IN CONVERSATION WITH EUGENE KOTLYARENKO

Last Monday evening I had the honor of sharing a pot of Jasmine tea at the Beverly Hills Urth Caffé with Eugene Kotlyarenko, one of the most important people in independent filmmaking today. His Instagram is a must follow. I've learned more from his Instagram stories than I have from my university textbooks, I love it when he goes off about Marshall McLuhan. Eugene and I spoke about the similarities between designing clothes and making films, being a PA for Agnès Varda, his love for Manfred Thierry Mugler, Brian De Palma v. Martin Scorsese, O.P.P. (other people's phones), and so so much more. 

Make sure to catch his latest film THE CODE, streaming on Mubi now!

Hagop Kourounian: I'd love to start off by asking you about your own personal style and your relationship with clothing. How much time do you spend thinking about clothes?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I do think about it but it comes from something kind of nice which is that I do find clothes really inspiring as an object. I used to go thrifting all the time and if you really diligently go through the racks you'd find some random old thing from the ‘70s or ‘80s or maybe early ‘90s and you're like oh my god how does this exist. Like this is like a really stupid idea and by stupid I mean in the most positive way like this is a really ridiculous like visual or design concept or wearable concept. How did they convince a company to mass produce this and this is just one of the ones left over. You know having funny straps or buttons or just weird shoulders or whatever. It's obviously also like an entry point into the past but you do find these unique pieces where you’re like how did this happen and that is really inspiring to me. In a way clothing and manufacturing is kind of like filmmaking, right? There's the vision of a team or a person who’s like this is going to connect with people this is going to be cool this is going to make people feel cool. Then there's the whole financial business element of it where it's like okay well now it's on the market how do we convince people that they should wear this, that this is going to be the new trend. So when you do see pieces from the past that have survived or were part of a massive trend and they're interesting and they're different or they kind of change the contours of fashion in that era I find that super inspiring because I feel like it’s the same struggle as a filmmaker trying to make something that makes people feel cool. You'd be like wait how did that exist in the completely bland and homogenized atmosphere of movie making at the time or fashion at the time.

Hagop Kourounian: It's kind of like both directors and designers are storytellers and world builders but just in different mediums.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: There are other similarities. It's really about the user experience or the viewer experience. You do hear designers talking about oh I'm making this for this type of woman or I'm making this for this type of guy but really at the end of the day I think it's like you have to imagine yourself as the ideal audience and maybe you put yourself in the shoes of a busy woman in an urban center or something like that and you're like Yohji Yamamoto or something. But really the only kind of barometer of taste or aesthetic or happiness that you have is your own and then you have to kind of believe that it will connect with other people and it will make them feel the way you believe it makes you feel you.

Hagop Kourounian: I’ve heard you talk about brands like Thierry Mugler, Issey Miyake, Comme des Garcons, etc. In a DM exchange a few months ago you broke down an outfit for me specifying the year your CDG gear was from…you were wearing this blue collared shirt and you had your tie around your neck as a necklace rather than under the collar.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: There was a phase I was in a couple years ago where for a few months I was like we need to bring back ties but I'm not gonna be fucking putting them under collars. I think we should still do that, we should start wearing ties but like why would we need to tie up the thing. Ties are a very archaic concept. They come from this idea that maybe the top button isn't there or maybe your neck is too fat, my neck is often too fat for my shirts. You can use clothing whichever way you want. There's actually this jacket I'm wearing right now… I actually don't know what this thing is for, do you? 

Hagop Kourounian: I do not…

Eugene Kotlyarenko: So sometimes I wear it like this, I guess people won’t be able to see this, but it's like a little strap that's on the inside of my coat but then it has a little hole to put through a button. So it must be for that but could it also be for some other thing. It can also be for this though… look at this, I don't know why it would be for this thing but maybe it is. 

Hagop Kourounian: Once I spoke to Wim Wenders and I pointed out that he always wears his watch over his cuff and it became it became this whole story from his childhood of how he got gifted a watch at a really young age and it was the object he valued the most in his life at the time and he was wondering why he had to hide it under his sleeve. So he wanted to show it off and put it over his shirt and everyone would tell him that he’s crazy but he still does it to this day.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I mean you have to admit these directors out there, these writer/directors they're quirked up… They're quirky core okay. It's like we feel the need to express ourselves, you know? I don't want to say most directors but I do think directors do think about aesthetics a lot and think about their personal presentation because part of it has to do with how others view you. You're put into this role of authority and one would hope that your enthusiasm and your sense of urgency and your sense of collaboration is all that people need to trust you but sometimes those cues are nonverbal and sometimes those cues are adjacent to the project at hand. So if you can communicate something that is fun or authoritative for lack of a better word or cool through something that does not need to be spoken of then it's useful in that way.

Hagop Kourounian: That entire answer is the reason why I started this whole thing…There are certain directors that when you see the way they dress it makes you think, wow I understand Wes Anderson movies more now that I see the way he likes to portray himself. When you see Wim wearing the watch over the cuff it doesn't necessarily translate to his films but it gives you that sense that this guy is doing these things his own way.  He clearly cares about the visual aesthetic of the things around him.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: But it does translate to his films. I love a lot of his movies but they have a very deep awareness of socioeconomic things and kind of the trauma of your position within a socioeconomic hierarchy whether it's from your past or in your present. All the way from his earliest films like Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities, to even the last one Perfect Days. They’re literally about your place in society and I think if that object meant a lot to him that object showed the world that hey maybe he grew up poor. I mean he grew up in post-war Germany, maybe a watch meant a lot. When you grow up poor, having objects that signify like hey we might be poor but we can still tell time… that means a lot. 

Hagop Kourounian: Love the way we sidetracked here but going back to the question I started out asking… Do you keep up with couture shows and what’s happening on the runway?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Not exactly. My gateway into designers, it really is just a few that I care about, is Thierry Mugler. When I got paid for the first time as a director for Spree I said okay I'm gonna go on eBay, Etsy, Poshmark…I found a Mugler shirt and it was something really weird that I really haven't seen much since then called Mugler Jeans, it’s a weird sub company but it had the regular stars for buttons and that slanted pocket he’s known for. I got it in the mail and it was around $27 and I was like yay this is cool and the first thing that happened I opened up the pocket button and it ripped the pocket open… I was like holy fuck I just ripped this first designer piece of clothing I ever bought. It was actually a really great moment because I was like you know if you can't embrace the fact that this stuff might decay and might break you're not really appreciating it. If you treat it in a precious way then you're treating it differently than all the clothes you bought at thrift stores and it's wrong. It becomes an art object rather than what it was intended to be. I was recently hanging out with my friend Etienne who runs My Clothing Archive and he was telling me he had just finished doing all this research about Yohji's three stripes. It was when he was kind of obsessed with Adidas but before they had started the Y3 collaboration. He posted this clip where Yohji said he started to see less and less people over the last few years wearing his clothes in the street. His clothing had suddenly become like an art object and no one wanted to wear it and it made him really upset which is why he was like I'm just gonna start making street wear. I think that's right. You don't want to make something so rarefied. You want to make something that's cool and sophisticated and inspires people to think about the form of what you're doing but you don't want it to be so rarefied that it's only for elite people or people who you know might not even want to wear it because it feels too special. That's of course one of the liabilities of cinema now too. It's unappealing to go to the theater because you can't take a selfie in the middle of the movie. There's nothing social about it. Suddenly going to a movie theater becomes something more like ballet or opera, a kind of special rarefied experience rather than the kind of communal opportunity to sit your ass down and be entertained and feel some empathy or have some laughs with everybody else. It began as a mass entertainment artform and now it's moving more and more towards that kind of rarefied art which is not the intention and quite sad if you ask me.

Hagop Kourounian: Especially with all these stupid texting friendly screenings.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: But I know where they're coming from. Where they're coming from is that we're returning to the early days of cinematic exhibition which is vaudeville. The movie started as like one part of seven things in a fucking vaudeville theater and you have some people juggling you have some people dancing you got some clowns up there. Because every experience now in order to have a value in people’s lives needs to be documented. You have to prove that you went there and it was cool that it was worth your time and money otherwise why did you go? Could you imagine connecting with the film or enjoying yourself without fucking documenting it? Anyway, I understand where everyone's coming from so sure you have to eventize the screening. Chicken jockey is the best thing that ever fucking happened in movie theaters in the last few years because it became an event to just see the movie and that's what it should feel like. It should feel like a fucking event just go see a movie.

Hagop Kourounian: It's so hard to even convince some of my friends to watch something before 2005…

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Do you think your friends would like The Code?

Hagop Kourounian: I think they would yeah. Maybe not all of them but the ones that are a bit more online. On Twitter, or on TikTok…

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I've constructed the movie for someone who's on their phone all the time. I do think your average person is on the phone a crazy amount and I'm thinking about the way that social media activates us to have agency in the storytelling. Obviously I'm not making a movie where it's like choose your own adventure but I am making a movie where you are rewarded for paying attention to all the little details. It's hopefully triggering the parts of your mind that are triggered when you play a video game or when you're doom scrolling or whatever the fuck you're doing on your phone.

Hagop Kourounian: When Peter and Dasha's characters were looking at each other's phones I was reading all the other previews in their messages app.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I've done this in my last three movies. Showing someone's phone big up on the screen to me is the same as Rear Window or Body Double. This is voyeurism. Cinema is founded on voyeurism. The contemporary mode is just looking at someone else's phone or I call it other people's phone. O.P.P. That definitely has been a very useful and successful set piece for me in the last three movies and I kind of tried to put it on steroids in the new one… Can I bring something up though? One of my fashion anxieties as a director…

I love Brian De Palma, he's one of my favorite directors. I'll get one thing out of the way, what you wear to set an aesthetic message to the other people you're working with can also be very practical. I'm always wearing vests on set and I know De Palma did that and Tony Scott and a lot of other directors wear vests because it’s just really practical. That's a cool thing. Now back to this De Palma thing… There is a haunting interview for me. It's De Palma and Martin Scorsese who I also love and they’re on the Dick Cavett show. There's nothing that's said in it that's wrong, everything they both say is great. It's just a question of which way western man? Martin Scorsese looks fucking awesome in it. I think the year is like 1977. It's like after Taxi Driver and Carrie, which are two masterpieces that I love and completely different movies that are both amazing visions of American alienation and violence. Scorsese just looks really put together and cool and clearly of the mid-70s moment but it still looks good. De Palma on the other hand, I hate to say, looks like a fucking clown. He looks like a fucking rodeo clown and it’s also a refelection of like mid-70s to late-70s fashion but he just doesn't look well put together. So sometimes when I'm wearing the outfits for whatever promotional Q&A’s and stuff I'm like fuck, am I doing Scorsese here or am I doing De Palma right now.

Hagop Kourounian: I think you clean up nice, man! You seem to have an affinity for Chef’s shirts, can you elaborate on that more?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Let me say one thing about Mugler though. It all started with Mugler for me. The other guys I like too, well proverbial guys like Rei Kawakubo or Yohji or Issey Miyake. They're not just designers they are holistic artists and you know Mugler may be most of all because he photographed a lot of the official collections. There's several really great books of Mugler’s photography of models wearing his clothes. He was really involved in the runway shows and he talked about himself as a artist, not a designer and a visual artist. That spoke to me because it's just inspiring and I’m someone who has my fingers in every single element of how we're making the film. The clothes make sense to me because the ideas of the person make sense to me. I have a few Mugler shirts that are kind of chef core because they're kind of a double button breasted so they have like double thickness they have like two layers in the middle which you know not only kind of harken back to the protective layering of a chef but also kind of like 19th century military regalia. I'm a pocket freak, I like anything that has a zillion pockets. I will stuff those pockets with shit.

Hagop Kourounian: A while back you told me that you worked with Agnès Varda. What was that experience like? What did you learn from her? She’s one of the best dressed of all time, in my personal opinion, would you agree?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Yeah definitely she loved clothing. Her work found the perfect balance between the poetry and the practicality. She was actually very audience oriented but she could only do it through her kind of poetic modes. So she'd be like well what about this image or about this situation will engage people. This is not something she said to me, this is something I observed working with her and she was kind of always looking for the right approach to an image. Sometimes it was an angle, sometimes it was a moment, sometimes it was just filming something that you didn't think would warrant being filmed. The funny thing about her is that after the shoot we kind of became friendly so whenever she would visit LA or New York we would meet up or I'd go to her premieres. She had this flock of acolytes or followers in a way. Women that were around her age would show up to her premieres and they would have the same bowl cut with purple fringes and a little silver top. They'd be wearing purple clothes, she was really rocking purple for many years. It was really interesting to see all the acolytes and Agnés stans showing up in her style, they were emulating her style. 

I moved out to LA, I didn't know anyone, I was begging people for jobs at bars. Someone called me and said I have a job for you, I said great, they said it doesn't pay any money. I said that's not a job, no thanks. They said it's working with Agnès Varda, I said I'll do that for free. Then I was PA-ing on her movie, The Beaches of Agnés, about these different beach towns and coastal places she's lived her whole life. I was just a PA and we really connected and at the wrap party we were really talking about movies and bonding and I gave her my DVD of my shorts. She called me the next morning at 6 AM and I'm sleeping obviously and she's like “Eugene?” and I was like Agnès? Then she's like “yes I saw the films and maybe you and I we can go shoot a little bit together.” I said yeah yeah yeah yeah that'd be amazing when and she's like “in 30 minutes?” I said sure but I lived in Echo Park at the time and she was out in Venice staying with a friend of hers. I just put water on my face and drove over there like a madman. I shot with her for the next week and it was amazing, just the two of us bonding. I definitely thought about what I was going to wear to meet up with her every day and then one of the days we were together she filmed me and so I ended up in the movie a little bit. I'm wearing a sweater that was probably far too hot for me to wear but it was this ‘70s preppy kind of vibe, a bit French because it had a dark navy blue and some white and a little bit of orange. I want to make her feel comfortable with me. 

I mean all these little micro decisions we make in our lives do influence how people see us. I think people understand it now more than ever with social media. People's approach to social media is a constant decision-making process of perception. Every decision comes with a whole set of obvious and less obvious signifiers that people judge you on and they can literally judge you, they choose whether to like or not like or comment or not comment. So we're in this constant enforced aesthetic decision-making mode which most people are not really equipped for so they just trend towards the popular things. There's nothing wrong with that. Why should everyone be forced to constantly question what aesthetic decisions they're going to make. That would make life for most people pretty challenging, unlivable, and tough.

Hagop Kourounian: Who do you think are the best dressed filmmakers? Are there any you look to for inspiration? 

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Going back to Agnès for a second. I was in Barcelona recently and at one of the art museums there that had a huge exhibit of her work with lots of photos from her childhood and teen years and 20s. She was so well dressed. She was a very masculine dressed teenager. Then in her 20s she was very post-beatnik but she had a lot of cool looks, a lot of turtlenecks and like weird ideas for dresses and jackets but still kind of masculine oriented. Through the eras she just handled every era of her personal style. She really is kind of an icon for me. Aesthetically, fashion wise, everything… Her movies are highly aesthetic. There's a set of interviews that Vincent Gallo did around Brown Bunny where I think every outfit he wears is super cool. It’s like ‘70s throwback stuff during the era when everyone was doing that. The mid-late ‘90s was the era where it was one of the first major compressed waves of nostalgia. Like every generation the nostalgia becomes more compressed so in 1994, 1977 was the nostalgia. Everything he wore was really cool. He's also kind of fashion adjacent so you will find a lot of photos of him in Dior or whatever. Jim Jarmusch I think has a really cool style. I'm jealous actually because I'm so caught up in making these movies with my friends and usually something that kind of falls by the wayside is set photographers in my films. I always regretted that, there's not really many set photos. I always feel like everybody looks cool in my movies and I do think about what I'm going to wear to set so there's just not a lot of documentation. So when you see these cool photos of Jim Jarmusch or whoever you just know that there is a hired set photographer whose job it is to take shots of the actors and take shots of the director. I recently worked on a film with Amalia Ulman who is really well-dressed. I love her style. She's very smart. She’s the writer/director and I was one of the producers and she said that we're hiring three different set photographers for behind the scenes shots. She realized that the power of the behind the scenes aesthetic is how you make the myth of the director and the myth of the film.

Hagop Kourounian: It kind of helps with the longevity of the film.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Correct. One of my other fave things you did is your piece about the Oshima Gang shirts.

Hagop Kourounian: Yeah dude, I think I’ve complied like the utmost history of the origins of that shirt. I interviewed Jeremy Thomas, the legendary producer, and he gave me the full story on how that shirt came to be. It was a collaboration between Nagisa Ōshima and Kansai Yamamoto. If you’re not already searching for Kansai Yamamoto on ebay, poshmark, etc I think you’d love his stuff.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Two years ago or so I used to be able to get all those brands Kansai, Sissy for like five ten dollars and now it's like sixty seventy dollars. One brand that I think is really undervalued in Japan right now is Agnès B. It’s a company that has a kind of film adjacent history. She worked with a lot of French filmmakers.

Hagop Kourounian: Famously one of Claire Denis favorite brands too. How do you typically get dressed for a day on set? Is there something you can’t be without on set?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: The style in The Code, especially Peter Vack's outfits, were definitely a big collaboration between myself, Margaux Solano, and Natasha Newman-Thomas. This time Natasha was one of the producers. They brought a lot of great stuff for Peter but sometimes I'd be like you know what, this is one of my sicknesses, he just has to wear my clothes right now. There's this whole section at the end you know we're the code reveals itself and he's wearing my FujiFilm vest. I later gave him that as the wrap gift so I no longer have that. I'm going to need to replace that because for me that's an essential item on set. 

Hagop Kourounian: There seems to be this (for lack of a better term) troll-like behavior in the promotion of your work. I’m thinking specifically about the Spree marketing campaign. Where does this side of you come from?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I don't think of it as trolling really. I don't view it as empty provocations. My intent is to get people interested in the movies because the movies mean something to me and I believe that the movies are worth watching. I think that they're entertaining enough to warrant people's time but they don't have huge actors in them and they don't have any marketing money behind them so it's like how do you short circuit that? How do you create virality with no money and so the way to do it is to kind of fool people. To engage people in what seems like markers of success because people do want to celebrate you, people do want to engage with something that already seems successful and jump on the bandwagon. So you can just jump the shark and get there. I've never really been such a sucker for the truth, I've never thought there's only one objective truth. I understand there's dominant narratives but those are usually corporately controlled, institutionally sanctioned. I'm an alternative type of person even though that term doesn't mean much anymore so like I've always seen my kind of intentions of these marketing campaigns to be a kind of intrusion or a kind of alternative form of marketing.

Hagop Kourounian: I don’t really know a lot about technical filmmaking, I’m just a fan of the art form so I would love to know what your process is like making these social media and smartphone centric films? What is the screen recording process like? Who makes the TikToks we see in The Code? Who writes all that dialogue in the messages app? How do you create these personal worlds within the digital footprint of your characters?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Well it's definitely intentional. The level of planning varies from concept to concept but I don't view them as extra. I don't view this as extra stuff, I view them as integral to a person's understanding of the story or the character. The comments for instance are a reflection, it's like a Greek chorus. Comments during a live stream reflect the audience and reflect the culture that the character is living in and can influence the character. There's a scene in Spree where Joe Keery is talking to Bobby at a gas station. It felt silly on set but it's basically just Joe talking into a phone. He had to trust me that when I got to the edit, the timing would work. I told him to pause and on set I would read the comment back to him that was going to be there so he would know what the timing was like. These are experiments but they're also set pieces. These are cinematic set pieces that involve the material that actually surrounds us every day whether it's TikToks or comments or live stream interactions. 

To me these are cinematic details and no one is really trying to make something cool or something watchable or narrative out of them and to me it seems like a no brainer. It’s a cool opportunity to kind of expand some language and engage people who don't see their lives represented in movies. Contemporary life is barely scratched in most movies or tv shows and so to me it seems it's my responsibility because no one else either knows how to do it or cares about it or is scared to do it. So how do we do it? It’s just a lot of a lot of work, a lot of sitting around. For like Wobble Palace the opening of that movie if you remember is like text exchanges between the couple. Dasha and I sat there for two nights and wrote a whole text history so that I could scroll through for 30 seconds super duper fast to the beginning and if you paused it on your computer at any point it would seem realistic and seem like you were at month three of the relationship and month six of the relationship and year two of the relationship and you could see the arc if you went frame by frame. 

That stuff's important and for Spree I wrote like seven thousand comments. Not just the comments, I had to come up with the username because then you think of what is the person saying what username do they have to be saying something that's like you know like fucked up or rude or like adoring. A person who says come to Brazil they have to have some sort of Brazilian username. It’s pretty solitary work but I loved doing it. Now you'd probably inform it out to AI. You probably say hey make seven thousand usernames for me and like seven thousand comments or something but it probably wouldn't have like the intentionality and the heart. That’s really integral to me. Same thing with The Code, it was fun making the memojis. When the characters swap their phones, suddenly you know Peter’s character is Dasha’s character and vice versa. I mean that to me felt like a cool set piece to show how opening the pandora’s box of the other person's phone suddenly creates a virtual identity confusion. You suddenly get into their narcissism machine and it's complex stuff but actually it's very primitive too.

Hagop Kourounian: Thank you so much for your work, Eugene. There's so much intentionality behind all of your films and you can feel it all. I love them so much and cannot wait to see what comes next. I had such a great time talking with you!

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I'm so glad we got to talk, this is my long time coming and I'm really happy to talk to you not just in the DMs but in real life so thanks for having me man.