Shooting in Estonian Winter – Pablo Knappe Rodriguez
Director’s Visionary Statement – Mute (Pablo Knappe Rodriguez)
I found out about the Dollar Baby Program on some random instagram post. It was late and I was already in bed – I had to go to film school the next day. Still I got up again, sat in front of my computer and started googling the dollar baby program. I found the website right away and read through the rules and guidelines. Then I saw the list of all possible short stories to adapt and to be honest I knew only a few. So I kept up and read the summaries of all the available short stories – such an important decision as to which of the stories I would possibly adapt couldn’t be made lightly – I needed all the information possible. As you can imagine it became quite a short night for me and the next day in film school wasn’t my most concentrated one.
A few months later I was on my way to my semester abroad in the blistering cold Estonian Winter. I was going there together with a few colleagues, but we were all new to the country and the language. Perfect conditions to start shooting a film there, right?
Over the course of one or two months we managed to launch a crowdfunding campaign and that’s how we came to our budget of around 2000€. I found some excellent Estonian actresses and actors and a German actor for the lead role of Monette. The special thing about this project is the power of the story. Knowing that it was an adaptation of one of Stephen Kings short stories and reading the script made Michael, who plays Monette, agree to travel to Estonia on his own costs and to stay at a hotel on his own costs, just to be a part of our project. The same thing goes for Jonas and Yannick, friends of mine who also came on their own costs from Germany to help out in the camera and lighting department. Now I’m so thankful. Shooting abroad comes with many difficulties and it really helped my to be surrounded by a team I know I can trust.
Shooting in Estonia comes with a lot of obstacles. Whilst searching for the perfect locations I found out that less than 1% of the Estonian population is catholic christian. Therefore almost no churches have confession booths there. We found only the one cathedral in the old town of Tallinn that had a confession booth, but sadly they wanted more money than we could offer. That meant I couldn’t shoot all of the scenes I had in my script. The confession scenes were essential to my script though, as they built one of my stories structural arcs. So I started another research and found out that in Germany we could find a confession booth that we could rent and build in my film schools studio, so we did that and focused on the other scenes in Estonia.
Another obstacle came with one of the other important scenes/settings of the script: the lonely, Estonian road. I saw an Estonian Short film that even won a student Oscar a few years back named „My Dear Corpses“ by German Golub. The film also featured a few car-scenes and I approached the director and the producers and they were so kind to give me the contact information of the street they filmed on. It was a private street that belonged to some industry and it was a little less than 1km long. Also we were allowed to use a room there to warm up and to serve lunch – perfect!
The shooting conditions were far from perfect though. We shot two days there, two half days to be exact, because we wanted to shoot during daytime and in Estonia in winter the time with daylight is reduced to merely six hours. Also it gets cold. So cold. The second day we arrived on set it was -20°C / -4°F outside. The whole team was freezing. On top of that we didn’t have a lot of time because of the short daylight time so the whole technical team didn’t really get to go inside to warm up. When we left the location the second day the gaffers hair was completely frozen and white, which made him look like jack Nicholson in the very end of „The Shining“ by Stanley Kubrick. Also the sound mixer on that day lost the feeling in a part of his toe. To this day the feeling is gone (though they are all healthy and happy today and I’m still friends with both).
I’ve never experienced a set in my life, where the people were ready to sacrifice this much and work under such harsh conditions only for the sake of the movie. They were all committed to make this short film happen and without every single member of the team it wouldn’t have happened. So everyday I meet them now I have to pay for the drinks… I don’t know if that was worth it from a financial point of view but from my perspective as a director it definitely was!
Pablo Knappe Rodriguez – December 15; 2024
