Erupcja: Charli xcx’s Lost Weekend in Warsaw

As a filmmaker, could there be anything more serendipitous than running into Charli xcx in May 2024, mere weeks before Brat took over the culture, and discovering not only that she wants to make films, but she would like to make films with you? This is how Pete Ohs, director of dreamy relationship drama Erupcja, describes his initial meeting with the pop star: complete serendipity. “It’s not that we were doing auditions,” he says. “It’s not that we were strategising to make the most out of Brat Summer. It was just some humans with similar interests getting together. She wanted to get into acting, and the idea of making a movie really small with a group of friends is exactly like how she likes to make music. These things just aligned.”

It’s the perfect creative meet-cute for a film that is entirely about the power of coincidence. In Erupcja, Charli xcx plays Bethany, who returns to Warsaw after several years with her boyfriend Rob in tow for a couple’s getaway. Bethany argues that Warsaw is a more romantic city than Paris but unlike what Rob, poised on the brink of proposal, believes, her sense of romantic possibility is directed more towards her friend, Nel, whom she first met as a teenager and has seen intermittently in the years since. Their meetings always coincide with a volcano erupting somewhere in the world and the two women have taken these displays of nature as part of a much greater truth, of the mysticism of their friendship as a site of synchronicity and freedom. When a volcano erupts, they believe, anything is possible. 

“Humans, because we have these big brains, we forget that we are part of nature,” Ohs explains. “We’re trying to think our way out of it. [But] what is it about volcanoes that feel special? How is it some sort of metaphor? We arrived at this idea of how love can be such a destructive force, in the way that a volcano can.”

Being open to forces beyond yourself is exactly how Ohs makes his films. They begin with an initial idea or inspiration – in Erupcja, it was the city of Warsaw, where Ohs himself had fallen in love years before – and build through conversations with the actors, who help to shape the direction of the story and the script. All three leading actors are also billed as writers: Ohs’ films begin shooting with half an outline and no script, with each scene filmed chronologically and written in a collaborative process between actors and director on the day. 

“I make movies the way I do because I want it to be fun,” says Ohs, laughing. “I want it to be free and like how I made videos with my friends when I was 15, when there was nothing at stake. There was no pressure. We were just kids with a camera playing make-believe, and as we become adults, we start to feel the infinite pressures of life. So many of [my filmmaking] decisions are intentionally designed to remove pressure. That’s why we’re making it low-budget, that’s why we’re making it for only two weeks, that’s why we don’t write a script.”

By eschewing some of the practical and formal considerations of traditional filmmaking, Ohs seeks to deliberately disengage with some of the other mechanisms of the industry, and the ways in which they alienate artists from their own creativity. “I say to the actors, ‘If we don’t make a movie that’s OK, as long as we feel we’ve grown and learned something as humans,” Ohs explains. “But because of that, we’re very much not trying to engage with the capitalist system. The purpose of making it for us is taking risks. We should be trying new things.”

It is appropriate, then, that Ohs takes inspiration from far more than cinema when making films. Music, he explains, is a key touchstone, not only in the way it is made but the way it is received by its listener. “I’m so jealous of music,” he says, “the way it can both be something you actively listen to or something that can play in the background, and that’s not an insult to it. It’s actually perfectly performing its role. Movies can, at their worst, take us away from life. The best films, and the best art, find a way to complement the life that’s actually being lived.” Whether that means the audience watches Erupcja and is inspired to discover the romanticism of their own city or even watch it in the background while they create their own art, Ohs’ dream is that his film opens up a world beyond the film; that, rather than command the spotlight, it illuminates everything that lies around it. “If the movie can support the life being lived,” he says, “that’s what I really strive for.”

Erupcja is out in UK cinemas on June 3.