Stay Strapped, Stay Sanitized

Can you tell me about your production process?

It's a collaboration between me and the actors where we are starting without a script, just half of an outline, and we're shooting the movie in order, doing three scenes a day. We live the story as it happens, it unfolds in front of us, and we just have to be really active, engaged, and present. 

The reason I do this, which I also believe is the reason a lot of other creatives do it as well, is that it was fun when we were kids. So I try to make every decision I can: What would I do if I was 15? And then I use that as the guiding light. 

I always start with a location. For this one, I was living in Warsaw at the time. I was inspired by the way in which when I first came to Poland, I was anticipating something concrete and black-and-white, and then I got there, and I found this beautiful, colorful, vibrant country, and it made me very excited to put that on camera. 

Films so often begin as questions the filmmaker has about the world. What questions did you have upon starting on Erupcja?

One was, what happens when you make a movie in a language you don't speak? What will get lost in translation when I write a scene in English, it gets translated into Polish, and then I have to translate it back for subtitles? And there were differences, but it was really fascinating to dive into language, communication, and the nuance of how to express something. 

I had moved to Warsaw and was having a really intense experience of existing in this place where I didn't speak the language, and it was challenging me in ways that I didn't anticipate. And when you feel lost, you look for signs. If you're lost on a road, you're looking for a road sign to tell you where you are. And when you're navigating the landscape of your life, you also look for signs. I was seeing this happening in the story, paralleling my own experience of, how do you know if you're making the right decisions? How do you know if you’re on the right track? How do you do it without hurting other people? Is there a way to do it without hurting other people? 

Can you talk a little bit about the collaboration on set?

Process is the product. And for me, what that means is, this is the movie that gets made when this specific set of people get together at this specific time in this specific place. Clearly, we have Charli xcx in this movie, and this is Brat Summer for her and that is an eruption. By creating essentially a writer's room during the shoot with these actors, the collaborative process is whatever those people are going through and becomes the textures of the movie we eventually make. 

I was really taken with that shot with Lena and Charli across the room from one another and Charli is sitting on the floor, soliloquizing. How did that framing come about? 

That apartment was our first AD, gaffer, and production manager, Michal Wieckowski’s place and he let us film in it. This is where we kept hanging out; at the end of the night, Michal would cook us dinner, and we'd all be talking about what we were going to shoot the next day, and frequently, people were sitting on the floor, drinking wine there. So I’m seeing that and it’s informing the eventual decisions I made.

Because we're filming chronologically, when we get to that moment, we have experienced all the things that have happened in the movie now too. The hope is that we're pretty connected to our characters and that’s where you start to make these artistic filmmaking decisions that support the purpose of the scene. These characters have some sort of main character syndrome. They are performing for the world to look at them, and it felt right to have Charli sit on the floor in that door frame, her legs positioned as if she is on display and here to present something to us. But at the same time, she's distant from this person that she's been so close with.

What is your relationship like to a film of yours once it's out? 

The way I view movies is that they are documents of my life. When I see the movie, I’m remembering that week, the time I spent with those people, the things we did before and after those scenes. It’s a keepsake for me.