Charli XCX’s Secret Movie Revealed: How the Pop Star, Jeremy O. Harris and Director Pete Ohs Shot ‘Erupcja’ During ‘Brat’ Summer (EXCLUSIVE)
As ‘Brat’ summer raged, Charli XCX snuck away to Poland for a couple weeks in August to make a secret movie with playwright and actor Jeremy O. Harris and filmmaker Pete Ohs.
The film’s title “ERUPCJA” is the Polish word for “eruption” and refers to, of course, the type of violent explosion of molten rock that comes from a volcano, but also any sudden release of pressure or tension. The story centers on two women with a combustible relationship — one woman is Polish (Lena Góra, star of “Imago,” for which she won best actress at the Gdynia Film Festival, “Roving Woman” and the upcoming Max series “The Easterngate”) and the other, named Bethany (Charli XCX) is visiting the country. Rounding out the lead ensemble are Harris and Will Madden (who has become something of a muse for Ohs; this is their fourth collaboration as actor and director).
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“Erupcja” is a city movie, meaning the city of Warsaw, Poland is a character unto itself. So, if you’re wondering how they pulled off filming all over town and keeping the project a secret — well, they kind of didn’t.
“[Charli] definitely got recognized a bunch of times,” Ohs tells Variety, joined by Harris in a conversation over Zoom. “She was always really sweet. She took selfies with many a Polish fan …”
Harris chimes in: “Which is also how our secret project got leaked.”
Indeed, news of the movie leaked on Twitter when the popular handle @FilmUpdates posted a vague notice about Charli, Harris and Ohs’ collaboration.
“Jeremy, obviously, is a very like public figure, very active in the world of culture, but I haven’t had a film project that even like qualified to get leaked,” Ohs says with a chuckle. “So, it was cool. It was fun to see that happening.”
But Harris wasn’t surprised news of the movie made its way to the internet. “I had a gut feeling that our plan to keep it low key was going to be difficult,” he says. “And that was affirmed the first night I went out in Poland. We were staying at the Nobu Hotel, and that’s close to the queer section, so I walked over to a gay bar, and there was a sign advertising a ‘Brat’ party.”
The production actually filmed a scene in another nightclub. “It was almost impossible to shoot, which was insane,” Harris adds, laughing. “Every single person in the club was like, ‘Oh my god, Charli XCX is here to do a secret performance.’ And it was like, ‘She is, but not the one you think.’ We were shooting the same week Obama put her on his playlist as well, which is hilarious.”
To be clear, the project wasn’t a “secret” because Charli XCX is one of the most famous pop stars on the planet. It’s simply how Ohs makes his movies.
Here’s how the filmmaker’s process works: he starts with a location that’s “narratively inspiring” — this time it was Warsaw, which he’s recently made his home. “The thing that was most exciting to me is the fact that they speak Polish,” he says. “I was like, ‘I want to make a movie where there are people speaking a language I don’t speak. Like, what will that experience of directing be?’” From there, he works with his actor-collaborators to develop ideas for the characters. He’ll then write an outline for about half the movie, and that’s what they begin production with.
“We go to a location for two weeks. I’m basically the whole crew,” Ohs explains. “We shoot in order, and we write the scenes as we go. We’ll write the dialogue the day before or the morning of, and we live the story.” He continues: “It is kind of crazy. It is a challenge, but it makes it really fun, and it makes it not feel like a job. It makes it feel like this is pure creativity.”
Oh, and there is a volcano involved in “Erupcja” — an idea sparked from a conversation Ohs had with a man who got trapped in Warsaw for a month when a volcano erupted in Iceland, grounding flights across Europe. “I just thought, ‘That’s good. There’s something to that,’” the filmmaker says, explaining how the volcano became a pillar of the story, while keeping vague about exactly what transpires.
But, how did this Charli XCX, Harris and Ohs come together in the first place?
In May, just before she released “Brat” and birthed a cultural phenomenon, Charli XCX bumped into Harris and Ohs (who’d worked together on the HBO documentary “Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play”) at a bar on New York’s Lower East Side. It was around 3 a.m. when Charli and her crew walked in, and since Harris knew Charli, he introduced her to Ohs. As they made small talk, Harris mentioned the director’s unique process. Charli was like, ‘I want to do one,’” Ohs recalls. “And I was like, ‘What are you doing in August? Want to come to Warsaw?’”
The next day, Ohs had a message from Charli in his DMs. She’d looked him up and found he was legit. (Ohs is an editor and cinematographer turned director whose indie films “Jethica,” “Everything Beautiful Is Far Away” and “Love and Work,” have made splashy appearances at SXSW, Sundance, the Los Angeles Film Fest and more.)
“The way he talked about making his films felt akin to making an album and the chance meeting also felt equivalent to the conversational and spontaneous nature of his film making,” Charli XCX writes about Ohs, emailing while on the road from her “Sweat” tour with Troye Sivan. “Our processes felt linked in some kind of way and it felt right and exciting to pursue some kind of collaboration.”
In those early conversations, Charli suggested that she play against type. “She was like, ‘I think it should be completely not me. I feel like I could play super shy,’” Ohs says. “So we’re talking like, Charli XCX is completely unrecognizable as Bethany.”
Charli is building quite the resume as an actor; her upcoming projects include the erotic thriller “I Want Your Sex” starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman; Daniel Goldhaber’s remake of 1978’s “Faces of Death” starring Barbie Ferreira; and Julia Jackman’s graphic novel adaptation “100 Nights of Hero” starring Emma Corrin and Maika Monroe. Charli is also guest starring in Bentio Skinner’s Amazon comedy series “Overcompensating,” for which she’s also producing original music.
“Charli is an excellent actress,” Ohs says of the star. “She is a performer. She understands what it’s like to have a camera pointed at her. She understands how to convey things through all the different ways in which we communicate, whether it’s with body language or your voice or your facial expressions. She had a scene where she cried, without being asked – she could deliver all the goods. She’s a legit actress. I am proud of us for making a movie this way during ‘Brat’ summer.”
Pete, how did you develop your filmmaking process?
HARRIS: Have you told her about the “table of bubbles?”
OHS: The “table of bubbles” is a metaphor. It came about two months out from making this movie called “Youngstown,” which is the first movie I made with this process. The process being: make a movie like you would if you were 15 years old. Let that be the way you make all your decisions. Would you write a script? No. Would you have producers? No. Would you have permits? No. What would you have? You just have a group of friends together with a camera, and you just come up with ideas and have fun and eat pizza, and that’s it.
As that shoot was approaching — it was like a week and a half with two friends in small town, just with a camera having fun — but still, I felt all kinds of stress around going to do it. I reflected on it, and [realized] It’s because there’s this pressure I’m putting on myself. And what I needed to recognize is that the creative process can take no pressure. [It] can support nothing. It is a table made of bubbles. You cannot put anything on it. It can’t support it. It can’t support your hopes, your dreams, your rent, anything. It’s just a beautiful, magical object that you can appreciate. But don’t put anything on it, because that’s not what it’s for.
So, that metaphor is applied to all these movies, “Do not put pressure on it. Don’t put financial pressure on it. Don’t put hopes and dreams. Don’t put career pressures on it.” Because all these pressures are the opposite of what creativity needs. Creativity needs no pressure. Creativity needs the safest, most open space to be free to take all the risks, try all the things, have all the failures and have no fear around.
Jeremy, what was it like to work in an atmosphere like that — when there’s so many things swirling around your career and other projects in development as an actor and producer?
HARRIS: I think it’s not an accident that I found Pete when I did, in this moment that was highly-pressurized for me. Where every decision I’ve made felt like decision between the Tony or an Oscar or the sense that I might be forgotten if I didn’t do any of those things, [Pete] brought me back to the joy of making. The reason I made the things I made in the beginning, anyway.
I also think that’s why Lena did this movie, why Will did this movie, why Charlie did this movie. We’re all in these moments where every decision we make feels like it’s make or break, life or death. And Pete gave us this opportunity to not fear a mistake, to revel in a mistake, to see a mistake as an opportunity. I really needed to reset my brain in this moment, and it’s a process that I yearned for the minute it was over. You start to see that every movie, even an “Oppenheimer,” should be made in that sort of spirit. And if we can fabricate that spirit in these movies, where there’s very little pressure, who knows what will happen later.
On a producer level, for my company, I could invest $30,000 in developing a new script for someone that never gets sold, that never gets made, that sits in development hell for years because we can’t attach Jude Law of Judi Dench to be the lead of it. Or I could say, “Here’s $30K, let’s literally make something that is a object that we can experiment with.” It felt like a very important thing for our company to stand behind.
Jeremy, what ideas did you have about your character?
HARRIS: One of the things I was most struck by in Poland were the secret enclaves of like otherness that exist there. It was very easy to imagine that Poland is this deeply homogenous place, but Poland has always — for theater artists, for graphic designers, for visual artists —been a haven for a lot of like oddballs around the world. So, I knew that this person I was playing was most likely going to be in the art world somehow and was also going to be a bit of an oddity.
One of the one of my favorite parts of Pete’s process is we start the first day finding costumes. Like, you go to a thrift store and try out a bunch of costumes and show him like, “Oh, I think this is who Claude is.” All the ones I picked were the things that would telegraph a type of American-born, Black person living in Europe, finally free to just be his authentically odd self. I found someone to braid my hair, who was a Black woman from Sierra Leone, who had a sort of oddity to her. I found this really great clique of Asian-Polish people, who had this sort of uniqueness [to them]. So many people in Poland have this very cool 90s rave aesthetic. It was about understanding where he might go out at night, who his friends might be, and how he’s decided to break out from America to end up in this place.
You were teasing folks a little bit, sharing TikToks from Poland while searching for costumes. People who were paying attention knew something was brewing…
HARRIS: They did. That was the really fun thing. And now we can allow the tease to fall away, so we can focus on getting the movie to the best place possible.
Pete, you’ve begun editing the movie. Tell me about moving from the ideation phase and the production phase to crafting what the movie’s going to become?
OHS: Because of the way the movie gets made, it’s still unclear what it is. While we’re in the middle of it, things are coming into focus, but the whole picture is still not clear to anyone, let alone me. Honestly, I’m okay with that. I’ve done this before. Like, this is just part of the process. It’s exciting, it’s scary. But because fear doesn’t help you, you let that fall away and just embrace it. It’s a sense of discovery. I’m an eighth of the movie in so far and it’s already like revealing what it’s about, which is super cool.
HARRIS: I’m hoping that what comes from this is a lot more young filmmakers feeling less pressure to have their first, second, third, fourth, fifth feature be the $10 million, $20 million, $30 juggernaut they want with every person that’s like, the most famous person online. and maybe, you know, something that’s like, truly, you know, honest, like, fun, unique to them, that’s smaller, that maybe takes a really brave, exciting distributor to jump onto.
There’s so much pressure on everyone, especially post-pandemic, to make sure everything is the most financially-viable thing ever. And I fear that if that is the mode by which we’re all making movies, we won’t get another “Daughters of the Dust.” We won’t get another “Paris, Texas.” We won’t get “Stranger Than Paradise.” And I’m hoping that young people, and our peers as well, can see more of the exciting things that are happening in the micro-budget landscape, and say, “I can do this.”
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