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Nine Years of Storytelling: Seth and Pete Scriver on Endless Cookie
Endless Cookie, courtesy of Sundance Institute. Sundance is capable of showing some fairly excruciating and/or formulaic comedy, but one alternative this year was the shaggy DIY delight of Endless Cookie. Tucked away in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, this Canadian animation from half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver (who are white and indigenous, respectively) daisy-chains stories about their family history, from the far-flung Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba (where Pete lives) to 1980s downtown Toronto (where they logged time together). Stories from the past blur with the constant activity of the house and environs where Pete’s children and dogs live as Seth visits to record people’s memories and random interjections.
Both the animation and humor speak the language of a warmly bustling family where everyone has a nickname and there’s no peace from someone piping up, playing video games or generally poking their (brightly colored) nose in. There are stories of a beaver trap gone terribly wrong, a burgled chicken truck in Toronto, the phenomenon of “shaking tents” and the cruel history of residential schools, as well as some healthy mockery of Canada’s police force. All are narrated in the amusingly low-key voices of Pete and his children, recorded in what might called deadpan audio by Seth, in a film merging Pete’s talents as a natural storyteller and Seth’s zine-influenced lo-fi renderings.
At Sundance I spoke with them together about the process of pulling together stories, and the complex traditions, legacies and practices that inform them. Endless Cookie will next screen in Doc Fortnight at the Museum of Modern Art.
Filmmaker: The movie took nine years to make. How did it evolve over that time?
Seth: It started off as, “I love Pete’s stories, and I want to record some of them and do some animation.” We had a plan to do some nice high-quality recordings, but Pete has eight kids, a four-bedroom house and 16 dogs. It was really hard to make a clear recording; the kids were interrupting, so we eventually gave in to the idea that it’s impossible to do this without these interruptions.
Pete: How many days did we take the clock off the wall because it was ticking and you could hear it on the recording?
Seth: Over the nine years we have a historical audio recording of Pete’s fridge getting louder and louder and louder until it’s like, “Oh my god, we gotta unplug it!”
Filmmaker: But you don’t notice at first because it’s gradual.
Seth: Exactly. Then, once more of the kids got involved in the story, we started recording stories off them. It became this family portrait, so we tried to have everyone have a little part. That wasn’t the plan, but in the end it was so sweet to have everyone in it.
Pete: It was just recording stories that we talked about at the family table, like that one about the Sasquatch. It’s not something you tell to everybody.
Filmmaker: I like how the movie keeps coming back to the beaver trap story about Pete getting his hand caught as a through-line.
Pete: Yeah, it disappeared into my hand like this. [shows his hand]. Literally the flesh was touching on this [other] side. But I was so embarrassed when there was a skidoo [snowmobile] coming. I still don’t know who that was. I’m never going to live that down.
Filmmaker: How often would you meet to gather stories together?
Pete: Oh, once or twice a year at most.
Seth: It’s pretty expensive and far [to Shamattawa]. There’s no roads going there, so you have to fly in a little bush plane. You could risk it on the winter road, but it’s terrifying.
Pete: It’s very, very bumpy.
Seth: If you got stuck or something, you’d be screwed. It would cost a lot too, ’cause you’d have to get one of those walkie-talkies that can go up to satellites. Or if you do break down, you’ll die. You’re not gonna run into anyone for, like, 250 kilometers in any direction.
Filmmaker: How did these story sessions work?
Seth: We’d record long sessions so everyone was relaxing. You could get really genuine performances, ’cause no one’s an actor, but you have to let everyone get comfortable, myself included.
Pete: Yeah, at first it’s just sitting around talking, then Seth decides to record. There were times where we had to do the recording again or fix something.
Filmmaker: How did it feel to re-record a line from a story?
Pete: “Huh?”
Seth: Pete’s a natural storyteller, really brilliant, but it’s really hard to tell someone, “OK, now tell this story about whatever.” Pete has to be kind of triggered into it, and then it’s really good. But if I’m like, “Tell me the story about the Sasquatch getting his eyes ripped out,” he’ll just tell me a couple little bits of it, with no detail.
Filmmaker: You used Adobe Animate for this (after starting in Flash!). How did you develop the look?
Seth: Some of my artistic practice has been drawings, and when I first started making cartoons and animations, I learned by going through the garbage can in the animation class that I wasn’t enrolled in. At the end of the day everyone saves their files, then puts stuff in the garbage can so the computer’s clean for the next class. I started getting them all out of the garbage can and messing them up, adding things on top of other things and figuring out how it worked, dissecting it, putting it back together. Then I made another feature before this one called Asphalt Watches [2013]. I developed a style with my friend Shayne Ehman, and it evolved from there. But with the family I was just trying to capture them and just… going with it.
Filmmaker: Everyone has such distinctive character design. I love Pete’s hat.
Pete: I’m still wearing the same shirt!
Seth: It’s mind-blowing: when my son first saw the images of me and Pete, he was like, “Papa! Uncle Pete!” Pete was saying that up in Pete’s community people will see the drawings and just know who it is, which is a little surprising because they’re pretty surreal. Some of them had symbolic meanings and stuff. I was showing Dez [one of Pete’s daughters] her drawing. She’s the elastic band: She moved to Toronto when she was three, grew up downtown for a while, then moved back up when she was 20. It was surprising how well she adapted back to Shamattawa: She was a total queen up there, instantly really solid. I was always impressed by how elastic her ability was to adjust to both places. So I did a very simple thing of making her an elastic band. And when I was showing her the character, she was like, “That’s me!”
Filmmaker: How about the colors and composition? I love the palette and how action will pop up in part of a frame.
Seth: At a certain point I was trying to make everything look like the real colors that they are, and it was really gross-looking. In real life things are vibrant, but for some reason when you draw them, it’s like, “Man…” But once I realized I didn’t have to follow any rules, my life was so easy. It’s so freeing when you realize that. It was literally like painting a family portrait.
Filmmaker: Do you start with a simple image and keep adding details, or how do you accumulate these images?
Seth: The whole movie is kind of a snowball. Peter’s stories led the whole animation. It’s not “just telling the stories”—they held everything together. I did tons of work drawing everything, but Pete’s work was of equal importance.
Filmmaker: Pete, do you like to tell stories at regular occasions or all the time?
Pete: It’s a habit I picked up from my grandmother and my mom. They just kind of break out into a story. Kids sat down for storytelling; it’s like having your favorite cartoons come on. We didn’t have a TV. I don’t think we had electricity.
Seth: Was there radio? CBC?
Pete: No, it was CKY from Winnipeg, but most of us couldn’t understand it because it was in English. English is my second language. I spoke Cree. My father came up to visit when I was 10 or 11, and he said my English was way better than other people in the community. I usually tell people I taught myself English because I remember one day a plane landed and these people got off and I thought they were really funny-looking and talked funny. So, I tried imitating them, then I got sent to Sunday school.
Filmmaker: Do you also draw?
Pete: I used to mostly write or carve, and I kind of gave up on drawing, because my idea of drawing would be, like, if I could get it to look like a photograph. I thought. “That’s totally impossible,” so I just gave up.
Filmmaker: What do you carve in?
Pete: Oh, just whatever’s at hand. Sometimes it takes a while; I’ll forget about it, put it up on the shelf and do it again.
Seth: Pete finds lots of discarded things at the dump because of his job at the nursing station. He always has to bring the garbage from the nursing station to the dump. He’s always finding these amazing swords that he’s made beautiful new handles for. But I just remembered another funny thing when you were talking about your mom. I was visiting Pete one time, helping him babysit the kids, and me and his mom were hanging out. Pete left and I was watching Alien vs. Predator with her. She started screaming at the TV and I was worried, because she was really losing their mind, yelling in Cree. [Pete laughs] When Pete finally came home, I was like, “Your mom’s losing her mind watching this.” And he was like, “Oh yeah, she thinks everything she sees on TV is real. I forgot to tell you that.”
Filmmaker: Endless Cookie talks about how your grandfather could communicate at a distance through special tents. Could you elaborate?
Pete: My mother just recently started telling me about it. It’s called a shaking tent. They used it to go communing with the spirits. One time my mom asked her dad, “What do you see in there?” He said, “Well, I talk to my friends.” “Well, what’s it like?” “It’s like going to the picture show, except we can talk to each other”—his idea of the picture show was silent movies that he’d seen one time. He communes with his friends at a distance. It was a way of passing messages, like so-and-so passed away. In the spring, when everybody would travel down to Hudson Bay to trade their furs, there was another river where there were three or four families. So, they camped there, waited for them to come, but before they got there, they would get in contact with one of his friends in his tent. The priest was totally against all that stuff, called it black magic. But that’s how they kept organizing themselves and each other. So, it was a tool for good. Some people used it for bad, but my grandfather would use it to find where all the caribou were, where the closest moose was. All of a sudden he’d be packing up; he would take his sled, gun, teapot, tent and he’d be gone. Three days later he’d show up with the meat and tell other people, “I couldn’t bring everything, I left it over there, go get it. It’s all yours.”
Filmmaker: You mentioned the priest. There’s some serious history in the movie about abuse, but it’s included as part of the flow of stories.
Pete: Some of the stuff I talked about in the movie, you were not allowed to mention it when I was a kid, because the church officials would get wind of it or even the police. They did a lot of damage, but my grandfather had given up that way of life as he got older and joined the church. I think he combined the church and his old beliefs. My mom was there all the time, so that’s how I know all the stuff.
Filmmaker: It felt important that the residential schools are also touched on in the movie.
Pete: Oh yeah, and this is not too long ago. They just recently stopped. My brother got sent to the residential school. Three kids from my community got sent there, and when they got there, the school was closed, so they got shipped around all over the place, not knowing where they were. I always say [Rusty] was kidnapped when he was seven years old, basically.
Seth: And this is in the ’60s, not that long ago.
Pete: When my brother got shipped out, I think it was 1975.
Seth: When we were telling these family stories, there’s context needed sometimes that we had to add in there. Because everyone knows in the family, and it’s sad maybe, but it’s not like we’re laughing at it. So we’re trying to be respectful, but then also trying to do it the way that our family would talk about it.
Filmmaker: Well, I love how the movie talks about the police…
[Both laugh]
Seth: Pete was a magistrate, a justice of the peace up there between the community and the police.
Pete: That was the only job available that nobody wanted. I thought “What the hell, I’ll apply for it.” I think they liked what I had to say. I had to deal with the police all the time. Some of them were nice, some were just assholes. And the nice guys, I don’t understand why they wanted to be police. I started to understand how they were thinking. One day they asked my advice on something, so I told them. And I got accused of “turning native.” I said, “You know, I’m from Shamattawa, and a lot of the people you guys put in jail are my family, my cousins. Just because my skin’s white doesn’t mean I’m one of you. I was born and raised here.” After that, they started to distrust me a bit.
Filmmaker: Are there other artists that you feel a connection to? I came across a collection of Vancouver zines that you’ve mentioned.
Seth: Oh, yeah, Nog a Dod. It’s a community of people that I’m friends with that have a similar do-it-yourself vibe. There are some movies that I thought were amazing. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; when I saw that, I was blown away. This Is Not a Movie by Jafar Panahi really blew my mind when I watched that too. It’s like Endless Cookie a little bit: it’s kind of like a documentary but then it’s also like “What is happening here?” And I watched Shaolin Soccer in Shamattawa.
Pete: Oh yeah, that was funny.
Seth: It was so funny. The whole family is just laughing. And Boots Riley; Sorry to Bother You and I’m a Virgo, really good.
Filmmaker: What about animation?
Seth: A lot of lo-fi stuff that my friends make, but I like the classic stuff too, like Akira and Japanimation sci-fi like Ghost in the Shell. I also love crappy television cartoons—really inspiring, simple stuff.
Filmmaker: What’s that old one with the ray guns?
Seth: Rocket Robin Hood. That was made in Toronto, and it’s known as one of the worst animations ever created, or cheapest, and I know the guy! It’s this friend of our uncles. He did the matching of the voice to the animation.
Filmmaker: I do want to ask about the sound of the dialogue in Endless Cookie. What went into creating this natural, casual feel?
Seth: I guess it’s just our storytelling. I’m glad that you think that!
Pete: We tried coaching people to talk this way, and it didn’t work. A couple just gave up. My oldest son, Antonio, he was like, “That’s enough. Forget it.”
Seth: He’s the guy who likes the Chicago Bulls. Then, one day he just started talking to me when we were at home alone. Everyone else was out, I turned on the microphone, and he told me that dream story, which was pretty powerful. And he said, “My mom, people tell her their dreams and she interprets them, because she has lots of intuition into that kind of stuff.” And with Cookie, we exaggerated [the sound], but Cookie did have one of those voice modulators at one point.
Filmmaker: Yak Baks?
Seth: Yeah, those Yak Baks. But then we got a more powerful one and made it even more yakky.
Filmmaker: This movie brings together so many practices. Thinking about what you were saying about intuition and knowledge, do you see any connection between these traditions and art-making?
Seth: Well, my wife’s Japanese, and this Japanese saying came up: are you following the brush, or is the brush following me? It’s an idea of intuition because you’re the one controlling it… but am I controlling it? Then it’s this joke in the animation when we’re looking at the storyboard: are we following the storyboard, or is the storyboard following us? The intuition of artmaking is spiritual in a different way, and it can be powerful. I would say they’re different things, but there’s always some special stuff going on if you give in to it.
