I sat down with director and filmmaker Nicholas Ma ahead of the release of his debut feature Mabel, a family film that follows a science-obsessed young girl named Callie whose best friend is a potted plant. This was an exclusive press junket conversation, and what struck me most about Nicholas was his genuine kinship with…
I sat down with director and filmmaker Nicholas Ma ahead of the release of his debut feature Mabel, a family film that follows a science-obsessed young girl named Callie whose best friend is a potted plant. This was an exclusive press junket conversation, and what struck me most about Nicholas was his genuine kinship with the interior life of his protagonist, a man who once argued the reality of black holes to anyone who would listen has now made a film about the strange, beautiful loneliness of being a kid who cares too much about one thing.
McAuley Tucker: How much of your own experience as a child is in this film, if there is any?
Nicholas Ma: I don’t know if I responded to the world the same way that Callie does, but I was certainly a very, very persistent, eager, science-loving, nerdy kid. I was a physics head. I have like my threadbare copy of A Brief History of Time. And I’d be very happy to talk to anyone about why black holes were absolutely real and why it was just absurd that people were resisting this idea… I feel a great kinship with Callie and that sort of unrelenting interest in a specific subject. I think there’s a beauty of childhood, of that desire to find that corner of the world where you can feel like an expert… there’s something really beautiful about the way those passions emerge and then of course the challenge of feeling those passions that make you feel great also make you feel lonely.
McAuley Tucker: Fred Rogers… specifically built his career around one idea: that children deserve to be seen. And in this project you have this character who wants to be seen, desperately wants to be seen. And I know that you had an opportunity when you were six to perform “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” with your father on his show… I was wondering how much did you literally sitting with Fred as a kid shape what Mabel became.
Nicholas Ma: I think that question of seeing through the eyes of a child is something that is direct transmission from Fred… It’s so easy when you make movies about children to think that you should make them from the perspective of an adult and to see all the ways in which children… what they don’t see around them. But really to me it’s much more fascinating to think about how did we, or do we, see the world as a 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 year old, you know, in all the ways that it doesn’t make sense, in all the ways that maybe we see things that we stop being able to see as we get older. And I think that is such a gift that Fred always reminded us, that there is wisdom in that perspective. Not just youth in that perspective.
Nicholas Ma: Plants were the alpha and omega for this movie… What we didn’t necessarily know at the beginning was that we were going to need eight Mabels in order to get through the production and each one of them needed to be tended, and they were by far the most finicky cast members… You can’t just sort of say to a plant, ‘figure yourself out and be ready.’ That care, that mutual care really is a part of it.
Consider watching Mabel Today.