The year was 1999 and we sat at the kitchen table in Old Town in Stockholm and had morning coffee. We started playing with the idea of being an actor. Cinemateket’s program sheet was on the table and in it you could see frozen stills from films by Akira Kurosawa (‘Dreams’), Michael Curtiz (‘Casablanca’), Ingmar Bergman (‘Scenes from a marriage’) among others. We fell for the idea of creating moving pictures from stills, with ourselves in all the roles.

We have since made a number of short films on that theme. We decided that each movie recording should take no more than one hour and we calculated that we could get three to four moving still images in one day. Since the budget was only SEK 300 including pizza, all the films were filmed at the Myrorna flea market in Ropsten, where we borrowed clothes, furniture and arranged with lighting and filmed in secret. What happens when we film ourselves still as in the picture, what emotions penetrate the moving picture? When our mutual concentration during the recording failed, the story was created in the gaps.

Although we had not seen several of the films that were shown at Cinemateket in Filmhuset in Gärdet, the frozen still images in the program sheet became a window, which we passed through and out on the other side. Ingmar Bergman said that he did not feel any closer relationship with Johan and Marianne, although he acknowledged some common traits. That applied to us too! We used our own experience of our platonic love relationship. We made our own ”Johan and Marianne ” by freely formulating our own lives. The scene from a marriage, was completed in Stockholm 2020.