Interview: Filmmaker Maja Borg
...I lived in different kinds of open relationships...
Old Fashioned Dreams: A conversation with documentary filmmaker Maja Borg.
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In 2007 Maja Borg’s future was looking bright. The Swedish filmmaker was working on her first feature about the economy. It wasn’t the easiest of pitches, but funding began trickling in and things started taking shape.
And then a global economic meltdown changed everything. Far from being a serendipitous stroke of luck, Maja found the questions she had been virtually alone in asking the year before were being asked daily by the world media. Huge sections already shot became redundant. Her audience had received a crash education in the crunch, and her project – much like the system – wasn’t working.
With her personal life undergoing a slow motion meltdown all of its own, Maja pressed on and began the agonizing process of re-finding her direction, which in turn cemented the theme for her film – how do we as emotional beings move on from our relationship with capitalism?
The resulting documentary, Future My Love, explores the hefty original subject matter in large part through her own personal heartbreak. A lyrical soul-searching voice-over directed at a previous lover named simply as ‘You’ walks us through the tricky job of admitting that a relationship isn’t working, letting go of the old dreams, finding better ones and moving on.
Maja’s road-trip takes her all over the world, including a long spell with 97-year-old futurist Jacque Fresco at his ultramodern Floridian social experiment the Venus Project. He’s been refining his particular dream for humanity since the Great Depression and is surely in a minority of people who can use the term ‘tentacles’ unselfconsciously whilst describing how a giant computerized brain could manage the earth’s water levels.
For the most part Maja shoots in lush technicolur HD, switching to grainy black and white Super 8mm when she wants to address ‘You’. (‘You’ is embodied on screen by actress Nadya Cazan, herself one of the lovers who helped inspire it.) Maja also weaves in archive footage and vintage futuristic illustrations, the kind where humans are reclining with cocktails in space pods on the moon. The past and the future converge paradoxically throughout Future My Love, and it’s impossible to find a depiction of how we might one day live that isn’t loaded with emotional baggage. Jacque’s curvaceous worlds and his descriptions of the way we might occupy them can’t help but carry eerie undertones of a Hollywood science fiction nightmare. I wonder how much shared reflexes like these sabotage our imagination.
“It was never meant to feel this way,” Maja tells ‘You’ towards the end. Indeed how is the future supposed to feel? Certainly her film was never meant to feel this way. The moving confession that drives it only exists because the first path failed. And it took invention and courage to find a new one.
After a rapturous reception on the festival circuit and nomination for a Michael Powell Award, Future My Love has been playing in cinemas in the UK and is now available on demand. Maja tells me a phone interview is better for her than email. She’s lived in Scotland for 12 years and when we speak her voice fluctuates every few minutes, switching accents between rhythmical Swedish and melodic Scottish, like the colors in the film.
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NAILED MAGAZINE: It took you five years to finish Future My Love, and a lot happened globally and economically in that time.
MAJA BORG: Yes, absolutely. I started to make a very different film. In the beginning we had a huge chapter that we filmed in Colonial Williamsburg, about the connection of monetary control and the American Revolution … so more the institution of money and how that is connected to freedom. But then after the crash, people knew so much more. And at the same time I felt that there were more fundamental, deeper, more philosophical questions that were being asked after 2008, which was good for me as that was what I was more interested in.
NAILED: The economic landscape had changed in that time, had your emotional landscape changed?
BORG: During that 5 years I was personally struggling with trying to challenge the normative relationship. I lived in different kinds of open relationships, then I had a partner who was very interested in that with me and would try to create the perfect relationship, and that was the woman that I did actually marry.
NAILED: Jacque evangelizes about technology a lot. Do you share his faith in the human power of invention?
BORG: Yes and no. I think my experience of people is quite different from Jacque’s. It’s not that I don’t agree with the findings he has, I’m not as convinced that we’re as functional or as clever and as sensible as he is. He has this very rational attitude towards things that I would maybe say no to or yes to, just because they feel good, even though I know it’s destructive.
I don’t think we need a profit motive to push technology further in order to actually get out of it what we need. I think maybe we did at one point, I think we were helped by capitalism and competition to get all this knowledge but now I think we have more knowledge than we almost can deal with.
NAILED: You’ve said that when you began you didn’t want it to be personal. So at what point did you actually make the decision to bring your private life in? How hard was it to open yourself up?
BORG: It was quite hard, but I wasn’t scared of it being hard I was more scared of it being self-indulgent. I have ended up being personal in a lot of my films. And I think it doesn’t have to be personal but films have to be really honest I think to work. If you are honest and open with yourself then the film’s never about just yourself, it’s about everyone. I don’t think people are interested in me, I think they are interested in themselves. I can use my perspective so people can explore parts of themselves they maybe wouldn’t do unless I had shared that perspective with them.
NAILED: What was your writing process? Did you sit down and blast it out or begin to gather notes?
BORG: I realized that the film was stuck… I had to be alone with it as well. So that was the hardest point of the film. Being the most tired and having the lowest confidence, to say “No. Everyone else step back. I am going to sort it on my own”.
So I took all the material on one of these massive hard drives and I went away with it. I went to a little village in Spain. I had all the materials, but more importantly I had all my notebooks that I had written for myself trying to sort myself out during these years.
They had been rollercoaster years for me. I was so passionate about this film but for the first three years we went ahead and filmed before we were fully funded, I didn’t have any money so I stayed on people’s sofas. And at the same time trying to juggle having a wife and a serious relationship apart from that.
The way to keep myself sane was to write these diaries while traveling. So I had all these books with airport notes, of total confusion, and total being in love, and total despair and hope, a lot of emotional stuff that obviously wasn’t written for anyone ever to read.
But I kept bits of the original text all the way through to the end, because I wanted to keep the honesty of it … because I was writing it for myself and also because language I think works like that. Sometimes you say something that doesn’t make complete sense but it makes emotional sense, so I didn’t clean everything up. Some grammar mistakes and language mistakes are still in the film, because it felt more important to let bits of the text just be how they were written in the moment.
It really was hard to face myself, and also to face my life coming back from that when I kind of knew that my marriage was over, so I was kind of writing the end as it happened. So this film is still sore for me to watch.
NAILED: So how do you feel about marriage now? Do you believe in marriage?
BORG: I see a lot of problems and always have done with the institution of marriage. I don’t believe you possess each other, I still don’t think monogamy is the only form of having a relationship … but I’m also a romantic, I feel things very strongly and I feel always the historical code that I am brought up under.
So I have a mixed feeling towards marriage, I feel very much that timeless feeling, that’s how my brain explains it to me. I want to get married. So yeah, I’m very divided now. Or always have been. I mean everyone was incredibly surprised when I got married, because everyone saw me as someone who would always challenge the norm in a relationship, so I was the last person people expected to get married and maybe that’s why I did. That’s how I work.
NAILED: You say that people are more knowledgeable about the economy now, so do you think they’re more ready to embrace new ideas economically? Or are they more anxious to make sure the old ones won’t fail?
BORG: I think it’s one of those interesting things in how we react to crisis. We don’t necessarily go “Oh my God, this really doesn’t work let’s try something different.” We go backwards, we get more fundamentalist views in times of crisis, rather than people being more open minded with new kinds of solutions. People get scared and suddenly they demand a leader, even if it’s the kind of system who has put them in that space. I think that’s something they do again and again and we have so many examples in history of doing that.
NAILED: Jacque reiterates a couple of times that economic collapse is the catalyst for making this all happen, he sees it as inevitable. But do you think the world would survive a messy break up with the past if it came to that?
BORG: I don’t think we can break up from the past, and I don’t think we can start fresh, not being emotional beings. I also don’t think we have to. It’s easy to become really overwhelmed and negative about it, but in a way it’s quite amazing that we live in capitalism, which is a system that teaches us all the time to be self-serving and to lie and to be selfish. Just on a mathematical basis you are economically punished if you buy Fairtrade produce, because it’s going to cost you more. It’s a system that in almost an absurd way goes against the morals of the same society. I don’t quite know how we got there.
But it’s quite amazing to see that we’re not just still completely and utterly selfish beings who don’t care. So if you see the environment we have created for ourselves and how we are assisting our environment, I think it’s quite encouraging.
NAILED: Jacque refers to community and society constantly, but not family. How does it fit into his theory and life and how does it fit into yours?
BORG: He has obviously questioned family. He didn’t want to have children because his work is very controversial and he was scared that would put his family at risk. Also Roxanne has made a very conscious choice. She has said that her biggest gift to the world is that she never had children.
I have always been a part of trying to search for a new kind of relationship, but that is very much trying to search for a new kind of family I suppose. ‘Family’ is even more loaded than ‘marriage.’ I have friends who live in different combinations where there are three parents for example, which in theory appeals to me a lot, but I’m also quite aware of myself and respecting the emotional side as well.
I’m not sure if it would work out for me. However I really admire when people are prepared to try, and I hope I can support people who dare to try without feeling like I’m a failure for not trying. We can be quite quick to feeling attacked ourselves. There’s a little bit about that in the film, how it was impossible to get support from friends and family, because it became important for them for us to fail, in order to relate to us and justify their own relationships.
NAILED: What are you most looking forward to in 2014?
(She tells me what it is, then tells me it’s a secret, I can’t print it. I promise I won’t.)
NAILED: So what are you looking forward to second most in 2014?
BORG: When I finish this film I promised myself I’d make a few short projects that wouldn’t take me five years and wouldn’t require me to pretty much write a book, so things with my hands where I could work with film as a much more direct medium.
NAILED: One last question. When was the last time you nailed it?
BORG: The best part of my work is when you can share it with filmmaker friends and I was going through a script with one of my absolute best friends, Ruth Paxton. She had two problems with her script that she’s starting to shoot this weekend. And together we nailed both problems. That is a lovely part of the work when you actually find these people, even though we make quite different work. Our different perspectives really help. That was the last time I nailed it, I think. Over lunch.
NAILED: Thank you.
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FUTURE MY LOVE IS AVAILABLE TO VIEW AT http://www.futuremylove.com
Maja Borg was born in Norrköping, Sweden, in 1982 and is an internationally award-winning visual artist and film director working across documentary, fiction, and experimental film. Shooting and directing local projects since her childhood, she has gone on to work on films in Europe, Asia, The Middle East and USA. Maja studied Film and Television at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in spring 2006 with in First Class BA.
