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What could be more “brat” than a chance encounter on the Lower East Side that leads to an indie movie joint slay in Poland? According to a new interview in Variety, that’s exactly how the movie Charli XCX and Jeremy O. Harris filmed over the course of a few weeks in August came to be.
News of the project first leaked toward the end of August, according to Variety, when the popular X account Film Updates posted about the film.
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But it wasn’t until Monday, when Variety spoke with Jeremy O. Harris and director Pete Ohs (Jethica), that we learned any details about the project, which is titled ERUPCJA, the Polish word for “eruption.” Set in Warsaw, ERUPCJA follows the “combustible relationship” between two women, one an unnamed Polish woman (Lena Góra) and the other a tourist named Bethany (Charli XCX).
But the relationship between the Polish woman and Bethany isn’t the only eruption in store for this movie. Ohs told Variety that there is also a literal volcano that is central to the story, a detail that was inspired by a conversation he had with a man who couldn’t leave Warsaw for a month when a volcano erupted in Iceland, resulting in grounded flights throughout Europe.
The director’s approach to filmmaking is unique, to say the least. Ohs told Variety that he starts with locations that are “narratively inspiring,” and then works with his actors to develop the characters. The rest of the movie is similarly developed collaboratively and on the fly.
The team came about in an equally random fashion, when Charli ran into Harris and Ohs at a bar in New York’s Lower East Side in May. Harris, a friend of Charli’s, introduced her to Ohs, and when he told her about his filmmaking process, she said, “I want to do one,” as the director told Variety.
The singer told the outlet that Ohs’ process “felt akin to making an album and the chance meeting also felt equivalent to the conversational and spontaneous nature of his filmmaking.”
“Our processes felt linked in some kind of way and it felt right and exciting to pursue some kind of collaboration,” she said.
Although the ERUPCJA crew tried to keep the film under wraps, Harris told Variety that he had “a gut feeling that our plan to keep it low key was going to be difficult.” He additionally told the magazine that one scene, which they filmed in a nightclub, “was almost impossible to shoot.”
“Every single person in the club was like, ‘Oh my god, Charli XCX is here to do a secret performance,’” Harris said to Variety. “And it was like, ‘She is, but not the one you think.’”
While we’ll be eagerly awaiting ERUPCJA, we have other cinematic appearances from Charli XCX to look forward to. At the end of August, she signed on to star in Gregg Araki’s forthcoming movie, I Want Your Sex. The New Queer Cinema luminary partially inspired Charli’s now-iconic Brat album cover. She’ll also be making her live-action acting debut in Faces of Death, the forthcoming remake of the ’70s horror cult classic of the same name.
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