 1980s Finland will know where to start. "Maybe my films are not masterpieces, but they are documents of their time. That's enough for me. Masterpieces I can't do - even though I try."

No interview with Kaurismaki can go by without discussion of the dogs who've appeared in so many of his films. One, Tahti, co-star of The Man Without a Past, won an acting prize in Cannes. "Do you want the honest truth?" Kaurismaki growls when I ask about his canine casting. "I like dogs, mankind I don't care for too much. You're supposed to like mankind because you're part of it, but I prefer dogs. They are honest and they don't lie."

'Lights in the Dusk' is out now

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