Interview With Timo Vuorensola, Director of IRON SKY: THE COMING RACE

Film Inquiry got the opportunity to chat with Finnish Filmmaker Timo Vuorensola on his latest film, Iron Sky: The Coming Race, which was released in cinemas worldwide in 2019. While a polarising venture to say the least, there is no denying the passion put into the series on various levels as evidenced by the director’s enthusiasm for his work.

Faisal Al-Jadir for Film Inquiry: How are you doing Mr Vuorensola?

Timo Vuorensola: I’m good, I’m good, I’m enjoying the short but cold Finnish summer. It’s very nice, nothing to complain about.

How do you feel now that the movie is out in the open for the world to see?

Timo Vuorensola: Oh you know, it took such a long time to make that movie. We did it since…I think 2013, you can already say we started working on this movie. So it’s been a really long stretch. So to think that when you work on something for so long and then it’s suddenly out…because after the film’s out, there’s not much you can do. That’s something that leaves you with “Wow, where did all of this fuss go?”, but of course, I have other stuff happening. But yeah, it feels great, but also…a little empty.

But you have more movies in the Iron Sky universe ready to go right?

Timo Vuorensola: Yeah sure, and all of that takes time…but you know, this is a special movie because we worked on it for such a long time. I grew so attached to the whole thing that everything that we’re working on now are in their early stages and I hope everything moves faster with them. You know, it’s not going to take seven years to make the future movies. Of course every movie is a child of its own, but this one…this was a troubled child.

Having gone through a huge number of challenges to get this one out, it feels kind of special now and I’m proud and happy to see the film finally out there. I think I will never feel as proud of any film that I make as much as I feel about The Coming Race, because there were times when I wasn’t sure if we were going to be finished. It’s been a hell of a ride.

And I think many people will agree that the first Iron Sky movie was a great accomplishment. I mean, everybody was looking forward to that; if you looked online, everybody was talking about that, and the trailers were everywhere. Was there a lot of pressure in making this film match the uniqueness of the first one?

Timo Vuorensola: I’d say the biggest decision I made was not to keep on milking the same cow, so to speak; that it actually tried to be a completely different standalone story which operated in a very different world and environment. That’s something I really wanted to do, and really tried to put in a lot of effort in the early stages to make sure this looks and feels like a very different movie, while still connected in some way.

It would have been very easy to continue the story of the Moon Nazis, but early on, I felt that that story and joke have been said and done. I could have milked that for as much as I wanted, but I also felt that there were still different topics that I wanted to talk about. The biggest thing was to decide on the main theme of the movie.

In many ways, the first movie was a satire of politics, and it was commenting on the old politics, the future politics and sort of current politics. With The Coming Race, my whole idea was to create a satire or comedy on religion; looking at the different ways people see religion, apply religion and even the birth of humankind. It also looked at the directions that religions would be taking in the future. So that became the underlying theme, and that alone made it very different. Because we’re not really focused on the politics anymore, but rather on how humans were born, the mythologies related to that, and the future of religions. That was very interesting for me, but also a bit of a challenge. You kind of have to reinvent the wheel in a way.

You guys like wearing your influences on your sleeves. The first film had an obvious Star Wars influence, and also a heavy pulpy feel, almost in the manner of Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer (1991), amongst other things. For The Coming Race, which works influenced you, specifically ones that not many people would know about?

Timo Vuorensola: Well obviously the first influence comes from the name The Coming Race, which is actually taken from a book written in the 1800s, Vrill, the Power of the Coming Race [1871]. That tells a story about going underground and finding both a race of creatures and a power source. So it starts with that, but I think the biggest influences were from my youth, when I was just getting to know science fiction. I was reading all the Jules Verne books I could get my hands on, which were translated into Finnish.

A lot of the influence comes from early science fiction stories, which didn’t focus on space as much as they explored our planet’s core and the depths of the sea. Then of course you had Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park and those kinds of movies from the 1980s and 1990s that I grew up watching as a kid. Bringing those elements into this movie was great fun and allowed me to revisit my childhood, which is a very rare but nice experience for an artist and filmmaker.

For people like me who love looking at miniatures and practical sets in movies, I think what you guys did with the CGI in the first Iron Sky was an extraordinary feat. It looked incredibly detailed and there’s so much emphasis placed on the designs of the various environments, especially the lunar base, Neomenia. How do you achieve the desired effect when your budgets aren’t as hefty as any of the films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for example?

Timo Vuorensola: I think it takes a certain kind of director, because you’ll have to be willing to talk to the visual effects company to the point where they start thinking, “Goddamn, this guy is never letting go”. You also have to be aware that there are many points where you have to be more fluid and fluent, because you can’t just throw money at problems…you have to solve them. One of the things you really have to go through is to look at everything with as sharp an eye as possible, but to also try and spot problems early on. Especially in the case of filmmakers who are not very used to working with visual effects, they might say “Yeah, let’s do something”, and then they see the finished shot and go “Oh, I want to change this thing to do that”.

It’s too late, because all the work has already been done, and they’d basically have to go back and restart. If you have the manpower to do that, then it’s no problem, but we didn’t. So we had to be very clever and also very attentive even in the early days of visual representations or animatics, and then try to spot the problems at that point. So in that way, it helps that as a director I am experienced with visual effects, but of course the team is willing to work very hard and get into the same frame of mind.

But like you said, the problem is that we are not really competing on the best-looking finished movie, for example, but rather that we are unfortunately competing on the same level as The Avengers, which has ten or twenty times our budget. So in that way, the arena we are fighting in is a little different, so you have to be willing to go there and fight for your end result.

Where did you get the inspiration to cast Tom Green as Donald, the founder of the cult of Jobsism?

Timo Vuorensola: When I wrote this character I knew that it would be great to have an American comedian for that role, and then I guess Tom Green’s name came up through a mutual friend of ours who suggested that. Obviously I loved Tom Green as a kid, and also his insane movie, Freddy Got Fingered and all of that stuff. So that of course clicked, that there is a person or character that fits into the Iron Sky world, and it’s definitely Tom Green. So we approached Tom Green and he was very eager and interested in reading up more about the thing, and found out that he gets to play, not a crazy, shouting character, but rather a cult leader who’s got an aura of respect around him.

I think he found it to be an interesting role and very different from what people are used to seeing him in. It was really fun to develop the character with him. When he came to the dressing room one time while we were looking for the right kind of costume for him, he found these big-ass glasses…shaded brown glasses and put them on. That changed the character instantly. Then we found him these white cowboy boots and that’s where we were building the character from. He’s not only a funny guy, but also a really intelligent guy, which made him nice to work with and build the character together.

The First Iron Sky film left an indelible mark on cult cinema. What do you hope for the legacy of The Coming Race to be?

Timo Vuorensola: It’s hard to say what the legacy will be. Obviously I didn’t plan for the first Iron Sky to leave any kind of legacy or mark. It did it on its own, and I didn’t plan that with this one either. I just had the story in my mind and I wanted to tell it. I hope it finds people, entertains them and, hopefully, inspires them too. That’s one thing I find the most interesting with Iron Sky; the number of young filmmakers who see it for the first time, realise that it’s not made by a big studio system, and recognise the decisions and craziness of the film and say, “Wow, I want to go ahead and do something in the field of filmmaking”. So I hope that it entertains people and is fun to watch, but also that it inspires some filmmakers to start their own journey and challenge the way films are traditionally made and think, “I don’t necessarily have to be the biggest player in the world to be entering the science fiction arena to do my own science fiction or genre story”.

Hopefully, it breeds the next generation of science fiction filmmakers, which I definitely believe we are in desperate need of right now. Because science fiction, especially in cinema, is really in the hands of the biggest players, and for the small ones…it’s hard to get your voice out there. I’ve seen some really fantastic works, I just watched a Swedish science fiction film, Aniara (2018), which was made last year…and it’s a beautiful movie, but definitely not the type that gets a big release. It’s definitely the kind of stuff we need, and I hope we can inspire those.

Film Inquiry thanks Timo Vuorensola for taking the time to speak with us.

Iron Sky: The Coming Race is now available on DVD & Blu-ray.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URTPgGEhmNM