Now and then
Swedish stars Alexandra Rapaport and Ella Hammasten Liedberg join writer-director Martina Haag to pull back the curtain on the making of Det är något som inte stammer (Little Did I Know), a Viaplay film about a woman looking back on her childhood as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
For her first film, Det är något som inte stammer (Little Did I Know), Swedish author and actor Martina Haag has used her own life for inspiration.
Based on two of her books – the autobiographical Det är något som inte stammer (There is Something Wrong) and Livet går så fort. Och så långsamt (Life Goes So Fast. And So Slowly) – the drama is written and directed by Haag, and centres on a woman looking back on the challenges she faced as a teenager while confronting new problems in the present.
At the age of 50, Petra (played by Alexandra Rapaport) appears to have it all – a perfect marriage, a successful acting career and two wonderful children. But when she discovers her singer husband (played by Shanti Roney) is having an affair and wants a divorce, her world falls apart.
Meanwhile, the 15-year-old Petra (Ella Hammarsten Liedberg) is a rowdy young woman searching for happiness and love while confronting a difficult home life.
Through the film, the action switches back and forth as the older and younger Petra share the same hopes and fears about the path ahead of them, in a story about finding yourself and becoming the person you were always meant to be.
Haag and Peter Aarhenius wrote the script, with the film produced by Rapaport’s Bigster for Nordic streamer Viaplay. Pre-sales have been secured with SBS in Australia, Pickbox in Croatia, EITB for Basque Spain, Mola in Indonesia and DMD in Latin America via Viaplay Content Distribution.
“When I was divorced, I was looking in literature for something to hold on to, something to tell me it will get better, that you won’t always feel like this. Some kind of strength,” Haag says. “But I couldn’t find it, so I discovered I had to write that book myself. Now I’m doing the movie.”
Presenting the title at this year’s Monte Carlo Television Festival, where it won the Golden Nymph Award for best film, Haag admits she was “so nervous” about making her directorial debut. But she made sure she had “the best actresses in Sweden” to support her on set.
“I had the best team around me,” she says. “In the first days, I wasn’t sure if you shout ‘Silence, action’ or ‘Action, silence.’ But I’ve done a lot of lead roles myself as an actor and I’ve been writing a lot of scripts myself, so this was the next step.”
“That’s one of her strengths,” says Liedberg, “that she has been on our side. She has acted herself, so she knows what we need from a director, she knows what it’s nice to hear and how to cooperate [with actors] because she has our perspective too.”
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Drawing together two time periods in the film, Haag wanted to demonstrate how people grow from the building blocks of their childhood. “That’s why the grown-up Petra is falling, tumbling through space, because she doesn’t want to give her kids what she grew up in,” she explains. “It’s so easy to be 15 and say, ‘I will never be like my parents.’ The message I would like to give people is that, yes, it can be very hard sometimes when you’re in a crisis, but almost always it gets better and you become a better person. It’s personal development and you have a better life afterwards.
“Without crisis, you’re very boring, but it’s hard when you’re in the middle of a crisis [to think], ‘Oh, I’m in a crisis, I will develop.’ You can look back and say, ‘That was good, because I would not be sitting here if I hadn’t been through this crisis.’”
But rather than exploring the idea of making a series to examine the relationship between Petra’s older and younger selves, Haag was always adamant that Little Did I Know would be a film.
“Because I love movies,” she says. “Sometimes when you watch a series, it’s just going on and on. I wanted to make this like you’re going to do a broth, where you put in vegetables and water and you just cook and cook, and I wanted to make this broth as strong as possible. I was sitting in the editing for years, just taking out one second here and one second here because I wanted the broth to be as strong as possible. If you do a series, it could be very watery broth.”
Rapaport and Liedberg have equal screen time in the film, yet it’s only at the story’s conclusion that they appear together.
“Of course we met and we rehearsed, but we trusted Martina to make Petra different at different ages,” Rapaport says. “I think we have similarities anyway. It was not [for us] to try to walk like each other or sit like each other, but I think we’re connected anyway. They are two people, because so much time has passed and young Petra is so different. She’s so rebellious when she’s young and she’s trying to be a good girl when she’s grown up and has lost that rebellion thing.
“Martina, as an actor herself, is really welcoming of ideas and different kinds of nuances. A really good director wants to bring her actors’ own experiences into the film. I really liked working with Martina.”
“We both chose to trust Martina because she had such a strong vision,” Liedberg adds. “It ended up [working] really well. She was always open to discussion – like in a specific scene or situation, we might have our own experiences, so we could put our own thoughts into it.”
Before shooting took place in and around Stockholm, Haag took steps to record a “sketch” version of the whole film, working with the actors with “no props, no make-up, nothing.” This was so she could film and edit the whole story in advance, and when it came to production, she knew exactly what shots she wanted.
“The funny thing was this was during Covid; sometimes people were ill,” she says. “So I was picking up people at the office [to appear in the film]. It was very funny, but that was a good help for me because then I was more self-confident when I started to do the real thing.
“When you have 40 people working on the set and catering, cars, it’s very expensive. But doing a little shoot is not that expensive, so I saved a lot of money. When me and the DOP agreed on something because we’d already tried it, we didn’t have any arguing. We also didn’t have any overtime, so everybody wants to work with me again!”
For Liedberg, making Little Did I Know proved to be a family affair, as both her parents – actors Jessica Liedberg and Gustaf Hammersten – also appear in the film.
“It was very fun to do, and in some ways I was more comfortable in the scenes with my mother, but it was also very weird,” Liedberg says. “I had to focus and compose and control myself – ‘Don’t laugh now, don’t think of your mother.’ It was weird but it was also very fun.”
Growing up in the industry, her first acting job was starring with her father in a Swedish Christmas production. “I was like, ‘Woah, this is so fun,” she remembers. But after some small roles, she decided to leave acting.
Then just as she was coming to terms with life away from the profession, she got the opportunity to star in Little Did I Know. “It reopened my eyes and I was like, ‘I want to do this.’ I know it’s a lot of work, and it’s not all glamour and it’s mentally hard. It’s real work and it’s pretty unstable, so I have both perspectives. It’s definitely something I want to keep doing in this moment.”
The actor was particularly drawn to young Petra because she found she could relate to the character, but she also had to dig deep into “the dark places inside yourself” to play the role.
“You have to bring back all the hard things you’ve been through,” she says. “It was hard doing this movie because you have to go back to all these emotions that are very painful and you don’t want to think about them, but you have to because you have to re-enact them. So it was hard, but also very giving and learning and fun.”
Haag is confident that anyone who enjoys reading her books “will love the film even more.”
Liedberg adds: “It doesn’t matter which societal group you come from in Sweden. Everybody I know that has read Martina’s books can see themselves in the books. It doesn’t matter if you’re working class or if you’re an immigrant or whatever. And of course, the people who have read Martina’s books want to see the film too.”
As for her future behind the camera, Haag isn’t folding away her director’s chair just yet. “This is not the last time you’ll meet me,” she says.
tagged in: Alexandra Rapaport, Bigster, Det är något som inte stammer, Ella Hammasten Liedberg, Little Did I Know, Martina Haag, Viaplay, Viaplay Content Distribution