The Big Picture

Mother, Couch is a surreal dramedy about the anxieties of balancing daily responsibilities with family obligations, starring Ewan McGregor and Ellen Burstyn. The director, Niclas Larsson, was inspired by early 2000s films and incorporates magical realism into his work, exploring metaphors and different worlds. Larsson gave detailed information about each scene to the crew but kept the actors in the dark, encouraging them to explore their characters and adding to the film’s sense of unpredictability.

Starring Ewan McGregor and The Exorcist’s Ellen Burstyn, Mother, Couch marks writer-director Niclas Larsson’s debut feature film, which premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. While there promoting the film, Larsson stopped by Collider’s studio at the Cinema Center by MARBL to speak with Editor-in-chief Steve Weintraub about this unexpected journey with an unbelievable cast.

Couch, Mother is a surreal dramedy on the anxieties of balancing day-to-day responsibilities with family obligations. McGregor serves as the lead, David, a son who runs an errand with his mother (Burstyn) to a furniture store. While there, David’s mother inexplicably camps herself out on a couch and refuses to budge while David’s prior afternoon engagements begin to weigh on him. When his siblings, Gruffuld (Rhys Ifans) and Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle), prove to be less than helpful, David must take a breath and try to make sense of this bizarre behavior with the help of the furniture store father-and-daughter duo, played by F. Murray Abraham (The Grand Budapest Hotel) and rising star Taylor Russell (Bones and All).

During their one-on-one, Larsson discusses the early 2000s films that inspired the magical realism of his directorial debut and the impressive short films starring Academy Award-winner Alicia Vikander and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour that paved the way to his TIFF premiere. Larsson explains the method behind writing an entire book explaining Mother, Couch to his crew, and why his starry cast was kept in the dark, how he managed to get McGregor, Burstyn, and more in his first film, and what’s up next for the filmmaker. You can check out all of this and more in the video above or read the full transcript below.

COLLIDER: I really want to get into the most important question up front – am I gonna get The Magic Diner Part 3?

NICLAS LARSSON: [Laughs] Oh my god. Such a good question. You know what? Yes, sure. I’ll write one for you.

Image via Photagonist at the at Collider TIFF Media Studio

It’s important, though. For people who don’t realize, you did two shorts for Vogue and you had Anna [Wintour] and you had a big movie star. Talk a little bit about those for people who haven’t seen them because they are on Vimeo, and they’re good. They’re short so you can watch them with ease.

LARSSON: They go quick. Dude, it’s a great story, actually. They did approach a bunch of really cool directors, right? Because it was a great opportunity for directors to work with actors for their magazine covers or whatever. I think Vogue has this one actor, one model, and then they have 12 issues a year, so it’s like six shorts with actors. Me and Alicia [Vikander], we were great friends, and all of a sudden, she was doing her Oscar push for The Danish Girl, and Vogue calls me, and they’re like, “Would you want to write something? We have a secret, but we can’t tell you who’s on the cover yet.” And I’m like, “Oh sure, I’ll write something.” Then I have breakfast with Alicia, and she’s like, “I’m gonna be on the cover of Vogue.” I’m like, “I think I’m writing this short for you for Vogue!” So that was just a weird coincidence.

I did write it, and it’s based on this Twilight Zone episode, “Nick of Time.” We found this little napkin holder, and I just started riffing. We had maybe three hours to do it. It was supposed to be Matt Damon coming in in the diner. He wanted to do it, but he was in Las Vegas shooting, I think, the Bourne film, so he was like, “Unfortunately, I’m stuck in Vegas.” This was the day before, and I’m like, “Great, who do we have around? Who can be the one coming in and breaking the wall?” The Vogue people were like, “Well, Anna is at a hotel close by. Maybe she can stop by on the way to the airport.” So she did. Working with Anna was great. Then for the second one, she was so into it. She came up, like, two hours before. She wanted to talk about her character. She’s like, “Is it okay if I stand like this? How should I…? What am I…?” I’m like, “You’re just picking up your eggs.” But yeah, it’s great.

Image via Focus Features

For people that haven’t seen them, something about those is you like magic realism, which is something that’s a part of your work. What is it about the magic realism and that sort of thing that keeps pulling you in?

LARSSON: I think it’s based on the movies I grew up with. I was born in 1990, so 13 Going on 30, I was, like, 12/13 years old, and Freaky Friday and Princess Diaries – I grew up with those. It sounds, maybe, banal, but I love those movies. I was blown away by– I think I watched Freaky Friday, like, 200 times when I was 13. I was in love with Lindsay Lohan, you know? I think that the scope of magic realism, it’s such a beautiful way to explore metaphors or explore worlds, so a development of that is that you go into [Luis] Buñuel and you go into the deeper sense of a director’s or writer’s journey. I just love those films, like The Swimmer, an incredible movie, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is also on a different scale of magical realism, but it’s still there, right? So, it’s something with what a camera can do that I’m obsessed with.

That’s one of the reasons people love movies, is to escape from reality and imagine what would happen if this could happen to me. And obviously, the genres of the apocalyptic future is the same. It’s magic realism but in a completely different way. Anyway, I like the movies.

LARSSON: Me too. It is magic. Movies are magical, you know? So why not bend the rules a little, and why not explore other worlds? You’re allowed to. I mean, you know, Interstellar, it’s magical realism. We haven’t done that, obviously.

So for people that don’t know much about the film, how have you been telling friends and family what it’s about?

LARSSON: It’s about Ellen Burstyn on a couch.

[Laughs] That is actually very true. However, there’s a little more to it, and I don’t know how much more you want to say.

LARSSON: It’s about everything, literally. I wanted to make a movie that was similar to the Greek masks, the theater masks. There’s a happy face and a sad face, and they flip really quickly to go with the villain, and I think that’s very intriguing. That’s beautiful. That’s cinema. That’s what it should be. It should be a happy face and a sad face. So yeah, it’s Ellen Burstyn on a couch, and a happy face and a sad face.

One of the things about the film, and I think you would agree, is after you’ve seen it all the way through and you watch it a second time, you’ll have a different perspective on things. Would you agree?

LARSSON: Yeah. I’m a huge rewatchable kind of guy. I love watching my favorite films twice, so I think that’s the beauty of movies. They’re usually no more than two hours, and you can find stuff in the movies on a second watch. And I made it for a second watch, a third watch, so I made it for the Reddit community. [Laughs] You’ve seen it! There’s so much hidden, and there are so many sort of alleyways of metaphors.

I read that what happened was you gave the crew very detailed information about each scene but gave the actors none of this, so talk a little bit about why you wanted to do this. And then, when did the actors actually find out? When did you inform them of—without going into spoilers—more information about the movie and what may or may not be happening?

LARSSON: I realized during prep that my crew kept coming with these questions of like, “Where are we? What’s going on?” And I was so sick and tired of them not understanding me fully in my script, which is sparse, it’s just dialogue, so I decided in prep to write this very detailed book I call The Storm book. It’s sort of nine chapters guiding my team, on a very literal level, where we are, what’s going on, and where we’re going, the core of each scene, and how much furniture appears, and stuff. So I gave my crew this book, and the whole schedule was based on this book. We didn’t shoot in order, so we could go from Storm Two, which was the beginning of the film, and people were like, “Alright, I’m prepping Storm Six over here. Do you want to go and check it?” It was a very easy way to communicate with my crew about where we were in the movie because, I mean, you know, it’s one location, but it’s also so many locations.

I debated with myself. I’m like, “Should I give this to the actor?” So I asked Ewan McGregor and I asked Ellen, I’m like, “Do you want to read it?” And I think unanimously we said, “I think it’s better not to and just stick to what’s said on the actual paper, and what we’re going to shoot.” By doing that, it was a beautiful way of them not knowing, but the crew knew exactly where we were going or what was going on. We had conversations, me and Ewan and Ellen and Taylor [Russell]. We’re like, “Alright, should we know here exactly where we’re going?” I’m like, “No, explore it. Let’s go explore this scene. Let’s see where this takes us.” And because I wrote The Storm book before shooting, sometimes I had to change The Storm book. I’m like, “Alright, they actually discovered something in the scene that I didn’t see coming.” So it was a beautiful kind of translation between the actors in front of the camera and the crew.

There are a lot of directors, i.e. [Stanley] Kubrick, that do not want to explain things, and there are other directors who really do like to break down things. Were you nervous at all about giving out a book to people that literally explains what this movie is and what’s going on because you are removing the ability—if that ever comes out—for people to sort of interpret it for themselves?

LARSSON: Well, first of all, I’m not going to go public with this book, so my audience will never read this book. That was a distinction I made because it’s not for the audience. But for my crew, for my creative team, I think it’s a necessity. Clarity is a necessity. I myself, I’ve been a crew member, and I’ve been an actor, and having a director who hides stuff from the crew, I find quite frustrating, and I think it’s actually hiding your insecurities more so. So, I’m like, “I know exactly where I wanna go. Why don’t just tell my team where I wanna go and we can, together, go there?” Because it’s a very complex film, and I needed them to be on par with me in order to spitball ideas of how walls should break and where we going.

Image via Chayse Irvin

So this is probably the next most important question; as someone who’s Swedish, how do you feel about IKEA?

LARSSON: I fucking love IKEA! Are you kidding, man? It’s funny because when I was a kid it was a Swedish game, you hid in cabinets and closets and underneath rugs or whatever, until the closing hours. They have night guards, but they usually just have one night guard who does rounds, so you stayed after hours with friends, and you just lived there. Because it’s so big, right? It’s a surreal experience because it’s a theater because it’s sets, it’s stages. I mean, everyone who’s been to IKEA would know that it’s like a kitchen, and then you walk into the living room, so you get the life experience.

Personally, IKEA is a movie waiting to happen. I just don’t know what the movie is.

LARSSON: He’s quite a controversial figure [laughs], the guy who started it. So either it’s a really dark biopic or a really funny Blue & Yellow. But I think maybe this is a little bit of an IKEA thing.

To be honest, there is a little bit of an IKEA-esque to this. So one of the things about the film is that you have to decide where and when you want to reveal information to the audience. In the editing room, did you make any changes, and how did it work because you do have to eventually give things?

LARSSON: It was a ride, man. It was a puzzle to make sure you’re not giving too much but not withholding too much because that’s just frustrating to watch. There was a point in the edit, let’s say four months in, where it didn’t make any sense, the film.

Were you ready to jump out of a window?

LARSSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, kill myself. But I didn’t, thank god. You find your way in, and then you start introducing moments of clarity, and then you reach a point where it’s too clear, everything is too clear, and you’re like, “Alright, we’re not going here.” And then you find this little weird middle ground. I remember starting to test the film and it was a beautiful narrative going from people saying, “I didn’t get this at all,” to people actually getting themes of the story, and I’m like, “Alright, cool. Here we go. This is a good place to be.”

This is your first feature, and I’m curious, you put together a great cast, so did you have blackmail pictures on Ewan and everybody else? How did you manage to pull everyone into the movie?

LARSSON: Yeah, I hired a bunch of paparazzi, nude shots of Ellen through the window, and yeah, yeah, yeah, and I just said, “Look, do you want this or…?” I’m a letter writer. I wrote letters to them. No, it’s a dream cast, man. I’m so lucky. I mean, these are the best actors in the world. I think when you write something genuinely from the heart, actors have an ability, an incredible ability, to sense truth in the script. I think that’s what they read, and that’s why I was able to get this cast. I was truly writing from the heart, and those actors you see in the movie, they were my first choice, really. So it was as easy as handing over the script, having a cup of tea with Ellen Burstyn, and she said she wanted to do it.

Image via Chayse Irvin

Was she the first one?

LARSSON: No, Ewan was the first one, and then we went to Ellen.

Talk a little bit about premiering your movie at TIFF. I know it’s a little bit of a generic thing, but I love this film festival, so what does it mean to you to actually be here?

LARSSON: It’s one of those things, like, you’re sort of invited into the special club. I couldn’t imagine any place better to premiere my film, totally. And the audiences – it’s just one of those festivals that are famous for it being for the audience. It’s a candy store, and it’s so inclusive that I think most festivals, especially European festivals, they can be sort of exclusive. This is not. And my film, if anything, I hope it’s an inclusive journey.

I’m curious, are you one of these people who has a bunch of scripts in your desk or a bunch of ideas that you’re now trying to pursue? What are you thinking about for the future?

LARSSON: I think I have my next two films in my head. Yeah, for sure. I have one half-written, but yeah, hell yeah. I have tons of ideas. So many weird ideas, man.

Do they have magic realism?

LARSSON: [Laughs] Hell yeah.

Do they involve IKEA?

LARSSON: Yeah, totally. One of the things is an IKEA thing. For sure.

You must know this by just looking at Hollywood history, your first feature can be a make-or-break of your career because if it doesn’t work, you might not be getting another chance. So, how much did you debate, “Is this the movie I want to do as my first feature?”

LARSSON: Not much at all. It’s one of those things, as an artist, I think—I hope every artist has this—you just have to do it. It comes from deep within that you can’t think strategically. I have those people thinking strategically, my managers. And even if they say, “I don’t think this is a good…” because people did say that. People said, “Maybe it’s too pushy, maybe it’s too weird,” but if it’s something I, as an artist, I need to paint this picture, then I just have to paint it, right? So I try not to think about that at all. I don’t want to be a strategist of Wall Street. I’m not that guy. This is from the heart. This is a messy, beautiful, emotional ride that I think a lot of people can relate to. I can, and if I can then I hope a big audience can as well.

My thing, and the thing I enjoyed about your movie, is I wasn’t exactly sure where it was going, and I think you’ve seen a lot of movies, we’ve all seen a lot of movies, and any time I’m watching a movie, I can predict so much when I’m watching a film because when a movie is two hours, there’s only so many places it can go. So any time I don’t know where it’s gonna go, great, because it keeps me invested.

LARSSON: You’re right, and I truly love those movies. Because you steal two hours from someone, right? You better make those two hours worthwhile. I feel, sometimes, when I can predict a movie, I sit there, I’ve invested this time, and I know exactly where the movie is going and the movie is going exactly where I thought it was going, I’m like, “I could have just dreamed this up and stayed home!” So, if anything, I wanted to go from here to beyond, and I don’t think anyone can predict the ending.

Mother, Couch doesn’t have a release date.