Fantastic Fest Interview: Connecting With Nature in The Squirrel

In Finland, they don’t talk about the rat race. They say, oravanpyörä, meaning squirrel wheel.  But in The Squirrel, the Fantastic Fest-selected film from writer/director Markus Lehmusruusu, it’s the presence of a squirrel that breaks a man and maybe the whole world out of their daily pattern.

In the gentle sci-fi comedy, which was just selected as Finland’s entry for Best International Film in the Academy Awards, Miro Lopperi plays Pasi, a man making robotic pets for a world where all wildlife is gone. All non-human species are extinct, and so he spends his days trying to make fake dogs a little more convincing. Well, at least more convincing for people who have never seen a real dog. His belief in the perfection of this empty world is shattered when he stumbles across a squirrel, real flesh and blood, and suddenly he finds he must reconsider his relationship to all living things – especially other humans. 

Lehmusruusu explained that when he started writing the film in 2018, he was inspired by his own “contradicted relationship with nature. I say that I love nature, but I know that my life is designed to be as separated from nature as possible in many ways. At the same time, I remember there was news all the time of species going extinct, and this combination of looking at my own life honestly and I read the news, it started to feel bad.”

For the script, he flipped that idea on its head to explain the society Pasi lives in. “What if it’s good that we lose animals? We’re so inventive as a species, we can just come up with better ones, ones that are more comfortable and that we can control?”

Of course, the whole nature of animals is that they can’t be controlled, and that’s why Lehmusruusu called squirrels “the perfect animal for this. It has this cute side, and people project these pet emotions onto squirrels. At the same time, it has this wild side.”

There were discussions about whether to use CGI to anthropomorphize the squirrel, but Lehmusruusu instantly rejected them as undercutting that whole question of projection. “The VFX designers asked me, do you want to show the expressions, show that it’s sad or show that it’s happy. And I went, ‘No. I don’t want to do anything that the real ones can’t do, and if we don’t know what it’s feeling, then we don’t know.’”

Having a squirrel as a truly wild animal on the screen is one thing. Dealing with them on set, that’s something completely different. There were actually four squirrels on set – Alwin, the hero squirrel, plus his stand-ins, Brave, Wheeler, and Mr. Thief – and none of them were easy to work with. In fact, it was almost impossible to find a trainer who would tale them on. Lehmusruusu said, “The most experienced animal wrangler in Finland said to me, ‘Please, just switch the animal.’ She had worked one time with squirrels, and she was like, ‘They bite, and they don’t do anything. I cannot work with them anymore.’”

After a five-year search, and with only four months to go before shooting, the film’s German  co-producers finally connected the team with Hungarian animal coordinator Árpád Halász, the only person willing to work with squirrels. Producer Mark Lwoff said, “We had a Zoom with Árpád, who doesn’t speak English, but he said, ‘We like challenges.’’ In the whole call, that was the only thing he said in English.”

Casting the squirrels was one thing: Finding someone to play Pasi was a different challenge. Lehmusruusu said that, during auditions, it was a challenge to get someone who understood his inner life. “A lot of actors went to low energy, but with Miro I immediately sensed that there was so much happening. Even though he has this deadpan, emotionally clumsy and detached character, there is this activity going on that you can sense. I wanted this feeling for the audience, that they were hoping that what they sense for this character would come out.”

Lehmusruusu and Lwoff were looking for the same feeling when they cast Mimosa Willamo as Emilia, the government worker assigned to uncover Pasi’s secret, and soon realized that they were a perfect pairing. They actually shot the film in somewhat reverse order, traveling to Götaland in Sweden where they worked with a primarily German crew who had no idea who the actors were. Lwoff said, “After the first week, there were many of the crew who I did not know who would come to me and say, ‘there’s chemistry between these two.’”

Just as importantly, there was chemistry between Lopperi and his four-legged cast co-stars, especially Alwin. Lwoff said, “The squirrel loved him. He was walking and being with Miro, and jumping with him. It was a super-beautiful moment.”

The Squirrel International Premiere Thursday, Sept. 24, 5:15pm

Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.

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