An amazing Finnish storyline attracted a strong international team

When award-winning American producer Joe Broido came across a rather obscure Finnish novel "The Man Who Died", he instantly knew he needed to make the mini-series.

As the creative producer of multiple series and nearly forty television movies, Joe Broido clearly has a nose for a good story – and also takes pleasure in telling his own. Talking from his home in Southern California, Broido related how a (at the time) stunning Finnish novel that was not generally well known outside Finland, came to be a brilliant miniseries produced by a top team of Germans, Americans, and Finns. The novel in question is The Man Who Died, by Antti Tuomainen. The series will be released in the summer of 2022.

As Broido fondly remembers it, “I first got excited about possibly making a television series adaptation of the book when it was the featured novel in a men’s book club I belong to here in Southern California. In the club there’s a composer who has a personal relationship with the author, Antti Tuomainen. He suggested we read the book – and within fifteen seconds of reading it I called my composer friend and said ‘This is a TV series! Can you put me in touch with the guy who wrote it?’. I then had a lovely phone conversation with Antti, who turned out to be one of the most pleasant people in the world – and I’ve met a lot of very pleasant people in Finland!”

Joe Broido quickly goes on to emphasize that the person most responsible for taking Tuomainen’s novel to the screen was the Finnish main producer Markku Flink, who had recently optioned it. Fortuitously, Markku already had interest for a mini-series from Elisa Viihde and was looking for a co-producer. “I proposed to Markku that we team up with the people I work with at the German media company ndF and do it as a Finnish-German co-production. So we all met in Berlin, including Markku’s colleague, Pauli Pentti, and Eric Welbers, managing director of ndF International. Two days later Markku said, ‘Yeah, we wanna do this together!’. And to top it all off, the writer that Markku wanted to use is an Irishman named Brendan Foley, who just happens to live a mile from me in Santa Monica – so there’s your story of how this truly international series was born.”

Setting up the shoot

But what about the filmmaking itself? What was it like for an international producer like Joe Broido to shoot his first series in Finland? As he explains, “I’ve made television in a lot of countries, and the process always starts with my relationship with the local producer in the country where we’re shooting. In this case, I right away felt completely comfortable with Markku and Pauli. From the time we first met face-to-face in Berlin I found them highly trustworthy – and very open and welcoming.”

Broido continues, “When we started preparing for our collaboration it was pretty much the same as anywhere else – you’re preparing schedules and budgets. They took the lead on casting, as I didn’t know Finnish actors, but when they showed me clips of the lead actor, I could see why they chose Jussi Vatanen – he is a stunningly talented and compelling performer. From the moment they introduced me to the director they chose, Samuli Valkama, I knew the series was in extraordinarily capable hands. The end result is world-quality television at its finest.”

On location – Finnish style

The actual filming took place during June - August 2021, and Broido quickly learned that in some ways the production process is different in Finland. “The crews and production apparatus are more compact than what I have experienced in other countries. Yet the satisfaction of the Finnish cast and crew was striking. I’ve never been on a happier set. Markku and Pauli scheduled a four-day work week of ten hours a day – which is safer and saner than any schedule I’ve worked with previously. And, it allowed our crew got to go home to Helsinki from Hamina, the town where the book is set and where we filmed, for three-day weekends. They weren’t exhausted, and yet we stayed on schedule and totally got the job done.”

Broido tells of one incident that really underlined the Finnish film set culture. “We were shooting at a water tower, and the camera was lowered on a rope from the top of the tower down to the ground. There was one grip who spent the entire day hauling all the gear to the top of the tower to make a special shot at the end of the day. When the shot was done, the crew was wrapping, and that grip had to carry it all down. The first assistant director, instead of saying, “See you all later – I’m going home.”, carried the equipment down with him. It was extraordinary. You would never see that on an American set.”

Asked to sum up his Finnish filmmaking experience, Joe Broido simply says, “I would like nothing better than to shoot another season of this series in Finland!”