FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | interview: Finnish Shooting Star Tommi Eronen |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Tuesday, 03 April 2007 | |
 Tommi Eronen. Portrait by Fabrizio Maltese for european-films.net, 2007. All rights reserved. Tommi Eronen (Kuopio, 1968) is Finland’s 2007 Shooting Star. He had a supporting role in the 2004 Finnish Oscar submission Lapsia ja aikuisia - Kuinka niitä tehdään? (Producing Adults), starred in many local TV projects and recently headlined the first-ever Sino-Finnish co-production Jadesoturi (Jade Warrior), in which elements of Chinese wuxia "honourable fighting" films (Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and the traditional Finnish Karevala mythology are combined into a spectacular whole. Jade Warrior premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and grossed a more than respectable €600,000 in Finland, a country with a population of just five million. We met with the affable actor in Berlin, where the 2007 Shooting Stars were presented to the international press during the Berlin Film Festival. How would you define European cinema, if such a thing exists? It does exist. It is a question of identity, of who we are. It is like a child who finds his own voice. Finnish cinema is like the northern dimension of European cinema and is rising all the time. It is typically in a melancholy mood; we are the European schoolboys [Laughs]. What would you like the audience to know about Tommi Eronen? That is a good question! [A reflective silence.] Basically, I would like them to know nothing, because I am an actor. The less the audience knows about me, the better, so that I can just be the character in the film. Perhaps they should know that Finland is a very dualistic country. It is kind of a European, urban country but, then, on the opposite side of that, we come from the forests; and we kind of like shy animals. It is finding the balance between these two opposites that defines the Finnish people; we all carry this struggle within ourselves. How do your two most famous roles, in Producing Adults and Jade Warrior, compare? They are totally different roles. Producing Adults is about relationships and life in a humanistic sense. It is a drama about the characters and we rehearsed [the scenes]. For Jade Warrior, the approach to the role was totally different: this is an action film so it was all very physical, the preparation was all about the physics. You could actually say there are more differences than similarities between the two roles. If I had to choose, I am not really sure which of the two I would say I prefer. I’d like to do both! What are you working on at the moment? I’ve just started work on a new TV series in Finland. I am excited: it is the first time I will be acting together with my wife [actress Ria Kataja]! We will finally be seeing each other a bit more; I am sure it will bring a whole new angle to being together. [Laughs.] |
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