“The Deepest, Darkest Parts of Ourselves”: Victoria Mapplebeck Discusses ‘Motherboard’

After spending her early career making documentaries for British television, primarily for the public service broadcaster Channel 4, Victoria Mapplebeck’s life took a sharp turn. Finding herself unexpectedly a single mother, she left the all-consuming job of a TV director and became a full-time film professor at Royal Holloway University as she raised her son Jim.

With the advent of the smartphone camera, and the possibilities it held for telling intimate stories without the need for a big crew, Mapplebeck returned to filmmaking after a break of 12 years. In her first smartphone short, 160 Characters (2015), she revisits her fractured relationship with Jim’s dad through their three-year text message chain.  She took her personal journey further in the short film Missed Call (2018), where she and Jim decide to try to reconnect with his father. The film won the inaugural BAFTA for short form program.

Mapplebeck was nearing the completion of Missed Call when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Still filming, she turned the difficult journey into both a Guardian documentary and a VR film, The Waiting Room, which takes us inside the radiation lab from Mapplebeck’s perspective.

Our paths first crossed at Sheffield DocFest in the late 90s, and in recent years I have been a big fan of watching Victoria use emerging digital technologies to tell personal stories. I’ve joined her at Royal Holloway University, teaching smartphone filmmaking to a new generation of filmmakers. I am also an associate producer for her latest film, Motherboard, exec produced by Debbie Manners. The feature doc, filmed primarily on her iPhone, tells the story of the first 20 years of her life with Jim. It threads the difficult needle of revisiting material covered in Mapplebeck’s short films, in a new and fresh way.

Documentary spoke to Mapplebeck ahead of Motherboard’s UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. Last week, Motherboard was announced as one of the shortlisted features for the IDA Documentary Awards in the Best Feature category. This interview has been edited.

DOCUMENTARY: What was it like coming back into filmmaking after such a long break?

VICTORIA MAPPLEBECK: It kind of felt like I’d had a career in two halves, really. So much as I massively enjoyed the career in the 90s and 2000s and got lots from it, when I ended up at 38 single, pregnant, and broke, I learned quickly that it was not the kind of TV career that you could carry on as a lone parent!

When I was pregnant with Jim, I was doing a series for Endemol that was very kind of daytime TV, called Baby Tales, which was filming couples giving birth. You could only film couples, and you couldn’t film the pubic hair. And it had to have that commercial sort of voiceover. So I was already, in a way, realizing that it was going to get harder and harder to make films that I was passionate about.  I’d always loved teaching; I used to teach quite a lot at the London Film School, and then I got the job at Royal Holloway when Jim was two. And so that became my new career plan.

And I got back into being creative again with writing, which, again, I’ve always enjoyed. The beginning of Motherboard was a decade ago, creatively, when I thought I realized that I’d unwittingly archived those text messages in that old Nokia that charted the whole relationship between myself and Jim’s dad over three years. I thought, oh, write a short story; I’ll sort of tell the story behind each text message. And then I got it accepted by Curtis Brown, and that was really exciting. And then I realized having a publisher is very different to being published. I saw that Film London had funding available—2000 pounds. I adapted it, and that’s what became 160 Characters.

D:  So you made your three shorts, and then decided to make a feature, all of them autobiographical. How difficult was it to come to the feature and have it visit some of the same territory and stories of the three shorts, but have it be its own distinct film?

VM: It was really difficult. When we were pitching at the forums, the commissioners always were saying, “But what’s the grammar of the feature?” And in a way, you can do nothing but bullshit. The short films were incredibly useful, because they were about me finding what kind of grammar worked for what type of storytelling. There were two things that were very life changing: Shooting on smartphones and realizing the access possibilities of that and the intimacy of that and how it suited Jim. 

It was amazing when I was documenting the cancer treatment, because literally, nurses would help me film—nobody was intimidated by a smartphone. And then I think the second piece that I did was the first VR project that I ever made, The Waiting Room. It had this single take with a GoPro Fusion on my head, and it was basically a reconstruction of my radiotherapy treatment. Over a nine-minute single take, I used a lot of the voicemails and the sound archive between Jim and I. The shot was amazing. It was just meant to be a test shoot, but actually the angle ended up being really brilliant, because you just saw my eyes looking up, so you really feel like you’re watching me think. There was quite a breakthrough in the edit when I realized that we could just use the 2D footage of that 3D footage within the film. And that the device I’d used in the VR piece of recreating my kind of internal thoughts and memories gave us a really good flashback device. It’s a way to convey that interior monolog dialog, you know, the monkey brain way that we’re always thinking about fears and joys and angst and worry.

That miasma of the internal monologue is a device that’s used a lot in the film. So that we can go between past and present in that much more elliptical structure, which I think it hugely benefited from. We were using consultant editors, and the feedback we were getting was that it was going too slowly, and it was laborious. And once I’d sort of found that technique, that made a huge difference. So yeah, the short films and the immersive projects were really useful. But I still had a massive amount of work to do in that two year edit, because they were a good starting point, but I still had to find my own grammar for the feature. And I think you can see in the feature that, yes, it’s got elements of the shorts, but it’s also got something that feels quite new and quite different.

D:  We see, of course, Jim grow up in this film. Talk me through his evolving role over the years.

VM: He’s got a creative consultant role, which I felt like he deserved. Certainly, he had full power of veto, so I had to show him footage that we wanted to use on a fairly regular basis.  And he was hugely influential. He’s got a great barometer. In terms of him as a subject, that really evolved. In Missed Call he was 13, and really liked being filmed—it wasn’t onerous or difficult for him. And then I suppose when it became much more difficult was when he started to evolve into the teen years, understandably. I was diagnosed with cancer when he had a few months left of being 13. Then he turned 14, and then the conversations and the filming became about that. I’m always quite agile about the mediums that I use, depending on how sensitive or difficult a situation is. And so when I was making The Waiting Room, I switched to audio.

Quite often, Jim and I would do an audio-only recording, just sitting on the sofa. And actually, it did become a sort of DIY family therapy, because he would be very open in those audio conversations about his fears. He also knew that filming cheered me up to a degree, and it became a way that he could kind of help me through the cancer treatment. Sometimes, when I was having a really bad day, he would say: “Do you want to do some filming?”

 And it evolved again in a really good way in his late teens, sort of from sort of 2020 onward, when I discovered the technique of putting the unattended camera in selfie mode, and me and Jim sit on the edge of the sofa, like we’re both subjects, basically. That was really liberating for him, and he really enjoyed that. It’s the real comic bit of Motherboard.

D: What has been the response so far to it? During the whole long edit, who were you imagining watching it?

VM: My feeling initially was that it would be women of a certain age. When we were pitching, it would certainly appeal to women commissioners more than it would men. It’s pretty relatable, I think, particularly for women who have been parents. When it played Copenhagen, there was a nice sort of revelation, because Jim was there doing the Q&A’s that it also has quite a lot of appeal for people Jim’s age. Jim had a lot of people coming up to him, going, “Oh, I’ve been bought up by two gay dads,” or “I just had one parent,” or “My parent went through cancer treatment or died at a certain point in their childhood,” and they were really kind of very connected to it.

Jessi Klein’s written a lot about very male narrative of the hero’s journey in any kind of creative form. She says motherhood is a sort of hero’s journey, but it’s not a journey to far-flung places. It’s a journey to the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves we didn’t even know were there. And I think that’s what Motherboard’s about. Epic journeys can begin and end at home.

Carol Nahra is a documentary journalist and lecturer. She teaches documentary and digital journalism at Syracuse University London, Royal Holloway, and the London College of Communications. She also works as a programmer and producer and is the lead trainer for the Grierson DocLab New Entrants scheme.