Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker invested in making sense of our current technology-driven world. His camera frame often has live action footage sharing the screen with iPhone depictions of text message threads, dating app swiping, or other apps, both real and imagined. Sundance selection Spree employed footage of GoPros attached to Kurt’s (Joe Keery) car as he livestreams a rideshare’s descent into murderous frenzy. Set during Covid lockdown, his latest, The Code, follows Celine Unger (Wobble Palace co-star Dasha Nekrasova) as she flees Los Angeles for the California desert with her boyfriend, NFT artist Jay Richard (actor and www.RachelOrmont.com writer-director Peter Vack). Still recovering from a slew of anonymous #MeToo allegations, Richard is understandably paranoid at where Unger’s impulse to film an amateur documentary on their relationship might lead. Spiraling, he purchases a slew of his own spy cameras to secretly film their desert getaway himself, maintaining his point of view should he need it. Ideas of authorship swirl around The Code’s examination of our current reality in which everyone records each other at all times.
Doubling down on Spree’s diegetic camera-heavy approach, The Code frequently depicts six simultaneous cameras at a given time, with upwards of 12 in some moments. The Code leans into an amateur filmmaking aesthetic, blending lower-resolution spy cameras from Temu (including a ridiculous pair of chunky spy sunglasses Richard sports) alongside the more professional grade (but still prosumer) camcorder that Unger wields. Cinematographer Barton Cortright (The Cathedral, Actors) and his small camera crew of just three work wonders capturing scenes shot from every conceivable angle and point of view. Talented filmmakers in their own right, co-editors Tucker Bennett (Planet Heaven) and Sabrina Greco (Lockjaw) edit this mountain of overlapping footage together, dipping into the filmmaking languages of TikTok, wedding videos, student thesis films, and much more. It’s an intentionally overwhelming assault on the senses that replicates how screen time affects our brain chemistry.
Kotlyarenko recently wrapped up a stateside screening tour of The Code, with notable moderators for the Q&As including critic and The Sweet East screenwriter Nick Pinkerton, visual artist Jon Rafman, and animator Victoria Vincent (AKA vewn). Playing into the film’s themes, Kotlyarenko would livestream each Q&A on Instagram, usually from an unflattering, close-up of the underside of his bearded chin. Still in theaters in Los Angeles and New York, The Code is also now available to stream on MUBI. I caught up with Kotlyarenko last week on the phone where we discussed writing the screenplay at the spa, verisimilitude when creating fake apps and websites, and his role as a satirist of the 21st century.
Caleb Hammond: Your early film 0s and 1s is one of the earlier Screenlife films, as they say, and Spree employs a lot of different simultaneous cameras. You’ve made a lot of features, and The Code feels like a distillation of a lot of the things you’ve been making. What had you learned by the time you got to The Code?
Eugene Kotlyarenko: Screenlife is almost [Timur] Bekmambetov’s company’s attempt to coin a thing which is not something that I subscribe to. So I would push back a little against that. My first film 0s and 1s is an expressionistic interpretation of early Internet and personal computing, second wave, MAC propagandistic OSs. It’s not actually a screen recording at all, which is what their whole thing is. At the time I was making that — which took me three years to make — I made a movie that was all screen recordings of video chats and desktop behavior called Skydiver. Between those two things, I went in completely two different directions. One was the complete fabrication and almost an animated film that takes place inside of an operating system, and then Skydiver was pure documentation of the screen, existing OS and real websites. Once I did those two films, I completely moved away from that in a way. And now my last two films are a re-emergence of things. When everyone else caught up to this idea of “why don’t we make movies through desktops?” I was so over it. Spree was my attempt to basically make a smartphone movie, a livestream movie, a movie that’s not about video chats going on. It’s about streaming as a narrative. And then with The Code, I wanted to dig into the synthetically schizophrenic nature of all these things coming together: the self-made amateur doc, the FaceTime conversations, the way you can monitor surveillance devices on your phone, and the surveillance state that no one ever expected, but that has become the completely accepted new normal — parsing out the reality we live in, and showing it back to viewers and society in a way that no one has taken the time or energy to reflect back. In terms of what I learned, every single one is an experiment. I’m just trying to entertain people. So I use this grammar and experiments to figure out the most effective way to make a joke, or have an emotion come across, or figure out a cinematic set piece. I try not to repeat myself. If I’ve already figured something out, I try to figure out a new thing, because that’s what makes this whole thing fun for me.
CH: How much of the stuff that we see in The Code are fake apps that you’re creating, and how much of it is real? For instance, the Two Way app: is that real or a construct?
EK: The Two Way app is a fake app that I invented for the movie.
CH: Bixby?
EK: Bixby is a real app, but the Brighton app is a fake one. But for this movie to work I had to invent a recording device. There are secret recording devices that you can install on your partner’s phone, but what they don’t do is simultaneously film selfie mode and the outward facing camera. You can get one that maybe records the screen, or that maybe does selfie mode, or that activates your outward facing camera, but you won’t get one that does all those things at the same time — and then doesn’t tell the person [laughs]. That was the fictional app that we created. We had to take two phones and rubber band them on top of each other, and one was the selfie angle, and one was the outward facing angle, and record in that janky fashion. There’s a lot of low-level technical inventing that Bart Cortright, the DP, and I had to do to make these nontraditional, non-cinematic devices work for our cinematic purposes.
CH: The film does a great job with the design of all these things. As a viewer, you’re assuming some of these things are fake, just probably for legal purposes. But you understand the aesthetics and how these things look and work, so that it’s not always clear what is real and fake.
EK: I’m very sensitive to when people incorporate “technology” or apps or phone screens into their movies — it looks atrocious. It immediately takes a person, even subtly, out of what’s going on. For me, that verisimilitude is a no-brainer. You have to do it the right way, so that people are in it. They feel like they’re looking at real life. Even with all the absurdity in the movie with behaviors that are over the top and ridiculous, the actual contours of life look real, whether that’s production design, on set or virtual OS or UX design in the apps on the phones. That stuff’s important to me, having people immersed in the storytelling, and that accuracy speaks to my desire to do that.
CH: As someone who makes films where the Internet and technology is so present, an outsider’s assumption could be that there would be this irony present, a cynicism. What I like about your films is their earnestness. True love is often at the center, and The Code is an optimistic movie about relationships.
EK: I’m basically a traditional satirist that has a humanistic impulse. That’s how I approach coming up with stories, characters, jokes, and emotional moments. I try to point out what I see as the absurdity in contemporary life, and to extract humor and emotion from that. There’s no other way to do that than to be intentional and truthful with your observations. Now, sometimes the path to truth can be more campy, it can be more surreal, it can be more grandiose, and sometimes it can be subtle. I’m not scared of different registers of humor or performance style. I embrace whatever style is necessary, whatever register is necessary to get across my point.
I’m not cynical. The easiest thing in the world would be to be “hmm, technology, bad. Smartphone, bad.” Even with Spree, which is about a mass murderer, I’m trying to reflect on what the mechanisms of the culture that lead to that are, without saying, “We have to stop this.” Because realistically, there’s no way to stop it. There’s no way to stop the desire that people have for convenience with their technology. So whether that means the convenience of immediately communicating, or being able to access social media platforms or pornography or other people’s attention, or just as a narcissism engine to look at or understand yourself — all these things are too appealing and comforting to ever eliminate. What I’m trying to do is reflect it back in a way that’s honest, and then let people extract whatever moralistic meaning they want from it.
For The Code, surveillance is something that’s very simple to say, “we’re stuck in 1984.” But in fact, we’re all extremely complicit in the new normal of all-pervasive surveillance. We seem to like it just fine, since no one opts out and no one disagrees with consent forms and installation of apps and social media. So if we’re all fine with it, let’s figure out a way to come out the other side and use these modes and platforms to empower ourselves to come up with something that might help recontextualize experiences in a positive or hopeful way. I’m not a “technology bad” guy, but if people come up with that conclusion from my films, that’s also fine. I wouldn’t resist anyone’s conclusion.
CH: On a script level, the tightness of the narrative strikes me. In the scavenger hunt at the end, he’s looking up the price of this crypto coin, which then cleverly calls back to earlier scenes. There’s this propulsive momentum leading him at the end, and one could assume that’s all that’s needed. But you still take the time to craft these precise jokes throughout.
EK: The movie is almost reverse-engineered to be about those details, and those jokes are all callbacks to previously set-up jokes. In writing the scenes that are the origin of the callback, you have to think: where’s the punchline? 30 or 50 minutes later, do you still have a punchline? Part of the project is the recontextualization of footage, or lived experience. Because at this point, footage is just a memory that we decided to offload onto the cloud or onto our phones or platforms. That’s something that everybody’s gone through. When they remind you “a year ago today” or “three years ago today, here’s this memory” of people going through their photo roll and seeing moments that they don’t even remember documenting and having a sense of nostalgia. But it’s not just nostalgia. You’re also recontextualizing the meaning of that moment that you offloaded onto your device. To actually narrativize that, and make that part of the psychology of the film on a humorous level, but also on an emotional level — that was one of the major projects of The Code.
CH: Was that tough to crack in the writing process? What is your writing practice?
EK: I finally cracked a good writing practice for this movie, which is going to the 24-hour spa, and putting my phone in a locker and never looking at it. And then I just sit in the sauna or the hot tub, thinking about stuff, and then I run to a public computer that also exists in the spa, and write it all out on WriterDuet. That’s my process. I’ve never written so quickly or so clearly. The phone is enemy number one to creativity and deep thinking when it comes to non-phone things such as writing. I’ve thought about the concept for this movie for 20 years. I was inspired by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel The Key, which is about a couple who keeps diaries. Each alternating chapter is from the husband or wife, and they have dueling perspectives on what is going on in their lives and their relationship. I’ve wanted to make a movie like that for a long time, and it took me about 20 years to figure out the proper mode, grammar, and circumstances that ultimately crystallized when Covid lockdown started. I thought, “Well, this is the perfect milieu for the story I’ve been trying to get into for 20 years.”
CH: I prefer films to have scope in some form or fashion, and with a lot of Covid movies you know you’re likely going to be in this one house for the entire duration. This movie largely centers around one house, but they get out, and there’s a lot of characters. You find ways to give the film narrative scope. But you shot this after Covid right?
EK: We shot it in 2023, so basically a year and a half after Covid was kind of all over. I could feel that the experience of Covid was disappearing, and that’s foregrounded in the actual narrative of the film — this preoccupation with capturing what’s happening. I try not to lead with the idea of describing this as a Covid film, because I’m aware, for good reason, that people are allergic to that. Because they’ve never seen a good Covid movie. But I think once people see The Code, they don’t mind the Covid reality that’s being depicted, because it’s just a milieu, an environment to explore all sorts of behavioral trends and compromises and insanities that were conjured up during that moment and still live with us within our psyches today.
CH: Pacing-wise, Ivy Wolk’s character arrives an hour in, and she’s such a burst of energy that helps get the audience across the finish line. Are you thinking about this as you’re writing it, or are you pretty instinctual with these things?
EK: I’m not a very calculating writer. I’ve never made it through one of those screenwriting books or any of that shit. They talk about 10,000 hours — if you actually watch 10,000 hours of movies, this shit gets ingrained in you. You have the innate sense of when things are supposed to happen in the movies you like. There is a rhythm formula for a general traditional film that is tried and tested. The perspective, quality, and insightfulness of the film is different for everyone, but the actual flow and rhythm of how a good film works, there’s a feeling to it. That’s all you can really ever subscribe to as a director: your feeling about what is good. Your feeling about pace or honesty or invention or character or whatever, that’s all about just trying to excite and amuse yourself and be insightful while you’re doing it. I try to have a sense of it. But it’s a collaborative process. You work with editors, you work with producers, you work with everyone on set, including actors. Actors have less of an understanding of pace and overall arc and rhythm. But the editors, director, to a certain extent, producers — and by director, I mean writer-director — have to understand the full picture of pacing.
CH: What were co-editors Sabrina Greco and Tucker Bennett’s role in the edit? You have all these cameras to deal with, and it’s a pretty tight script from beginning to end. Did they have space to play around?
EK: For me, editing is mostly getting rid of stuff, revealing stuff that doesn’t work, chiseling away at the noise to find the essence of the thing. There are formal experiments that we’re engaging in that Tucker and Sabrina led the charge on. The film is trying to interrogate the primacy of editing as the final narrative voice of any movie, or of anything in the culture that says, “this is the narrative, this is the truth.” The edit is in charge of that. So there’s a lot of room to play around with editing styles and modes. Tucker and Sabrina were extremely game for that, whether it’s making a TikTok or a wedding video. These are different editing languages. And then we find the one that we like and work together to make sure we made something that feels good to all of us. Certainly it’s highly directed, but also there’s a lot of play. The edit on the movie was really enjoyable.
CH: How did the credit sequence come together? That’s a highlight.
EK: I’ve wanted this scroll through IMDB for a credit crawl for a long time. I didn’t know what film it would fit in, but I knew it was a good idea. How do I get through the main department heads and actor credits? They’re arguing for control of the authorship of the movie. That’s the theme of the film, so why don’t I extend that into the credits and incorporate all the real people who made the film into their text conversation debate? Madeline Poole, my old friend who’d never done a credit sequence before, helped jump-start it with me. She designed a bunch of elements, and then Matt Chan came on at the end and helped too. The three of us animated it all in a week, because we had to premiere the movie the next day at Fantasia.
CH: I was talking with Bobby McCoy after the screening, and we both love the quick Cum Town audio clip early on. It’s such a funny COVID signifier, because a lot of people, Bobby and myself included, were listening to that podcast at that time.
EK: I wanted to make an opening montage that realistically described everything that everyone’s going through: going to the supermarket, all the highlight reels on her Instagram story with the masks and GIFs. In the car you’re not listening to the radio anymore in the car, you’re listening through Bluetooth, and it’s a podcast. I hadn’t seen that in a movie. Dusty and Sweets McGee, which is one of the first hybrid docs about heroin addicts, has a great opening montage in the first six minutes — it’s just dynamite. I always loved it. I felt I could do something like that to describe the milieu that the characters find themselves in.
Comments are closed.