Zaida Bergroth’s new feature film for cinema release was shot entirely with digital SLRs

“Lighter technology fit the character-driven tragedy perfectly”

Zaida Bergroth

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By Harri Römpötti
     
      Lighter and cheaper digital cameras are gaining ground in the movie industry.
      Judging by the image quality, one could never tell that the Finnish feature film Hyvä poika (The Good Son) which premiered last Friday has been filmed with around EUR 2,000 apiece digital SLRs costing around EUR 2,000 apiece, rather than with actual movie cameras - and no, that "SLR" back there was not a slip; the film really was made using cameras that are primarily meant for still photography.
      “We decided to carry out the principal photography in the summer of 2010, but we were not sure how much money we had at our disposal. Still, I wanted to shoot with two cameras and I wanted to operate one of them myself. With digital SLRs, one can these days shoot high-quality video as well”, says director Zaida Bergroth.
     
The visual narrative of The Good Son is sophisticated.
      The different scenes often have something happening in the background as well as in the foreground. The depth composition appears well thought out.
      “As the cost of film was not an issue, we were at liberty to improvise. Of course the screenplay gave us a rigid shell to work with, but we were able to shoot alternative takes. The situations took on a life of their own and the takes became prolonged. In all we shot around 40 hours’ worth of material”, Bergroth explains.
     
This is a lot of material, and would have been way beyond the budget of the film had it been shot using a conventional film camera.
      When Bergroth made her directorial feature film debut Skavabölen pojat (Last Cowboy Standing, 2009), she had to calculate carefully which scenes she could afford to shoot twice.
      And twice was an absolute maximum.
      ”The Good Son is a character-driven film, so lighter technology fits it well. In Last Cowboy Standing every shot had to be thought out carefully from the point of view of set decoration and effects. For myself and the actors, The Good Son was a liberating experience, but it required a lot from the rest of the crew.”
     
In spite of the abundance of the footage shot, The Good Son does not ramble on. It lasts just under an hour and a half in the cinema cut.
      The title character Ilmari (Samuli Niittymäki) is a boy just under 20 years of age, who has adopted the role of a man in a family without a father.
      His mother Leila (Elina Knihtilä) is an actress.
      A scandal caused by the mother causes the family to escape the public glare to their summer cottage.
     
Ilmari is his mother’s biggest fan and at times also her personal bodyguard.
      For a long time the film’s working title was Henkivartija (Bodyguard).
      Leila relies on her son and manipulates him.
      An oedipal spiral emerges between the two, the twists of which get tighter and tighter towards the end.
      “When writing the story we decided not to try to avoid the oedipal tension, but we did not specifically aim to construct it, either”, Bergroth says.
     
Bergroth wrote The Good Son together with her husband Jan Forsström. Forsström also co-wrote Last Cowboy Standing and Bergroth’s award-winning short film Heavy Metal (2006).
      The main characters of all three films are boys or young men.
      “I am not sure why there are so many young lads in my films. But I am terribly fascinated by these type of guys. They are young, their emotions run high. With Jan we reckoned that the main character’s aggressiveness would not be as easily accepted if he was a she.”
      Equally, a mother-daughter juxtaposition would have been lacking the oedipal twist that lurks beneath the surface, creating the film’s dramatic tension.
Bergroth was interested in exploring a situation that threatens to turn destructive despite the best intentions: in spite of the fact that the main characters love each other and do not mean any harm.
      “With Jan we always juggle different ideas and stories around and see which ones stay alive. With this one what remained in the end were the mother and the son, with their motives and needs on a collision course. I knew early on what would happen, that it would turn into a tragedy. But I wanted to avoid cheap moralism.”
     
For the director, the characters are dear.
      Bergroth defends Leila, the vain and self-centred mother, whom one could easily see as the villain of the piece.
      “Of course it is clear that Leila makes mistakes, but that is only natural. On the other hand she defends Ilmari when she is being warned about the boy. I feel it is important to do justice to Leila, too.”
      Bergroth, who was born in 1977, points out that movies tell a lot about the people who make them, so long as they have not been created totally on the production machinery’s terms.
      For Bergroth it is not easy to pick The Good Son apart. Even she is not aware of all the motives of the characters in it.
      ”If I was able to explain their behaviour exhaustively, the film might be boring. I do not even dare to think what The Good Son might be saying about me.”
     
The Good Son is the first Finnish feature film made for the big screen that has been filmed by using digital SLR cameras.
      These cameras are even lighter than the digital cameras that David Lynch used to shoot his last film, Inland Empire, five years ago.
      The season-ending episode of the popular television series House was filmed with similar cameras to those used on The Good Son.
     
“These cameras are so light that we were able to shoot the aerial footage of the summer cottage by strapping the camera to a radio-controlled model helicopter. Normally such a take would have cost an arm and a leg.”
      Additional visual splendour is provided by photographs of insects that we are told in the film are taken by Ilmari’s little brother.
      In reality the images were by a teenage nature photographer, Miikka Friman.
     
In Bergroth’s film, late-edition tabloids compete with garish headlines of the incident that Leila has caused in the movie world, forcing the family to retreat into the country.
      Are actors really such difficult personalities as the character is made to appear?
      “Not really. In Finland people still have their feet firmly on the ground. I had to urge Elina [Knihtilä] to be a bit more of a diva. But anyway, actors give so much of themselves that for all I care they are allowed to be a bit difficult.”
     
     
The Good Son premiered in cinemas in Finland on March 25th.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 25.3.2011


Links:
  IMDb: Zaida Bergroth
  Hyvä Poika (Bufo Films, in Finnish, contains trailer)

HARRI RÖMPÖTTI / Helsingin Sanomat