Pete Ohs Cast Charli XCX in His Movie, Then Brat Happened

An incendiary dynamic between two friends takes on a literal, virulent form in director Pete Ohs’ Erupcja. Featuring intimate, hand-held cinematography, there’s a breeziness that gives the film its enveloping, dizzying tempo. As his characters flit across Warsaw—parks, museums, clubs—we feel as if we’re part of the coterie, using sightseeing as a way to avoid the deeper emotions that nestle within.

Charli XCX has several film roles to her name already (she was recently seen in Faces of Death), but here she takes on the lead as Bethany, a woman who has arrived in Warsaw with her boyfriend, Rob (Will Madden). She suspects Rob is getting ready to propose and is unsure about committing to him, so she instead pursues her longtime friend Nel (Lena Góra), with whom she’s partially estranged.

There’s a metaphysical layer to this tale of hidden love: every time Bethany and Nel meet, a volcano erupts (their body count includes Iceland, Chile, Ecuador, and the Philippines). Like clockwork, Mount Etna obliges, and the two use that as permission to entertain whether they want their relationship to be something more. Ahead of its Toronto International Film Festival premiere, I spoke with Ohs, who made the movie alongside Jeremy O. Harris, at Dark Horse Espresso Bar about inviting Charli into his free-flowing creative process, how natural disasters remind us of our finitude, and some of the worst pronunciations he’s heard of the film’s title.

LEE: How did you decide where to insert the shots of the volcanoes and the colors you chose to overlay them with?

OHS: I had this idea that the first shot of the movie would be a flower, these flower closeups. But as beautiful as those flowers are, I thought, “I don’t really feel like that’s a strong enough image to start the movie.” I had this intuitive feeling: what if it was color blocks? Is that me having an awareness of Charli and her album covers?

LEE: Right, but you didn’t get the Brat green in there.

OHS: I actively chose not to use that. First I was making color blocks of those first four flowers and I thought, “Maybe I’m just going to keep reusing these four colors throughout the whole movie.” Then I thought about using those colors on the volcano footage. It felt connected to the other ideas of the movie, memory and projection. It isn’t all premeditated, nor does it need to be. It’s the creative process of uncovering the thing, whether it’s sculpting, chipping away at a rock to reveal the statue inside, or painting, coat after coat, and at some point you have to say it’s done, but at any moment you could paint over a brushstroke and that moment is gone.

LEE: I’ve heard you say in other interviews that you didn’t know who Charli was prior to working with her.

OHS: I definitely knew of Charli. I knew her songs. I knew that for a long time she had this “when is she going to have her mainstream break” thing, that she’s always the cool one influencing people but somehow never the one at the top of the charts. When we met I was like, “Okay, this is Charli XCX.” But that Charli XCX who walked into that bar in May of 2024 is a different Charli XCX, because it was pre-Brat. Then she entered a new era. The strangeness of watching the Brat phenomenon happen that summer, I’ve never felt so close to the center of the universe.

LEE: That must have been surreal.

OHS: It felt like a dream. Something about it felt maybe too good to be true, a miracle happening. As the whole world’s going crazy for her and this album, even up until days before we started filming, it’s like, “Is she going to show up?” Not because she’s being flaky. Just seeing the reality of—

LEE: Her world was shifting so quickly.

OHS: We are a tiny movie in Poland. There are so many reasons she’d be like, “I’m sorry, I’m the most famous pop star in the world right now. Barack Obama would like to see me.”

LEE: What was it like to invite her into your “table of bubbles” process? It seems like such a uniquely collaborative gift for people in any industry.

OHS: What I enjoyed about Charli is that she makes music very collaboratively. What can be so beautiful about music is that the stakes can be so low in the creation of it, but historically with film, the stakes couldn’t be low because equipment was too expensive. Technology has made things cheaper and smaller, so you don’t need as many people. It’s gotten to the point where we can create with less at stake, be looser, more collaborative, more open, less afraid of other people impacting the product. I find it really rewarding, and invariably the actor collaborators at the end of these shoots unanimously say, “That was wonderful.”

LEE: Remind me, when was the “table of bubbles” process first enacted?

OHS: It was Youngstown. A very tiny movie, literally me and Andy Faulkner and Stephanie Hunt going to Youngstown, Ohio for nine days and just playing. What I observed was how many gifts the movie gods were giving us that were not of our active making. It wasn’t us manipulating things. It was just because we said yes and started moving forward, and gates opened.

LEE: Everyone starring in this movie is also a co-producer and writer?

OHS: Yeah, they’re all co-writers. My first narrative feature was made the normal way. You spend all this time preparing everything you’re told you need: a script, a shot list, a budget, storyboards. What I’ve been testing with each movie is how much I can get away with. Do I need everything? What if you could get down to the point where you realize you don’t need anything? What if you show up on set without a shot list? What if instead of a full outline you have half of one? What does that do to the art, to the thing you end up making? The beginning of the conversation for this one was just: “One character speaks Polish. One character doesn’t. There’s something about volcanoes.” And even then, the volcanoes aren’t a metaphor for explosive toxic relationships. Maybe it’s the destructive power of love.

LEE: I read that when you make your next movie, you react in some way to what you just made. What were you reacting to from your previous film?

OHS: I kind of think of myself as a scientist testing theories, I want a new hypothesis to test. So I don’t need to repeat the previous experiment. Unlike The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, for example, this is not a “house” movie. With Erupcja, Warsaw is a huge character, and logistically a much different challenge. I thought, “What happens when I try to make a city movie?” Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but I wanted to test it. Most of my other movies don’t take place in reality, and that’s something that maybe is scary to me, and I like being afraid. I like entering the unknown.

LEE: Yeah, this is your reality-based movie.

OHS: There’s Youngstown, Jethica, Love and Work, The True Beauty of Being Bitten By a Tick, either quirky comedy or quirky horror, these two lanes. I feel like Erupcja has perhaps opened up a third lane, which is exciting.

LEE: You’ve put me to shame. I know I’ve been butchering the name of your film. What are the funniest ways people have been pronouncing it?

OHS: The funny one was Charli saying it so confidently, not knowing it was wrong. I have all these voice memos of her watching cuts and giving feedback, and she always said “Erupchika.” I’m like, no, that’s wrong.

LEE: What role have volcanoes played in your personal life?

OHS: The reason it resonated with me was when I heard this anecdote from Oliver Hermanus—

LEE: The History of Sound guy?

OHS: Yeah. He mentioned that he got stuck in Warsaw for a month because of the Iceland volcano in 2010. I was in Iceland when that erupted.

LEE: Whoa.

OHS: So I have a history with volcanoes. It felt exciting to bring that past into my present, what it felt like to wake up in the morning and have volcanic ash on your windowsill. I don’t like options. There are a million ideas in the world, but if an idea that bubbles up has some existing meaning I can add to, that’s enough.

LEE: Have natural disasters been a way to make you reflect on your relationships with people?

OHS: The L.A. fires were a huge thing that makes you recalibrate, how good you have it or how you don’t. We live in our little bubbles, and somewhere else in the world somebody’s dying and some real shit’s going on. Whatever you’re stressed out about, you need to shift your perspective. Decentering ourselves is really healthy, and our current modern existence with our phones is centering ourselves a lot. We are the stars of these movies.

LEE: A lot of the relationships between these characters are undefined. How much of that stems from the creative process, where you have these disparate people coming together having written dialogue for their character without yet knowing how they’ll interact with others?

OHS: Not every story could or should be made with this process. Some ideas will require a different process. But a story about people who don’t necessarily know themselves can be made by filmmakers who don’t yet fully understand the characters either—we are method filmmaking. These characters don’t know themselves yet, so we don’t need to either. As we make it, we learn about them, as the characters learn about themselves. If we had defined them, is that even real? If I define you, aren’t I already doing too much?

LEE: The breeziness of the film at 71 minutes captures that transitoriness. It makes me wonder where these characters might pop up again.

OHS: You meet these characters at a certain time in their life and you leave them at another. If you don’t pretend it’s the end, those characters get to continue living in their made-up reality and in your imagination. You get to dream about them or wonder about them.

LEE: How do you feel growing up in the Midwest shaped you as an artist?

OHS: I only had the childhood I had, so I don’t know what somebody else’s experience was. But in Ohio, I felt weird, and that must have had an influence.

LEE: Was that coming from other people thrusting that upon you?

OHS: Sometimes I think I’m normal and then I’ll make a movie and people will say, “This movie is autistic.” In my mind I’m making a normal movie and then you find out: “No, that’s really weird.”

LEE: I wonder if you’re almost giving people who have a similar sensibility a space at the table.

OHS: I’d like to think so. When I see a Wim Wenders movie, a Jim Jarmusch movie, a Coen Brothers movie, these movies are weird, but they feel so correct, so good. They vibrate with me and make me feel like there’s a place for me in the world. If these movies are doing that for anyone else, that’d be beautiful.