It proved to be pretty impossible to get funds for a feature film in Finland. It's still small, but the film industry was miniscule at that point in the early '80s.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A government institution called the Finnish Film Foundation funds filmmaking there, and I wrote several screenplays but never got any money. They were sent back to me, and they said that they were too commercial for them.
Eventually, in '84, we made a film for a little over a million dollars - with American actors that was shot in English - that was shown in Finland A little action film called Born American.
We've always had a roadmap to feature filmmaking, and making a feature film could have been three or four years away for us. But crowdfunding helped us get there in a year, and it allowed us to take a much bigger step.
In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.
It's becoming increasingly harder and harder; there's no such thing as independent film anymore. There aren't any, they don't exist. In the old days you could go and get a certain amount of the budget with foreign sales, now everybody wants a marketable angle.
I loved movies and went to see every movie I could in Finland.
Now, more then ever, we have the ability to make films for almost nothing and that's broken down all barriers of entry. I think it's a new golden age of film-making. With that, there needs to be the ability to recoup investment dollars, people need to make money.
The difficulty with the present state of affairs is that there is no legislation on the sources of funding for the Polish film industry. There is no legislation concerning filmmaking. And, there is no legislation on television that would be beneficial to filmmaking.
In the first years after 1989, films were partly financed from the state's budget as well as by public television. Still, except for a few special cases, most films are made this way.
To me, Helsinki is one big movie studio.