“We’re sort of a ‘low expectations family”
Walking with guests at the Filem’On festival, I hear them talking about the teenage boy who walks with us. How charming he is, and so nice to his mother, and so thoughtful. None of them recognise in him the little boy who, in the Norwegian documentary TODD & SUPER-STELLA, directed by his mother Mari Monrad Vistven, is so unutterably happy because he is going to get a cat. The film follows Todd and his sister Stella for five years. Stella hates things she can’t do. It doesn’t help that big brother Todd can do everything. Todd runs the slowest of the boys in his class, so he loves winning against Stella. Sometimes he dreams of selling her. “I used to fight all the time with my sisters,” says Mari Monrad Vistven, “but now we’re best friends.”
When meeting someone for the first time, do you try to guess their place among the order of siblings?
Mari Monrad Vistven: I sometimes do. I find siblinghood an interesting phenomenon. My mom is married to a single child. Whenever they have an argument, she says: it’s because you’re a single child.
How would you describe the film’s main theme?
Monrad Vistven: TODD & SUPER-STELLA is a portrait of childhood and the things you have to go through when getting older. And it’s about siblinghood, growing up with someone who’s younger or older than you. You can’t escape from it for the rest of your life, and being born into it, you might easily take up that role. Like Stella deciding to be a cry-baby, or Todd taking up the role of being the smart kid, the one who can fix things. But when he meets his older cousins, all of a sudden he doesn’t seem that smart anymore. The film is taking small everyday-life challenges seriously, and is an alternative to fantasy films about superheroes.
What’s your position?
Monrad Vistven: We are three, and I am the middle one.
Which made you the noisy one?
Monrad Vistven: You have to be noisy to get noticed… and that’s exactly what I did. The older sister is always number one – “Oh, you’re so clever!” – and the youngest one naturally gets the attention. So I became the loud one. “Look at me… I’m dancing!” It marks you for life.
How did you pitch your children as being more interesting than all other kids on the planet?
Monrad Vistven: Luckily I never had to pitch them. My colleague was researching for a film about kids’ friendship, and she told me: there’s something interesting about Todd and Stella and their interaction. I was like: but there are lots of other kids, you know, shouldn’t we make a film about them instead? But she did some test shootings and together we took the project to the Cinekid Script Lab. Our mentor Boudewijn Koole asked me: Why aren’t you directing? This is your project, just do it! Back home, we decided I had to take over from my colleague and be the director.
Now you’re still on speaking terms?
Monrad Vistven: We are. She was totally fine with it.
I have to confess that when I read about the project, I was like: normally a documentary comes with a great idea, and the idea ‘I’m a mother filming my kids and showing how interesting they are’, didn’t sound very convincing at first.
Monrad Vistven: I know! If Stella or Todd would have had some sort of crazy talent or a weird disease, then it could have become a personal thing. But they’re very normal. Making a film about the little aspects of childhood, it could have been about simply any child. That’s the strength of the project; anyone can recognise themselves in the film.
You present them with their minor mistakes and shameful reactions. Pretty confronting.
Monrad Vistven: It was a huge responsibility that caused me several sleepless nights. Whenever they said “We don’t want this to be on camera”, I stopped. I never pushed that line, except once, because after having seen the rushes, a colleague told me that I often stopped the camera when things started to get interesting. So once I kept going, and Todd just went crazy and started punching his sister. Afterwards they both asked me: Why didn’t you stop us? I apologised and said it was never going to happen again. Every time they got fed up, we stopped.
Any things you were particularly careful about?
Monrad Vistven: Nakedness, of course. There’s one shot when they’re dancing, and we tried to put some animation over it, and one shot when they’re both sitting in a bathtub. They never reacted to that scene. Yet, I can never be sure that this film won’t do harm later in life. When we were filming, I told them: this will be good for other kids to see. They didn’t believe me then. But when screening the film at festivals abroad and in cinemas in Norway, the young audience always comes up to Todd and Stella to say lovely things, like: “Thank you for sharing, that’s exactly how I argue with my sister”. “It was so good when you said you were afraid, because I am afraid too and now I know that I’m not alone.” And that’s exactly what you dream about when making a film like this. They must have met thousands of kids by now, and never a single negative word has been said.
How to end this project? When to decide: this is the story and I will stop filming them?
Monrad Vistven: At the start of the film, we set some goals. For instance, Stella claims she is afraid to jump, and when she jumped for the first time, it felt like an appropriate final scene. Here, the audience feels that the circle is closed. That was a classic final shot. Meanwhile Todd was growing up, and we didn’t want to take the project into the teenager phase.
Was there a detox period?
Monrad Vistven: Certainly. It was hard not to pick up the camera for every new and interesting thing happening in their lives. But as a kind of rehab, I took a lot of still pictures of them instead.
Can you describe a bit the daily life that is depicted in the film?
Monrad Vistven: It’s set in Oslo where we live, and in two family cabins, one hour away from the city.
Every Norwegian that I know has a cabin, but you have two!
Monrad Vistven: Three cabins, actually!
You’re the poshest Norwegian I’ve ever met!
Monrad Vistven: Life in general in Norway is good and easy. We live close to the school, there isn’t much traffic, they have their friends nearby, and sometimes we spend a weekend in a cabin. We’re sort of a ‘low expectations’ family, not putting too much pressure on them. School can be tiresome, growing up can be tiresome, being a teenager can be tiresome… and being a parent can be tiresome too. By worldwide standards, I would say we live a very pleasant life.
My most shocking question would be… Were you afraid of being accused of having your little favorite?
Monrad Vistven: Not at all, but I understand what you mean. It is difficult as a parent to treat your kids exactly the same. Because you relate to them so differently. Todd is 15 and it’s so lovely to hang out with him at a festival. Today he was carrying my bag. Ain’t that sweet?
He’s the one with the good intentions. From the very first scene, you see him being sweet and smart. And then there’s Stella, who is often a nuisance. And a snail killer!
Monrad Vistven: Only when a colleague started researching the film, I began to realise the complexity of their characters. Todd has good intentions, but he can react quite angry sometimes. And Stella seems like a nuisance, from Todd’s perspective. She wants to be the clown, she wants you to laugh when she’s trying to make you laugh. But when she isn’t prepared for you to laugh, she hates it. But Stella is very loyal and patient.
Your visibility changes a bit throughout the film. How visible could you be?
Monrad Vistven: The opening animation establishes us as mom and dad. But I was often behind the camera, filming. Once a photographer got involved, I became more visible. But we had to get my husband in more because he wasn’t around at all. As soon as we took up the camera, he went downstairs. And when he finally turns up, he is wearing crazy sunglasses from some garage sale. I was like, what are you doing? You’re going to be in the cinema! He looks like a clown in the film, a charming clown, I admit.
He doesn’t look like a clown! He looks like a lumberjack, helping his family to survive the harsh winter! I’ve seen a lot of modest, simple joy and happiness. But I also saw one scene with exuberant happiness!
Monrad Vistven: The coming of the cat! I’m sorry to tell you that happiness didn’t last long. It died after less than two years, right when we started the editing, the day after Christmas. It was heart-breaking and made me grow a few years older. But, we got a new cat now!
Let’s talk about the animations… Why are they there?
Monrad Vistven: They were not a part of the initial plan. But Stella draws very expressively, that is how she gets her emotions out. As a parent, I sometimes took her anxieties too lightly. Like, “don’t make such a scene, it’s just a tooth being pulled out!” Until I watched her drawings, and I understood: Is this really what you’re thinking? Is this what you are afraid of? I realised there was so much going on inside her head, and this I wanted to include in the film. These animations are a descent into a child’s mind, based upon her drawings and made by Kajsa Næss (TITINA)à, together with a great team at Mikrofilm.
TODD & SUPER–STELLA is another star at the firmament of the Norwegian documentary producer Medieoperatørene.
Monrad Vistven: Mediaoperatørene – which I’m running together with Ingvild Giske and Hanne Myren – has been producing documentaries for 25 years. We mostly do single documentaries for TV or cinema, and some of them are for children. Our projects often present vulnerable people in different situations, like we did with THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF IBELIN by Benjamin Ree, which is a big hit at Netflix. Throughout these projects, the ethical part has always been our priority. This helped me with my dilemmas about filming my children.
Gert Hermans