Starting from a series of daring improvisations, writer-directors Andres Maimik and Rain Tolk spoke to me about Aurora, their take on family drama with a Christian twist.
Ș: Let’s start from the beginning. How did the idea of Aurora come to pass?
Rain Tolk: First we got to know an Australian professor called Robert Marchand. He was doing a workshop on character-based improvisation. It’s a method which is influenced a lot by Mike Leigh and his way of filmmaking. I was there as an actor and Andres was there as a director. We spent the week with him and it was a very fascinating way of filmmaking. We decided to try it out by ourselves. We had an initial idea for a film which was about teenage boys and their friendship and it went in the territory of The 400 Blows. We were interested in their relationship to their literature teacher and how that becomes illegal. We started throwing out those improvisations. I’m not exactly sure where that idea came from, we just wanted to experiment with the coming-of-age genre. It didn’t come to be, it wasn’t working out, but what was working out was the backstory for the teacher and her family. So after that we decided to get rid of the boys and concentrate more on the happenings in her family and on their relationships—her husband and parents.
Ș: And how did that story evolve and take form?
Tolk: It evolved into a family drama during improvisations. These improvisations require a lot of time and boredom, because that is how actors create their relationships between their characters. You don’t have to throw in anything too dramatic. We created this character, Lenny, and the relationship between them. There was a rehearsal at my home where the family gathers, Lenny comes to the family dinner, thinking he will meet Aurora, but it turns out the family is there. Jörgen Liik, who plays Lenny, went all-in and a violent, dramatic scene happened. Rob was there and wanted to stop the improv, but we didn’t let him. The actors were fighting and my neighbours almost called the police. After that rehearsal, we decided to make the film about the family. We wanted to investigate how the relationships in a Christian family come to be. We didn’t really want to investigate Christianity as a whole, we wanted to tackle forbidden love.
Andres Maimik: We didn’t even give the actors a script, we provided them with the situation and sometimes, when they’d get too comfortable, we’d throw in disruptions. They had no idea what was going to happen.
Tolk: Even the ending is such a disruption, something they didn’t know was going to happen.
Ș: How did the actors react to this grueling process?
Maimik: As directors, we were responsible for their trauma, but they were responsible for their character, they were the experts.
Tolk: We were constantly asking questions about their characters, asking them if certain actions were suitable for their characters. Maarja, the lead actress, spent time in a congregation for research. We also did plenty of research. Most of the prayers and speeches from the father are taken from real life.
Ș: Seeing as how both of you are male, how did it feel to write and direct such a female-centric movie?
Maimik: We wanted to make a movie about youngsters falling in love with their substitute teacher, the story just drifted this way. We decided that the substitute teacher must be our hero. We tried to empathize with her dilemmas, her way of thinking. An Estonian author once said life is a pendulum between boredom and pain. If it becomes too boring, you begin to desire some edginess, some pain. When you’re walking too long on the edge, you’ll want your cocoon of boredom. That is what we wanted to showcase.