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| Heavier Trip Photo: courtesy of Music Box Films |
In 2018, Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren’s Heavy Trip won fans around the world with its sweet (but loud) tale of a Finnish black metal band travelling to Norway in an effort to reach a festival where they’ve been offered a potentially career-making opportunity – if they have the courage to take it. Now the two directors, both longstanding metal fans themselves, are back with sequel Heavier Trip. A few days ago we got together to discuss it.
“Me and Jukka met in a media school here in Oulu,” says Juuso. “Oulu used to be the metal capital of Finland, and Finland is the metal capital of the world. So we had a lot of metal people around us. The first project we ever did was like a short film, actually. It was a short film called Impaled Rektum. When we finished school we were thinking about, like, ‘What should we start?’ We wanted to write a feature film and we remembered that we had a good time writing the short film and there were already pretty established characters, and we had done a lot of metal music videos for local bands at that point, so we had this inside knowledge on what kind of people the metalheads are.”
“They were usually really nice, sincere kind of guys,” says Jukka. “So we thought that makes a nice contrast. These kind of sweet guys, this pretty brutal music and putting them together. I think that was what resonated. It felt like a great idea for a film.”
“We wanted to make like a happy, positive, feel good movie about these, I don't know, not evil looking, but people who are maybe like considered somehow evil or violent when they're not,” says Juuso. “I guess that's the idea. So the brutal metal music in contrast with the beautiful Finnish landscapes, it has a very nice picturesque feel to it.”
At what point did they know that they were going to make a sequel?
“It was a a bit of a surprise with the first film – going outside of Finland was very surprising for us,” says Juuso. “Finnish comedy films don't really travel to a lot of places. This surprised us all. And then the producers felt that there was interest and there were people who had seen the first film and would be very eager to see a second one. So I think it was year or two after the first film came out, we started to have these discussions to maybe do a sequel. It started from there. And we started to think, how not to make the same film and how it's going to be different, which is not easy.”
“But of course we have these great characters, so it's easier to build from that,” Jukka adds. “You don't have to start from scratch. Although we did try to write a film that means you don't have to see the first one to watch this film.”
“Some things are easier, some harder,” says Juuso. “When you think about like music films or what's important to the character, or what’s important to the band. I guess, like. Well, it's about the music or it's about the members or it's about fame. How many different stories are there?”
In some ways this is a familiar story, but, I note, they have succeeded in making it feel different and personal to those characters.
“That's very good to hear,” says Jukka. “Yeah. There's so many versions that you can tell from that story. I think it came naturally that we had the story that we told in the first film about these guys overcoming their fears to go on that stage. But as that story had been told in the first film, we would not do the same thing again. We started to think ‘What is the next natural step?’ If you have a band and you have some kind of notoriety and people have heard about your band and there's this legendary story about this band that they went to this festival and they took their dead drummer with them - what would happen to a band like that? So it started to tell its own story. Probably somebody would be interested in exploiting that in a commercial way.”
It begins when the band, Impaled Rektum, is serving prison time for inadvertently causing an international incident. That immediately presents a problem for the writers: how to get them out.
“It's kind of funny when you're writing an escape from prison thing,” says Jukka. “You have to be thinking of how to escape from prison. We had a couple of versions that were really complex, and then maybe it started to be funnier that it's really easy to get out of that prison. Also, you have to think about how many minutes from the film we can spend on that part.”
“Also, we don't want the boys to use violence as an answer to anything,” says Juuso.
They have supporting character Dokken for that.
“I think we had some versions where there was a security person from the prison that was not Dokken,” says Jukka. “But then we thought it would be so cool to have Dokken as the person in the prison. That makes more sense. We loved the character in the first film and Helén [Vikstvedt] is such a great actor and I think she does that so well. So we wanted to go a bit deeper with that character. We had huge storylines for that character as well. But when you're writing and when you're doing the film, at some point you have to let go of a lot of stuff to keep the film under control lengthwise and budget wise. Also, if the story starts to go in too many directions, it becomes diluted. So that had to go. But Helén was very happy to come back. She had a lot of fun doing the first film, so that wasn't a huge problem. We asked her and she was like, ‘I'm in.’”
The single most violent scene in the film is a fight in a rock history museum. Naturally, it’s a scene full of in-jokes, and a lot of fun to watch – but, apparently, rather less fun to film.
“I just remember it being a horrible shooting day,” says Juuso. “We had a coronavirus incident. That was supposed to be the biggest action scene of the film, and due to the corona thing, we only had one day to shoot the entire sequence. A lot of more stuff was planned for the scene that we just didn't have time to shoot. So it always felt like it was cut a little short because we had a lot more prop jokes written in that scene. Like, the Stonehenge was there from the beginning.”
I ask how they got that balance between the in-jokes for the fans and then the humour that everyone else can get.
“It's great to hear that there's a balance!” says Juuso.
“Yeah.” Jukka shrugs. “I don't know. We were just kind of riffing. Writing the film is, I think, the funniest part – and a very difficult part. We were trying to make it funny, but then also trying to make it worthwhile watching, because a lot of comedy films fall on their faces in that they just tell a lot of jokes. In order for anybody to watch the movie for an hour and a half, you want to have a story that you’re really feeling, so you're committed to watching. Like, ‘How does this story go and how do these guys end up?’ So it's very important for both of us that we are genuinely interested what happens to our guys.”
We talk about the atmosphere on set.
“I think we had great spirit throughout both films,” Juuso says. “If you want to be proud of something then I think, like, we've gotten a lot of thanks and praise from the crew that, even when the days were crazy long and it was very stressful for everyone and people started cracking and all that stuff, the mood was always pretty light. Everyone stayed friends and there was a lot of laughter, which isn't a given on a production. I think more times you hear that people start hating each other. I think it's really special that we stayed on such good terms with everyone.”
We talk about the music and the process of turning the actors into a convincing band.
“Mikael Amasari did the heavier songs for the first film,” says Juuso. “All the band songs, the Impaled Rektum songs and the Blood Motor songs and all the Fisto producer sell-out cuts. He did all the songs and he was very easy to work with. For example, there's the scene where we see the Baby Metal shuttle. You can hear like this metal coming from inside of the shuttle. I told him that I needed pretty much exactly nine seconds of something really brutal for this part, and he gave me a finished nine minute song with all the singing and lyrics and solos and everything done. I had to be like the asshole producer who takes the nine minutes and chooses the nine seconds.
“The rest is in the soundtrack so it doesn't go to the trash. But yeah, he wrote the songs and then we had a band that I've been obsessing over for a long time – I got them to do the score for the film Year Of The Goat. But yeah, like in the first film, the actors rehearsed the songs with tutors for a long time, learning how to play their instruments again. I'm very nitpicky about if I see somebody playing in a film. If it looks like he's not really playing, I'm going to go like, ‘Yeah.’ So I think they did pretty well in this film.”
There’s also a real band in the film – Japanese sensation Baby Metal.
“Writing the film, we had this idea that Baby Metal would be a great band to have in it,” says Jukka. “They’re a band that really separates opinions inside the metal fan base. And then we just wrote it in the film. Like it's not like, yeah, we're just not going to get them, this kind of obscure Finnish small budget comedy film. But things turned out really well for us and we got a connection to the band. Of course the production people had to do a huge work getting in touch with them.
“We found out that their producer, Kobametal, had actually seen the first film, which is bit of a cult classic in Japan. He was very open to working with us. And so that was just, like, what are the odds? But it was great working with them. We were such fanboys for them and they were so professional. They were so nice. I think we kind of robbed them of their few days of not being on tour. We were shooting this in Vilnius, Lithuania, and they had to fly there from Japan. They had just done their tour in Asia and they were just leaving for their tour in the States or something like that. So they had a few days off and they spend them on our film. Hopefully they had good time. I think they did and it was a great experience.”
If this film is successful, will there be a third?
“Well, if it's really successful,” says Jukka. “It's a genre that's pretty expensive to make and then you have to get a big hit out of the film. But we’ll see.”
Heavier Trip opens in US cinemas and on digital on Friday 29 November.
