Once a child actor himself, London-based writer/director David Bartlett had some idea of how to approach his most ambitious and impassioned project yet: Mousie, which became eligible for this year’s Academy Awards after a successful festival tour.
A film that’s only 17 minutes long, Mousie accomplishes a great deal in that runtime, anchored by a tap dancing seven-year-old Roma girl, Helene, hiding from Nazi patrons at a caberet club in Berlin circa 1936. She’s aided by club performer Katerina, into whose care she’s been left, leading to some very desperate decisions to keep them both alive. But while Katerina fights off fascists, Helene dreams of escaping to a better place: Disneyland.
Hannah Collins spoke to David about his historical and present-day inspirations, working with a first-time actor, and getting life advice from Sir Anthony Hopkins.
I wanted to talk first of all about where the idea for Mousie came from. I understand you’ve written about this period of history before – is it a specialist subject of yours?
Not so much, in fact, though I do find that period very interesting because it’s a period of extremes. And if you’re interested in history, in general, which I am, and if you’re interested in storytelling, which is my job, my life, my profession, and the art of storytelling in cinema, or literature or anything, then you’re sensitive to dynamics. And I can’t think of a more dynamic point in human history than the Nazi period, which, of course, lead to the deaths of 56 million people and many, many more traumatised, and the whole world changed.
So it’s a period that fascinates me, but it’s not how I came up with the idea for Mousie, which is based on research and history, but it’s an original story. It’s not based on anyone in particular, but [one] that came about [from me] reacting to what I felt was going on in my own timeline, and I just felt sad. A few years ago before we got to actually make Mousie there was a lot of extremism in what were previously very stable, relatively middle of the road countries in the Western world. And I started to notice a very disturbing trend of ugliness and othering, what I suppose you could read as xenophobia, but essentially, it’s a kind of withdrawing and a rise of nationalism, which leads to people looking at a group of [other] people, which I find the most deplorably deprived – and that’s not a political decision or campaign, it’s about people, to the largest degree. People who find themselves unable to continue working and living with their children safely, and so they have to leave.
And these people don’t leave with the bags packed with gold, you know, they’re not on holiday. Those movements from particularly Syria, and now Afghanistan as well… [It] pained me enormously to think that people were simply put: not compassionate. That sent an enormous alarm bell ringing that to me was, “woah, I haven’t seen [anything] like that in my lifetime.”
I remembered – and this is perhaps one of the biggest inspirations for the Mousie story – about five, six years ago, the toddler who washed up on the beach in Turkey, I think he was three or four and the image was famous – infamous – as soon as it was taken. I was, of course, filled with sadness. The key thing about children is their innocence. It’s as simple as that. By definition, they are innocent. They don’t pick up the guns. They don’t take part in the political squabbles that lead to punch ups and the worst examples in vicious, unpleasant wars. That little child was an innocent and what angered me about that was that it has been happening for some time and continues to happen, and that lots of world leaders sort of fan their petty egos by saying, “Oh god, what a terrible thing, isn’t it shocking,” having ignored it for some time before and continuing to ignore it. Don’t argue over children’s suffering; deal with it, do something about it, but at the very least, show compassion? At the very least, let us understand that.
Somebody else’s children are as dear as our own, and what seemed to be coming across to me [from that] was “my children are more valuable than your children.” There was even somebody in our country, and I won’t use her name because it makes me sick, who referred to refugees as “vermin”. What happened with me was apart from the general frustration, the thing that starts to bother me as a storyteller, and in a sort of rather singular way is we’ve been here before. And that started to explode within me as a cause, as a reason just to do something, to say something.
“Artists have throughout the ages provided a source of hope and resilience as an active defence.”
David Bartlett
We can’t go back to that period of 1933 to 1945 and undo it. We can’t say if we’ve got all those pictures that we’re also familiar with the concentration camps and people being demonised and Jews having to paint stars on themselves. We can’t stop that. We can’t reach into those photographs. As much as we’d like to and much as we’re drawn to emotionally if we’re compassionate human beings. The only thing we can do is to learn from it and remember it so we don’t go there again.
And so in a roundabout way, you said at the start, “are you just interested in history? Is that where it comes from?” I hope I’ve managed to put across it’s actually a sensitivity to where we are and what we are now that motivated me to say, “look what happened then”. So I hope that Mousie will ideally speak to people who haven’t thought about it, who are not so in touch with their compassion, or who have been perhaps misled by a lot of political cultism around now; if they’ve been misled to forget the quivering bottom lip of a child who is bewildered and lost; if they’ve forgotten that a child is innocent that a child is vulnerable; if somehow that has become an inconvenient and foreign and distant trouble.
Maybe it will reinvigorate, reconnect them to what essentially is one of the things that makes us, as the phrase goes, different from the animals. Our compassion is what defines us as human beings. And also, of course, to reaffirm and hopefully galvanise people like me that what they feel is right, and that it does come from the right place and that it is valuable and valid to feel a strong sense of protection for those who are vulnerable. This is never irrelevant. It’s never wrong. It’s resilience through art.
Artists have throughout the ages provided a source of hope and resilience as an active defence. So, really, and this is a very long answer to your question, in the end, Mousie seeks to really advocate for compassion and for art because those are two of the most important pillars that hold up the roof of our civilization and our claim to being humane. Humanity, at the end of the day, is everything. Because without compassion and art and the humanity they represent, we walk in darkness.
It’s a very comprehensive answer! And you’re right. It is a shame that the film is still so timely because we want to watch things like this and just see them as long and buried history but, unfortunately, these sorts of sentiments are cyclical still.
On the character of Katarina, she’s probably what we what we’d all like to think that we would be, what we’d have the strength to do in those sorts of times, but I also quite like that she’s not two-dimensionally heroic. There’s nuance to her and you can really see her struggling with the weight of being so selfless, looking after someone else’s child at huge personal risk.
I’m really very chuffed to talk about that character, and also the performance of CJ Johnson because when I wrote it, I thought that it should be fairly brittle. A gesture is extraordinarily risky, and it’s just kindness. You know what Charlie Chaplin said in The Great Dictator: “More than cleverness we need kindness.” But I wanted to do it realistically. I mean, the sacrifice is there without question, but I think she [Johnson] gets that kind of tough love of, “I’m on the line here. Don’t make things difficult. Just do what you’re supposed to do. I will protect you. I know you’re at risk. I’m at risk as a result of you but please don’t make this difficult.” Which hopefully reflects the stress that she would be under. And also, of course, the fact that children, while we love them, do make things difficult, hopefully in the most delightful and wonderful and interesting ways but they’re not going to stay in the wardrobe if you tell them to stay in a wardrobe. And yes, a toy mouse will become the most important thing in the universe to a seven-year-old mind.
And that’s Sasha’s [Watson Lobo, who plays Helene] age in real-life, too?
Yes.
Was she a first-time actor?
Yeah. So when I first presented Mousie as a short film idea, we had no institutional funding or backing. And producer Will Poole – who is one of the finest in the business – said, “Okay, Dave, so you want to make a film that has choreographed dancing, is a period film, has a crowd in a club, and the whole thing is reliant upon a seven-year-old child?” So it’s quite a tall order!
[When we were casting], we were finding children who were good little actors but just didn’t have the dancing [skills]. And then we found some super swishy experienced dancers who weren’t quite getting the period of tap [dancing right], and also just couldn’t act. Then we got a tape from Sasha Watson Lobo from her mum. And the dancing was there, so that’s taken care of. But then she gave a little introduction at the start of it, and there was something about the gleam in her eye. I thought, this is it. She can act with one finger.
I met her and she really didn’t get the idea of acting so she didn’t really audition at all. But I’ve worked with children a few times before – I was a child actor a long time ago, which I have an interesting story I can tell you about, but I suppose I identify [with them]. The poor form of children is that they need to have a sense of discipline. But I found very quickly that she [Sasha] was delightfully polite and focused to a fault.
When we started talking I realised was that this story is really, really nasty, as composer Jack Arnold called it before he came to the point of writing the music. It’s a horror without being a horror. And of course, the situation is that you don’t traumatise children even if they’re acting. You don’t tell things to a seven-year-old actress that are nasty. The key things are, you need to find a bridge where you can communicate. Reaching inside to bring out something that’s credible. And with some people, it’s a difficult thing. With a child, the bridge might be harder to build as they won’t have the same techniques as a trained actor or an experienced actor. But with Sasha, the bridge was already there. She was so keen to listen or to learn or to just do it. That was lovely. We didn’t really rehearse in the conventional sense because she just went “Yes. Okay.” It was the most beautiful experience with the most beautifully rewarding relationship. It really was.
The child actor story, by the way, is that I became a director because of working with Anthony Hopkins. I was about 11 or 12 and it was the smallest part I ever had in anything, on a TV film called the Arch Of Triumph in the mid-80s. And the star of it was a guy I’d never heard of before – some bloke called ‘Hopkins Hopkinson’ or something. And my mother had said, “Well, he’s actually quite a big name.”
I ended up chatting to him at lunchtime and he asked me if I was going to be an actor in the future. I said well, I’m thinking about what they do behind the camera because that kind of seems really interesting. And he said “If you’re a storyteller, you’re a director. You just need to know what the meaning of your story is. If you know that you have a story and you attach yourself to the meaning, that’s it.” Watching Hopkins acting, I’ve never seen anything like it: seeing that connection, that reaching inside to that emotional depth and I just thought I could never do that. But I knew I’d love to work with that kind of thing even at that age. An amazing experience with Anthony Hopkins, which I’ve never forgotten for obvious reason.
Going back to the character of Helene, I wanted to ask about the characterization of her as a mouse. At the start, you think “Oh, it’s a reference to her toy.” And then you see her scampering around and hiding in like small places, and you think, “Oh, she’s also acting like a mouse as well.” Then by the end of it, she transforms fully into her own approximation mouse and then uses that to hide in plain sight.
While I don’t really want to draw it back to this, you mentioned how certain nasty people in the media have made horrible parallels between refugees and animals that we would think of as vermin. Was there a conscious choice to sort of reclaim that idea here?
Yes, there was because the mouse is kind of several things. As you say, she scuffles around and sees a toy mouse as her only emblem, and yes, it was a reference to the ‘vermin’ thing, as well, or rather, it was a kind of a reaction against that. And, of course, a mouse is Disney’s mascot. Because America, for lots and lots of people at that time and ever since, has been the Promised Land.
It’s a rather sad thing too because Americans weren’t interested in taking immediate refugees at the time, it’s rather more complicated. Essentially, we all know that America is the ‘free country’. It was invented as that, as it were. Well, for the Europeans, not for the Native Americans, of course, but it was invented as a refuge from the religious and territorial monarchical royal wars of Europe. There’s a side thing to this: apparently, Adolf Hitler loved Disney films, even though he banned them, like lots of stuff from Hollywood. But for one of his birthdays, I don’t know which one, Joseph Goebbels apparently gave him a stack of Disney cartoons.
You mentioned earlier about Berlin being very dynamic. It’s interesting here because this time in Berlin is obviously overshadowed in history by the political stuff that was going on. The only other thing I can really think of that focuses on the cultural side of the city at this point is Cabaret. In that and in Mousie, there’s a sharp contrast between the public-facing, liberal arts side of the city coming into contact with the nasty underbelly of, you know, ‘we’re rooting out all these undesirables.‘
There are very deliberate iconic things that are metaphors in the film and they are all representatives of a broader comment. Katarina is a comment on the way I see the heroism and vulnerability of women combined throughout history, and the child is a representation of well, actually, we haven’t talked about the Romani thing yet. The club is representative of and is a metaphor for decay. Because once in the 20s, Berlin was the place to go, the most celebrated, liberated town of expression and sexual orientation, as well. And it could only hold on by its fingertips. So it sort of represents humanity.
When I was first thinking about doing this film and it came from the idea of a child in trouble, I thought that Berlin in 1936 is an interesting time because it’s the year of the Olympics. How ironic, how dynamic: we’re going to be that the greatest place in the world, people are going to come to Berlin and say how wonderfully beautiful Nazi Germany is. So what we need to do first of all is clean the streets of people. I mean, it’s just a caustic irony. And what is now starting to be mentioned and understood in research is the terrible suffering of the Romani people as a result of that.
More than 50% of Romani travellers across Europe were killed by the Nazis: we’re talking around 500,000 who were largely forgotten until very recently. And that struck a chord. I discovered a lot of photographs in the Library Of Congress of Romani, Travellers, Roma and Sinti people in the early 30s, before, in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws essentially – for want of a better way of putting it – outlawed the Jews and the Romani people. Looking at these photographs of the early 30s made me a very emotional man. Emotion is the currency of my art, I suppose. It’s a valid form of expression.
Our first premiere screening for Mousie was – and we hadn’t planned this – in Berlin, which is extraordinary. And even more extraordinary, during the AKE DIKHEA Festival of Romani film. They made a big fuss about the film, which was really lovely. It was a very, very warm reception from some really splendid people. And they invited along a Romani survivor who had survived the Second World War by hiding, not in a wardrobe in a Weimar club, but he was kind of as close to the real thing as you could get. So I went to this screening in Berlin and was very nervous as this was this man’s real experience. He’s the one person on the planet, probably, who has the most right to challenge whatever I’ve suggested or depicted.
But surprisingly, it came to the end of the film and – he’s a very, very charming, erudite, eloquent man – he’s crying and I’m crying and he’s hugging me, and he just says: “This is my story.”
words HANNAH COLLINS
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Mousie might win an Oscar – though it made the long-list it didn’t for the short-list of its eligible category and is therefore no longer eligible. Mousie is also 17 mins long, not 12, as also previously stated.
