I was making films when I was about 12 years old - Super-8 films.

This was in '79. I got pretty restless there, sitting around with a lot of people sitting around smoking cigarettes and talking about films, but nobody really doing anything.

It proved to be pretty impossible to get funds for a feature film in Finland. It's still small, but the film industry was miniscule at that point in the early '80s.

Sometimes you get involved in a film because you just love making movies and you want to keep working. Sometimes you're lucky enough to find something that you really care about. Therefore, now I'm emphasizing developing my own projects and writing my own screenplays, so that I can do exactly what I like to do.

I think that villains who are just brawn, muscles and weapons are boring. So I always try to find intelligence in my villains and also a sense of humor whenever that is possible.

In Finland, getting a university degree is the first thing that you expect your kids to do.

I decided that, somehow, I had to get out of there and go to Hollywood. I had never been to America.