\n<\/p>\n
If old age is not for snowflakes \u2014 well, try directing a 90-minute feature film about old age in the iPhone era, as Niclas Larsson has done.<\/p>\n
Mr. Larsson, 33, greeted me on a recent morning into his 15th-floor terraced apartment in a former button factory in Manhattan, looking eerily like his dog, a blond lurcher named Ted, the way many owners do. He had settled here, the garment district of Midtown Manhattan, after rejecting \u201chipper\u201d quarters in Brooklyn and the financial district.<\/p>\n
A native Swede with a deep appreciation of Americana, he was offering strong black coffee and strong opinions on where his new movie, \u201cMother, Couch,\u201d should be seen, like the Angelika theater downtown, where it opens on Friday, and the Nuart in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
\u201cHollywood is like, What\u2019s going on?\u201d Mr. Larsson said, considering the summer box office, which has thus far been a faint shadow of last year\u2019s Barbenheimer<\/a>. \u201cNo one knows what\u2019s going on. But I want to give the nerds the option of going to the theater. It\u2019s made for a theater. It\u2019s shot on 35 \u2014 it\u2019s all the film nerdy things in there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYou know what also about a theater that we forget is the God perspective of people telling us a story,\u201d he went on. \u201cPeople forget \u2014 the big shadow plays they did around the fires in the Stone Age? They did them large, because it\u2019s important.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMother, Couch,\u201d based on \u201cMamma i soffa,\u201d a 2020 Swedish novel by Jerker Virdborg, and shot to some local excitement<\/a> in Charlotte, N.C., indeed takes on large themes, including mortality, parenthood and that Gen Z bugaboo, capitalism.<\/p>\n The story is focused on an elderly matriarch (Ellen Burstyn at 91: \u201cthe cutest, most beautiful lady,\u201d Mr. Larsson said) who plunks down on a sofa at a furniture store and refuses to get up, causing her three adult children to rally around her in distress, if not consensus. The most agitated and involved of them \u2014 in the wilds of elder care, there\u2019s always one \u2014 is played by Ewan McGregor. Lara Flynn Boyle, as his sister, and F. Murray Abraham, as the identical-twin owners of the store, also figure.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Larsson was fretting a little that, at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, some had suggested that \u201cMother, Couch\u201d was a dramedy, an impression seemingly confirmed by a poster featuring Mr. McGregor as he looks winsomely heavenward. (The image has since been changed to something more surreal<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018Guys, it\u2019s horror \u2014 we did a mistake,\u2019\u201d he said (his excellent English is flecked with such occasional slight malapropisms). \u201cIf we lure the audience into believing that it\u2019s a comedy, they\u2019ll walk out. And they did, of course. Can you imagine? Poor people!\u201d<\/p>\n Though the director whose career Mr. Larsson most covets is Billy Wilder<\/a>\u2019s, he saw plenty of horror movies as a child, including two starring Ms. Burstyn: \u201cThe Exorcist\u201d<\/a> (1973) and \u201cRequiem for a Dream<\/a>\u201d (2000). He grew up on a farm near Malmo, often looked after by grandparents oblivious to the rating system, and he was about 8 when he watched Brad Pitt in \u201cSeven.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThat was a huge deal for me,\u201d he said. \u201cLike, what is this incredible force that comes from this screen? How can I feel this terrified?\u201d<\/p>\n His mother worked long hours at a beauty salon, where he read a lot of celebrity gossip magazines, wondering, What do these people do? Why are they important? Why do people take pictures of them? <\/em>He also fingered the hair-color samples. \u201cWhich I loved, because they had these beautiful little knots,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n His father was a former military officer who sold charter tours and had a cool record collection. Little Niclas went on a TV talent show, \u201cLittle Stars,\u201d and did an impression of Alice Cooper as he sang \u201cSchool\u2019s Out<\/a>,\u201d complete with a snake wrapped around him. He won.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He became a fairly successful child actor but soon realized you could have more fun behind the camera, controlling what people said. \u201cI hated school,\u201d he said. \u201cI was sort of a loner, and sort of famous, and that was weird to deal with, and I was really bad, bad, a bad kid. Not violent, but I didn\u2019t like the assignments. Like, for example, when we had Swedish class and were told to write a three-page story, I couldn\u2019t understand why I couldn\u2019t hand in 10 pages.\u201d<\/p>\n Ingmar Bergman films weren\u2019t doing it for him, either.<\/p>\n \u201cWay more interesting to watch \u2018Rambo,\u2019 you know what I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Truck honks were wafting upstairs, but Ted had fallen asleep on a squishy couch, his paws twitchy as if he were galloping through a dream field. Mr. Larsson described his current reading material: \u201cBurning Boy<\/a>,\u201d Paul Auster\u2019s biography of Stephen Crane, and \u201cCinema Speculation<\/a>\u201d by Quentin Tarantino. (He also liked Andrew Lipstein\u2019s recent novel about a finance-bro-gone-loco, \u201cThe Vegan<\/a>.\u201d)<\/p>\n He tried film school at the University of Southern California, where he bunked with a bunch of medical students who advised him to hop on a Hollywood tour bus for cultural immersion. \u201cWe pull up to Michael Jackson\u2019s house, and the gate\u2019s open, and there\u2019s an ambulance,\u201d he remembered. He snapped a photograph. Soon afterward, he continued, he walked into an H&M, where he saw a man crying. He recalled: \u201cHe\u2019s like, \u2018The king is dead, the king is dead!\u2019 I was like, \u2018What king? The Swedish king?\u2019 And my frat guys are like, \u2018You should sell that picture, you should sell it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Fascinating as Los Angeles was, Mr. Larsson dropped out and moved back to Sweden, to Stockholm, and sold fish-oil supplements outside supermarkets. \u201cThe experience of talking to 300 people a day \u2014 in retrospect, that made me a director,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He worked on commercials, including one for Adidas starring Justin Bieber, and on a short called \u201cVatten<\/a>\u201d (\u201cWater\u201d), a sort of \u201cLittle Mermaid\u201d in reverse, about a girl who falls in love with an underwater ghost in a swimming pool. It won awards.<\/p>\n For Vogue magazine, he directed two<\/a> shorts<\/a> starring the fellow Swede Alicia Vikander and Anna Wintour, borrowing the plot from the \u201cTwilight Zone\u201d episode titled \u201cNick of Time<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s like the last Andy Warhol,\u201d Mr. Larsson said of Ms. Wintour. \u201cThat\u2019s what\u2019s left. Icons are slowing fading away \u2014 everything becomes boring and generic. It\u2019s weird to be in a time where people care less and less about the craft of filmmaking and more about the instant click or whatever it is.\u201d<\/p>\n