Hail to the Queen
Tiina Lymi, creator of Finnish series Queen of F***ing Everything, joins executive producer Minna Haapkylä to break down this tale of an estate agent’s bid to retain her lavish lifestyle by turning to crime, touching on its themes of isolation and loneliness and how they created a supportive atmosphere on set.
It’s described as a black-comedy crime drama, but even the creator of Queen of Fucking Everything isn’t quite sure how to define this six-part series from Finland.
“I want to say there’s no genre like it, but if I had to give a reference, with a gun to my head, it might be like Breaking Bad, but it’s not that. There are a lot of funny moments, but also terrible moments,” says writer and director Tiina Lymi.
“I mostly do stuff that involves comedy in some form. I’ve done pure drama, but if it’s not true, it’s not funny. Comedy is like when you mix death with shit. Then it’s funny. Tragedy or fear has to exist in the scene.”
Queen of Fucking Everything centres on leading Helsinki real-estate agent and high-society fixture Linda, who wakes up one morning to find her husband missing, probably dead, leaving her in millions of dollars of debt.
Unwilling to give up her lavish lifestyle, Linda turns to a life of crime to keep up appearances. She starts with small-time theft, but is then drawn deeper into the city’s criminal underworld – and eventually murder.
“She’s a woman in her 50s, and she comes up and falls down and then she has to climb back up,” Lymi says of the lead character. “But if something is broken, you can’t fix it to be exactly the same, so she changes along the way.
“When I started writing this, it was about the experience Linda has, which is the experience of not being welcome or accepted. That’s what happens in the series. All her reactions come from her experience in her life, which started when she was 11 when her mother was cold. What is really a tragedy is the main character doesn’t see herself worthy of love. Then when she loses everything and is bereaved in every aspect of life, she finds there isn’t one person in her life she can go and cry to.”
It’s this apparent feeling that Linda is unworthy of love that Lymi wanted to study through the series, as well as the lack of trust the character has in those around her, such as co-worker Anna (Minna Haapkylä), fearing that if she doesn’t have her luxurious apartment, Louis Vuitton bag or expensive haircut that she will be ditched faster than last season’s fashion line.
So instead of finding support in those around her, Linda’s struggles lead her to meet a number of “dropouts and losers” who become her guides through the criminal underworld, where she hopes to rebuild her life. But actions that start off small – stealing her colleagues’ electronic devices or making small amounts of money by collecting bottles for recycling – soon grow beyond her control.
“It’s nice if the audience at first think, ‘That poor woman.’ It makes you think no one deserves what happens to her,” Lymi says. “But actually she’s a loveless person, a person who’s never been helped. She thinks the world won’t carry her. ‘If something bad happens to me, there’s nobody to help.’ I relate to that feeling totally. That’s why I wrote it.”
The series debuted to spectacular success on YLE last month, with the Finnish public broadcaster announcing that in its first week there were more than four million unique starts for all six episodes on its YLE Areena platform – in a country of five million people. Around 548,000 people also tuned in to watch the first episode online, giving the streamer its best ever numbers, while a peak of more than one million viewers watched episode one on linear channel YLE1.
Produced and distributed by Rabbit Films, the series is also the first Finnish entrant in the New8 European public broadcaster partnership, meaning it will also air on ZDF (Germany), NPO (Netherlands), VRT (Belgium), NRK (Norway), STV (Sweden), DR (Denmark) and RUV (Iceland).
Meanwhile, Haapkylä’s work on the series isn’t limited to her on-screen role. As Rabbit’s head of scripted, she was instrumental in bringing Queen of Fucking Everything to the screen with her close friend Lymi.
“I’ve worked with her, talked with her. She knows everything about my life, and I think I know most about her life too,” Lymi says. “I really love her. It’s not a very obvious thing to have a producer who really stands beside you so all the suggestions and discussions never go over some line that would break the story or the series. You have to make compromises. ‘That’s OK, I can do that, I can take that off because it’s so expensive,’ or, ‘I can do this and this; that I can’t do. If I do that, it’s shit. It’s not going to work.’ Minna knows the content so strongly and understands it. She has a good style and understanding. Nothing is forced.”
Haapkylä first readthrough outlined and ideas for the series before she and Lymi talked for “some days” about the project, “unscrambling” the story and rebuilding it several times over. “The essence is there all the time – the sadness of Linda, what happens to her, and her strength – but we were working on the details. It was really fun all the time,” the producer says. “All the obstacles were money issues, but that was solved. Of course, you hope for €4m [US$4.1m] and you get €1m.”
Lymi notes: “We are Finnish, so we’re never going to have a lot of money.” But with one person writing and directing the series, efficiencies were easy to find. “Because I work so much, I’m effective,” she continues. “But please do not make me do work that is of no meaning. If I say, ‘That’s not going to work, it’s awful,’ it is because I know it. It’s my baby. I usually say yes. If I say no, it would be wise to listen.”
Examples where a writer-director proved to be valuable include a montage scene in which Linda quickly moves from location to location, from a restaurant to her home to inside a car, and when a split screen is used to show a character in two places at once.
“It’s so much easier when the same person is directing,” Haapkylä says. “Someone who reads it thinks, ‘We don’t have time to do all this.'”
Lymi adds: “Those days when the actor is present, we just do them all, guerilla-style. I make them up as we go. I can make the decisions.”
That approach during the 50-something-day shoot also speaks to the varied camera style Lymi employed to tell the non-linear story of Queen of Fucking Everything, from handheld to stabilisers. “Then we made the decision that all the flashbacks are [shot] handheld, mostly, and in one shot.
“The camera work has to be really flexible. While doing the prep, we were quite aware of what we were doing with the DOP. We drew a lot of pictures, but most of all we decided the style, and I had in my head that some scenes would be cut very quickly. I like the series because the pace is really fast, and then you stop and have a quiet picture and watch a person doing something, so it goes from small to big, or handheld to a very stable picture.
“You just have to know how to use it and when to use it, and where you put the camera. That’s always the question – who’s watching who? Is the audience watching them like ants, or is it you watching her or her watching you?”
Haapkylä stars in the series alongside lead actor Laura Malmivaara, who plays Linda, and a supporting cast featuring Katja Küttner, Kristo Salminen, Janne Reinikainen and Miro Lopperi. “I’m a producer but sometimes I act. It’s a hobby for me. Also, it’s really nice because there’s one actor you don’t have to pay,” she jokes.
Haapkylä praises Lymi for creating a safe atmosphere on set, where actors felt supported and were able to push themselves, particularly in the show’s emotionally charged scenes. “Laura said most of the time it was so easy [to film the series], even though she has such a hard role with extremes of all the emotions possible,” she says. “But when you feel safe, you don’t feel afraid about having emotions because you feel protected.”
“Nowadays we talk a lot about actors feeling safe, and that is absolutely true,” Lymi says. “If actors are afraid then you get certain stuff out of them. But when they are not afraid, they feel free. That’s the number-one rule.
“But there is also the work of actors, and they have to do that. Learn your lines. You have to cry in this scene, so make it happen. I help you, I give you words and sentences that might help you and elevate you into that situation with the character, but the basic work is the actor’s.”
Composed by Lauri Porra, music also plays an important role in the series, with a lot of the action underpinned by a classical score that had to find a balance between the show’s emotional themes and its sometimes disgusting, gross-out humour – such as when Linda is trapped in a bathroom, hiding behind a shower curtain, while someone is using the toilet.
“I really respect his musical talent and vision. Music for me is very important,” Lymi says. “Very often when I write, I hear it in my head. I’m not a composer, but I know floating violins, quick violins or whatever it requires.
“With this series it was very difficult with the music. We tried a lot of stuff. Lauri wrote the score four times, but it wasn’t working. Could it be Balkan party music? No, it can’t. The problem was that there are scenes that are gross and terrible and funny at the same time, and it has to exist in the same world as those upper-class people and also [criminal character] Sporan, a crazy idiot man baby. But you can use classical music in so many ways. It felt this was the right way.”
After the success of the show’s launch, it’s unsurprising to learn that Lymi is already developing ideas for a potential second season – not least because she herself wants to know what lies in store for the assortment of characters she has introduced.
“There are some juicy characters. I would like to know what happens to them,” she says. “The main character does so much harm to other people during this first season, and she has to face the consequences somehow. But if not, I’ll do something else. I have other ideas.”
tagged in: Minna Haapkylä, Queen of Fucking Everything, Rabbit Films, Tiina Lymi, YLE