Of all the documentaries hitting Sundance this year, none will have the look, the wit, or the number of wild characters as Seth and Peter Scriver’s Endless Cookie. Nearly a decade in the making, the film involves illustrator and animator Seth in conversation with his half-brother, Pete. While the half-brothers share a father, Pete’s mom is Indigenous. He makes a home in his Northern Manitoba community trapping animals, raising his kids and his dogs, and navigating life in the community surrounded by friends, neighbours, and all kinds of characters, while Seth makes a living as a filmmaker in Toronto.
It’s in this rich setting that Pete’s stories – some surreal, some sweet, some just silly – are brought to life thanks to Pete’s soothing narration and Seth’s angular animation style. The result is a beautifully bent family portrait, one unafraid to tackle some of the third rails of Canadian multiculturalism, but doing so in a way that’s both inviting while never holding back from its acerbity.
POV spoke to Seth and Pete before Endless Cookie’s premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival about the epic journey to bring the film to completion, how a psychic helped it all come together, and more.
POV: Jason Gorber
SS: Seth Scriver
PS: Peter Scriver
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
POV: Let’s talk about the journey of bringing this to the big screen.
SS: I had been recording stories of Pete because he’s my favourite storyteller, as we say in the movie. Your older brother usually ends up being your idol.
A weird thing happened when some friends bought me a psychic reading. It was scary, but then I heard you can ask about projects you’re working on. The meeting started off where she said, “You have lots of dogs.” I said, “No, but my brother has 16 dogs.” At that moment, I hadn’t even thought about putting the dogs in the animation. She told me I had to put the dogs in the animation. Then she told me Dan and Chris are going to help you. I thought, “Oh, one of Pete’s kids is named Chris, maybe Christian’s going to help me?” And she was like, “No, no, it’s someone that’s involved in the movie industry: Dan and Chris and a woman that’s from a different country.” I had forgotten I had pitched to Dan [Bekerman] and Chris [Yurkovich] about possible funding. I had been scared because I’d never worked with producers before or anything like that. But once the psychic told me to work with them, I called some eight months after our initial meeting and said, “Hey, guys. A psychic told me we were going to work together, so let’s fucking do it.”
And she also told me that I was going to eat some kind of crazy hot sauce and shit my pants. Like, some intense hot sauce and then shit my pants, and she said [it would happen in] August. And then it actually happened, but in July.
POV: So, she was proven wrong.
SS: [Laughs.] It was sweet because I got to call the producers and say the first part of the prophecy has been fulfilled when that happened. So they’re the ones that dealt with Telefilm and stuff like that. We barely got any notes.
POV: You actually make Telefilm a character in your Telefilm-funded script, which I think is one of the greatest, most Canadian things ever.
SS: It’s pretty funny. It was making some of the producers nervous. They were telling us that adding the person that’s giving us money and making fun of them might not be a good idea. But luckily it worked out.

POV: “It might not be a good idea” seems to be a mantra for this film. Now, you always knew obviously it was going to be animation, but when did it actually coalesce into being this solid narrative? Was it just a matter of getting all of the stories recorded, and then drawing afterwards, or was it a matter of storyboarding and then trying to find things, how did it work between the two of you?
SS: I was recording stories, and hanging out, and then animating it a little bit, and then going and it all being screwed up and having to go back up North and then showing Pete the bits that I animated. We’d talk about it and then just talk some more, and then go like that. It became almost like a sculpture where you just keep adding on. We weren’t planning on having the thing where you get interrupted all the time with a million short stories, but it kind of just was impossible to avoid. Once we gave into that, that became the structure of having the one hand trap story throughout. But Pete had a beautiful thing he said, that it’s like dinner table stories that you don’t usually tell anyone. But we recorded them and made an animation.
POV: Pete, let’s talk about that. What is your connection to the world of documentary? You, sir, are the co-director of a documentary playing the Sundance Film Festival. Has that sunk in?
PS: [Laughs.] Yeah, it’s my introduction. I had no idea what Sundance even was. Seth came up for a visit, I’d tell him stories, and he recorded them and added animation, but it was just too much. We did try to organize it to record what you wanted to record, but then neighbours come in, somebody flushed a toilet, and so on.
SS: There was one saving grace of it taking so long, because there were a bunch of stories that Pete would say to not put that in in the animation as he didn’t want the kids hearing that story. Now most of the kids are adults, so it’s like “Oh, it’s fine if that’s in the animation now.”

POV: Pete, you’ve been telling these stories for years, what was it like for you to see your stories translated into a visual form?
PS: I at first didn’t know what to make of it. I just thought, “OK, Seth’s doing all of the work, but I really had no idea what was going on. I wasn’t too sure what to think and then of all of a sudden we’re going to Sundance.
SS: I’d always be showing Pete elements as we went along. When I first showed him some parts, he would laugh at the exact moment that he was laughing in the animation, and then sometimes just start telling the story when he was telling it. When I showed the hand being trapped, I tried to make it more exaggerated, but when I showed Pete the first drawing I made of it, he was like, “That’s exactly what it looked like.”
POV: How’s your hand now, by the way? Your hand’s totally fine?
PS: It’s good. I let it go on one side of my hand, I didn’t turn it because I knew I’d probably lose it.
POV: I’d have died out there in the cold.
PS: It just sunk into my hand slowly with very movement. As a trapper, I’m thinking, “Oh, now I know how those animals feel.”
POV: But what’s fantastic about that particular scene is that when the other person finally shows up, and you don’t want him to see you trapped, there’s a sense of pride. Many of these stories do make you look a little bit silly in the most human of ways. How did you feel sharing stories knowing that total strangers were going to know these stories about you, your family, and your dogs?
PS: That was so embarrassing. They would never have let me live it down if I had asked that person for help. I didn’t even turn around to see who it was. I just pretended I was setting up my trap, and it was sinking deeper and deeper. I’ve seen a guy drive home with one of those traps stuck on his arm, he made it home. [Laughs.]
POV: The whole world is going to be able to see you make that mistake in animated form, so was there ever a notion of like, “What are we doing here? Why are my stories going to be told outside of my family?”
PS: I never thought about it, I told Seth these stories and he wanted to make a movie, put it to animation and I was like, ok, fine. He showed up with the recorder and it was just recorded. I’m just surprised how this all turned out.
SS: I always love Pete’s stories, and a lot of the stories in the movie are family stories that everyone loves to tell or hear, you know? And then, it was like yeah, let’s do this project and shoot for the stars. You don’t think you’re going to get to the highest level, like Sundance. When you do, it’s, like, “What the hell’s going on?” I mean, we love these stories and we’re stoked that other people do too. You want to make fun of yourself first, so no one else makes fun of you first. It’s better to do it that way, right?

POV: Have you had a chance to show other members of the family or the community?
SS: Not too much. Only family’s seen it.
POV: And what has their response been?
PS: They laughed!
SS: Yeah, people are laughing hysterically.
POV: Laughing at, or laughing with?
PS: I think both. [Laughs.]
SS: Yeah, it’s a combo.
POV: Let’s talk about the visual style. Can you talk about nailing down the look, about how much character design actually played a role as the film developed over all of this time?
SS: Well, for a lot of the characters, I tried to make it symbolic not make total sense, in a way, but more like a visual feeling of the characters. Sometimes it’s more literal, like with Rusty Redhead, his nickname was Milk Jug and his last name’s Redhead and the caps on milk jugs are red caps. Pete’s saying that he sounds like The Godfather, Marlon Brando, so I had to mix those things together. It became pretty literal. But that’s far off from literal too.
POV: I mean, Cookie is a chocolate chip cookie.
SS: Cookie’s a cookie, yeah. For some of them, it’s more that they’re a hilarious person, or the character just made me laugh or made us laugh, and then I went with it. Sometimes it was just making things on the fly.
POV: In a normal animated film, you would do all of the vocal recording, you would have a very structured script, that script would be pretty much locked down, animation would be done after the voice recording, and it would be pretty static for years while you’re actually doing the animation. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this probably wasn’t done that straightforwardly. Can you talk about the process of getting from all of these different ideas and recordings to the finished product?
SS: A lot of it morphed. I was just recoding Pete in the very beginning, and then it was getting interrupted by all of his kids and stuff like that—neighbours, and the freaking dogs. With those puppies under the stairs, that was real audio of those puppies squealing. We couldn’t figure it out for a while and then Sylvester found them. Once more characters of the family were involved, then it was like, “Oh, fuck. This is turning into a family portrait.” And so then it was adding other family members and favourite stories from them.
POV: Do you have an audio-only version of the film and animate it to that, or do you have segments that you would record and then re-record, like what was the actual process of bringing the film to life?
SS: I recorded first, and then animated those sections of what was, and then added stuff the following year, and then slowly the film was morphing and then adding more, and then recording more, and adding more, and then it got to a point where it was too expensive. To visit Pete, it costs the same as going to Japan, believe it or not, even though it’s in Manitoba. It got to the point where I was calling him, and then I realized I could animate us on the phone, because I need more information. I didn’t even know how Pete moved to Toronto. I would then watch the rough drafts of stuff that we had with someone who didn’t know anything about it, and then I would give them insider information and automatically, I’d be like, “k good, write that down.”
POV: Using that method, I’m assuming you have a ton of animation you’ve done which is not in this film.
SS: Yeah, it was over two hours, and we edited it down to an hour and a half.
POV: A conventional animated film is all of the stuff is relatively locked in and then you do the animation, and that’s obviously not the way that this was working.
SS: The extra stuff is easier if you only have one animator. I’m a little bit sad that I wasted probably about a year, but I’m not sad that it took so long just because there were so many things that came to fruition, and so many things got crystallized over the nine years. There were certain years where I thought it would never get done and I would be desperately thinking, “Oh, what a freaking nightmare.” I remember thinking for a while why did I name it Endless Cookie? This may never fucking end! But you know, now that it’s all done, it’s great. I did have an assistant animator for two months, Julian Gallese. He’s from Costa Rica.
POV: This is being released in the context of a bunch of Indigenous stories. In film they have traditionally leaned into the mystical, or perhaps towards poverty porn. Can you talk about the pleasures of simply telling the stories with your sense of humour intact without waving a flag to say that this is really important to tell this story?
SS: I remember Pete saying he was kind of just bummed out because we would hear stories from Shamattawa but it would be some fucking horrible thing on the news. And then Pete would say, “There’s never been a good fucking story from here.” They never tell anything nice. When cops go up there, they think they’re gonna get shot in some way.
PS: There’s never a happy story about Shamattawa. If a happy story happened, it wouldn’t get reported, so it wouldn’t get heard. And most of everything negative that comes out of a place like Shamattawa is generated by RCMP information.
SS: The one joyous thing is to tell a couple of funny stories or just normal stories: normal people live in this place, families live here, there’s a lot of insane stories from there too.
POV: You’re taking us through the extreme situations, but not doing so in a way that exoticizes life up there. You’re dealing with the everyday experience that sometimes you’re going to lose your hand in the trap.
PS: Well, where I come from, most of the people aren’t serious about anything. And a lot of things are a laugh. If you get a laugh out of someone, you’ve got to get it out there.
POV: You lived in Toronto long enough to know that people have very specific ideas about what it’s like to be Indigenous in this country. They have preconceptions of what it is and what life’s like up there. There must be a certain joy in telling your stories the way you want to tell them. It’s animated, but your voice is coming through. There’s a normalcy that is missing so often in these stories that you usually get elevated into something either mystical or miserable.
PS: Well, a lot of us are just normal. [Laughs.] Some people don’t seem to get that or don’t want to get it. It’s like somebody that says they’re not racist, well, how many times have you had somebody that’s not of your race to come over for dinner or whatever? Now, my whole family is multi-racial. My niece has a child who’s Black and my brother has a wife who’s Japanese, and I’m half white and I have grandkids now, which is new. One’s white and one’s Brown. I guess we’re just normal, but we don’t really try to dwell on the negative side. There’s too much of that. It tends to be associated with Native people.
POV: Seth, I think, superficially, the film is fun and engaging and silly and goofy, but whether you like it or not, it’s doing something that I think is quite transformative in that it tells specific stories respectfully and without dealing with the baggage with which they’re often told. Were there any moments of hesitation while bringing these stories to the screen?
SS: Constantly. Constantly making sure, double checking with Pete and the kids that we’re not doing something that’s going to be bad or uncomfortable for anyone. It’s actually constantly in my mind.
PS: That had never occurred to me. I was just telling him stories.
SS: I mean, there was the odd story that was like, “No way is that going in the movie.”
POV: On a fundamental basis, there’s got to be a sense of finally being done, but there’s also that you’re just starting on a new journey as it were, as you head to Sundance. Can you talk about what it feels like?
SS: Pete’s happy because it’s giving him an excuse to retire. For me, I ran out of money near the end of the project, and was like telling my producer “I have to pick up some carpentry stuff so I won’t be able to be available as much for doing animation stuff or anything.” He said they need some stuff fixed, so I started fixing up their office, and then literally they’d be like, oh, “We need to check something in the movie in the subtitles, or something, and I would finish ripping a ceiling out and then come over and look at some stuff, and then be like “Ok, go back to work over there: or whatever.
I’m a little worried about this project, I’m doing this big renovation and I have to leave and come back to go to different festivals, but I don’t know, I’m a little bit, not scared, but it’s a little bit unknown. Peter doesn’t know anything about Sundance, I know more than him, but I know barely anything. I thought Sundance was in the desert. And I didn’t realize it was such a competitive thing. It’s kind of mind-blowing. People keep telling us, that’s really good, you’re in the competition section. So we’re just going into it totally blind in all honesty. We’re bringing a bunch of Pete’s kids down, so that will make it fun. Cookie and Simone and Chris are coming down. And Pete’s now here in Toronto – he hasn’t been here in 31 years! This has been a beautiful family reunion.