Jeremy O. Harris and Pete Ohs on Charli xcx’s Latest Film

Charli xcx’s latest project is a surprisingly intimate character drama, made in close collaboration with a boundary-pushing filmmaker and screenwriter.

“Erupcja” — out on Friday and directed by Pete Ohs and written by a team including Ohs, Jeremy O. Harris and Charli xcx, among others — sees the pop star playing Bethany, a woman visiting Warsaw. Whenever she reunites with her close friend Nel (Lena Góra, another credited co-writer), eruptions seem to ensue, including, in this case, a volcano that makes air travel impossible. Bethany’s boyfriend Rob (Will Madden, the fifth and final co-writer) expects to make a romantic sojourn out of their bonus time in Poland; probing at alternate lives she might be living, Bethany would rather hang out with her friend and see what further explosions the pair might generate.

As the fact of its cast working on the script might suggest, Ohs works through a collective method that Harris, who also appears in the film and has written theater works including “Slave Play” and the film “Zola,” says he found refreshing. (In recent years, Harris — lately in the news for confronting OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and for a brief incarceration in Japan — has been working on “Spirit of the People,” a play mounted last year at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.) Together, Ohs and Harris spoke to Variety via Zoom about working with Charli, the meaning of human-made art in the AI age and how Ohs’ method brought Harris back to his passion for theater.

Hi!

Harris: Hi! I’m not going to be on video because I’m on my phone and it’s so annoying.

That’s fine, I can turn my video off too. 

Harris: Isn’t this so much more liberating? 

I’ve never been an advocate for camera-on culture. 

Harris: I have a theory that only people who really believe in the power of their beauty like FaceTiming people as the initial way of contact. That is constantly being affirmed by the people in Hollywood who FaceTime you first. There’s a certain type of actor or actress who only want to do that. Why do you feel so confident about your face? 

I was curious about the conversations that led to this film coming together — both between you two, and with Charli.

Ohs: When I first met her, it was through Jeremy. I really didn’t know that she was this cinephile, and that she also had this desire to get into acting. I’m open to all kinds of collaborators, and as it became more real, and we started to engage more meaningfully, it became clear what her cinematic taste is and what her level of interest was. 

It was her idea to be like, I don’t want to be Charli xcx. I want to challenge myself to be something else. The idea of a character who was shy, who wasn’t necessarily the “365 party girl,” was one of her very first offerings. Anytime somebody presents an idea, that’s an act of vulnerability, but it’s also an act of investment. It felt really exciting and cool that she was already caring enough to be brainstorming with me.

The idea underpinning this film is that when two friends get together, there are both literal and figurative eruptions. How did that idea come to you both?

Harris: I always say that Pete is a Hong Sang-soo to me — or a Hong Sang-soo who grew up on Steven Spielberg movies and “Back to the Future.” He has this really deep, amazing process embedded with these deeply emotional human tethers that we expect from detailed, intimate independent cinema. But he has this wild imagination inspired by sci-fi and all of these other genres. It’s funny how they collide together. 

We were a block away from where we met Charli and we ran into [director] Oliver Hermanus, who randomly told us a story about the time he got stuck in Warsaw because his flight couldn’t move — there was volcanic ash from Iceland. Pete was like, I have an idea. 

Jeremy, as a writer, did you feel as though once the cameras went up on “Erupcja,” you wanted it to follow the script? How much did the constant collaboration extend once you were actually shooting? 

Harris: To continue that story, Oliver will say, “I got stuck in Poland for a week and a half because my flight couldn’t move,” and Pete will say, “There’s a movie here. I’m thinking a lot about love stories. I’m thinking about a couple coming to Poland, and a girl meets someone that she once had a relationship with, and the minute they meet, the room starts to shake, the air gets thicker, and immediately, a volcano erupts.” That’s the impetus. And then he writes an outline based on that. Then he starts asking [the actors] questions about who we are there: “Well, Jeremy, if you’re in the movie, who are you?”

As another writer, it’s really amazing to see someone so generous with their imagination who wants to play pretend with you in the truest sense of the word. From the moment he tells you the idea to the moment the film is locked, you’re in that free-floating place of make-believe and asking questions of how much can the story hold. No one is wrong and no one is 1,000% right. You just take what’s available to you and keep working through it like oils on a canvas, until the image presents itself in its totality. 

That sounds invigorating.

Harris: It’s been very inspiring to me as someone who has had this very lonely sense that I have to create a product every time I sit down to my computer and write something. He’s shown me that I can keep as many doors open as I want to keep open when I’m telling a story. This project has never felt dead — it’s always felt alive, even as we’ve started figuring out how to give it to the world.

Pete, I saw on social media that you’re inviting people to re-edit elements of the footage, putting their own stamp on it. Eventually, you did have to wrap the film and put it out as a finished project — is this a way of keeping it malleable even still? 

Ohs: I like knowing that there are two generations below me existing in the world so fluidly with media, with creation. I’m personally, selfishly curious to see what they would do — to see how their creativity is going to engage with this stuff that I was making. When I imagine myself as a 15-year-old getting access to footage — if I could have sat in the editing room with PTA while he’s making “Boogie Nights,” that would have been so exciting. I am more than happy to open my laptop and let people in. 

I was that “Boogie Nights”-obsessed teen too, but you and I grew up without every other window on our computer encouraging us to use AI to make an approximation of art. Is your inviting people into your very human, bespoke process intended as a rebuke to the idea of artificial art? 

Ohs: The AI stuff is way too “destination,” versus “journey.” It’s way too product-oriented. Everything I’m doing is about the process. The process is the product. The process is where the life is, and life is about connecting with other people who are alive. That’s what’s great about making movies: You get to engage with other people. You get to do creative problem-solving. You get to empathize with characters that aren’t you. 

The social-media version of “creator,” the YouTube version of “creator”: That’s so isolating. It’s this lie that you think you’re connected to the people you’re sharing with. But it’s not, if the way that you made it was by clicking a button that skips over the actual good part — the actual life that could be lived.

Jeremy, I imagine you’d agree.

Harris: I agree wholeheartedly. Pete made a movie that premiered at Slamdance that I was obsessed with called “Love and Work,” about people in a universe where labor has been abolished and it’s actually illegal to work. When work is taken out of the equation for these characters, all they want is to create, and they start working in a shoe factory. Pete made this amazing metaphor. His mother just made me the most gorgeous quilt with her hands, and it felt like this real illustration of his universe. He grew up in a universe where you give gifts that were labored over, that maybe don’t have fine finish, but the imperfections are part of the perfection.

One of the things that makes me really frustrated about how we’re teaching young people right now is that it’s so much about productivity. How can you make more things, instead of, How do you make a thing. It’s so hard to make a thing in general that to erase the difficulty of that is to erase the beauty of the making in general — which is one of the reasons I get so frustrated by AI. 

I think about the fact that one of the greatest screenplays of the last 20 years was labored over for over a decade by Tony Kushner. The screenplay that he ended up writing for “Lincoln” — there was a deadline for that that he missed by eight years. Had they told him, “We’re firing you, and we’re going to get someone who can come in and bang it out,” the story of one of the greatest turning points in American history would have been flattened. Because that’s what happens when you bang something out: You flatten it. 

Did the collaborative process of working with Pete on this film make you miss your earlier work in the theater?

Harris: Working in this way with Pete brought me back to the theater in a really natural way. Concurrently while making this film, I was getting ready for the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which Pete went to with me last year. The play I was writing was written in a process that I had forgotten was my actual process, because I graduated Yale with two plays that had premiered off-Broadway in my third year, and with the announcement that my next play was premiering on Broadway. After that moment, I immediately became a working artist. I didn’t have time to process the things that I had learned in grad school and to understand what my actual working process was — or what things I liked. 

I forgot, until I worked with Pete, how much my process of writing “Slave Play” or “Daddy” was informed by actually being in the room with people when I wrote. So with my last play, “Spirit of the People,” which premiered last summer at Williamstown and will hopefully premiere next year in New York, I got to sit with actors and build this story around them. I still maintain a sort of solo authorship of the work, but the act of sitting in a room and knowing that I was about to witness people read pages I was writing for them that morning or the night before helped me make a play that is one of the things I’m most proud of in the last couple of years.

Jeremy, beyond your writing, you were in the news for having been incarcerated in Japan for 23 days late last year. “Erupcja” is a testament to the transformational power of travel, but in your shoes, I’d likely have returned from Japan not wanting to leave the house for a long time. 

Harris: I’m curious what Pete will say about this. But right after I got out, Pete was one of the first people I met up with in Okinawa, and we spent the next two weeks traveling through Japan and discovering hidden parts of Japan that I hadn’t seen before. My experience for those 23 days gave me a new energy around travel. It made me want to look under more rocks, to find more places to get messy.

When you have an experience like that, you think about how precious life is, and how exciting and new life can be, and how every experience, good or bad, can inform you going forward. Pete and I did some crazy stuff after we left Okinawa that I don’t think I would have done had I not had the experience that I had.

Ohs: One thing that I know happened to Jeremy while he was detained is that he didn’t have access to his phone for three weeks. That digital detox allowed him to reprogram his brain and maybe return to his brain — get his brain back. What he then experienced the next two weeks, traveling around Japan, was infectious. I got to experience it through him. There was this openness to adventure and to the outside. It was never inward, toward the phone. It was looking out into the world, going to the top of a mountain, entering a random restaurant — just following our intuition and our impulses and —

Harris: And taking an overnight ferry from Beppu to Osaka on a whim!

Ohs: The thing that does come from becoming aware and engaging with life and the world is that a bunch of beautiful inspiration and opportunities present themselves. We’re on this overnight boat, and we’re like, “There’s a movie here. There’s a movie we can make on this boat. Maybe we should come back.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.