Kids & Dogs

In 2012, Joe Swanberg and wife, Kris Williams, were juggling two new additions to their household: newborn son, Jude, and Swanberg’s younger brother as semi-permanent houseguest. The ever-prolific Swanberg was working harder than ever, while Williams, herself a filmmaker, was suddenly a full-time mother. These newfound traditional gender roles marked a huge change from their filmmaking partnership, tensions hardly relieved whenever Swanberg’s brother came home drunk. All this is dramatised in Happy Christmas, Swanberg’s 16th film in a decade.

The cast is higher profile – Melanie Lynskey, Anna Kendrick, Lena Dunham – but the staunchly independent director also acts in the film, shot in his Chicago house, alongside his son. “I’ve spent my whole career making films that are close to home. I’ve always seen movies as a way of starting a conversation, and if you put something on screen that you’re going through, you’ll end up finding that other people are too.” Swanberg’s career began with the epoch of mumblecore, a media-created movement of the mid-’00s that was, he reckons, a natural outgrowth of the festival circuit, where no budget filmmakers would meet, become friends and collaborate.

One of those people he met then was Dunham, who started emailing the Swanbergs when she was a student filmmaker in college, obsessed with their web series, Young American Bodies, which means that, though she might be the most famous actor to grace a Swanberg movie, it’s still just working with friends. “I have no idea how she deals with all that [Girls] craziness,” Swanberg says, “but she seems really unaffected by it. I haven’t really noticed any difference in her, as a person, to how she was when I first met her seven or eight years ago.” The presence of “recognisable actors” is for Swanberg a kind of liberation, feeling that criticisms of his micro-dramas have been due to their lack of famous faces, their no budget aesthetic.

Happy Christmas, shot on 16mm, also marks a step up production-wise, Swanberg thinking it could be his last chance to work in the dying format. “On set, everyone is more focused, because everyone knows that it’s expensive, whereas with video, everyone knows you can just do it again, there’s no preciousness with the shot.” And yet, with the preciousness of celluloid, he chose to work with a two-year-old and a dog? “I felt like: we’re already shooting film for the first time, let’s throw a few more obstacles in there!” Swanberg laughs. “The dog is my friend’s dog, it lives in the apartment we were filming in, so I just let the dog do what the dog wanted to do. It was similar with Jude: I got him comfortable with the cast and crew and then just rolled camera on him hanging out. But he weirdly seemed a little more aware of it than that; he did multiple takes in a row at times. It’s hard to work out what’s going on in the mind of a two-year-old, but it seemed like he knew he was performing.”