Charli XCX wants us to know it’s “OK to be vulnerable and volatile and a mess, and that those are all just normal human emotions.” This was part of her mission in making her behind-the-curtain comedy mockumentary The Moment which premiered at Sundance on Friday.
Speaking at Deadline’s Sundance studio about the film written and directed by Aidan Zamiri, Charli explained why she chose the mockumentary route instead of the straight-up concert doc she had originally been offered.
“I’ve always been interested in flipping the form in any sort of medium that I’m working within. So I really didn’t want to do sort of like a straightforward telling of my experience through making the album and Brat itself. I wanted to approach it from a perspective where I was talking about my feelings around what I had experienced whilst making the record and putting the album out, but also kind of talking about the feeling that sometimes happens when you create a piece of art, you put it out into the world, and then it kind of becomes not yours anymore. It evolves into this other thing, and people project their own experiences onto it.”
Of course, this story is entirely fictional, entirely scripted, but we’ve often thought that what we were able to do with this film is hopefully touch on something that’s even more honest and more vulnerable than perhaps what a documentary might have done.
Writer-director Aidan Zamiri
She said that letting go of that creative control had been “almost like a grieving process, in a way,” and that “this film, in a way, is about how little control you can sometimes have. I think that was a big part of why I wanted to make this film, because I really felt that I had experienced that.”
During the three-week shoot, Charli was able to bring in friends as cameos, including Julia Fox, Rachel Sennott and Kylie Jenner. This is Jenner’s first acting role. “Kylie was just phenomenal,” Charlie said. “She totally got the assignment. She is a really great actress.”
For Zamiri, who became close with Charli after working on her “360” video, the project was a great fit because, he said, he and Charli share “a similar point of view, our worldview or how we see art. You have same sort of insecurities, same instincts a lot of the time. So it felt very easy to talk about stuff that felt that felt like a rumination on what Charlie was experiencing in real time.”
Charli xcx in ‘The Moment’
Sundance Institute
He added, “Of course, this story is entirely fictional, entirely scripted, but we’ve often thought that what we were able to do with this film is hopefully touch on something that’s even more honest and more vulnerable than perhaps what a documentary might have done.”
Alexander Skarsgård plays the role of Johannes, a director brought in by the label to put a more conventional and controlling spin on Charli’s Brat concert.
“I’d say that Johannes is the hero of the story,” he deadpanned, to laughs from the rest of the group. “Johannes sees potential in Charli, but she has a little too much integrity. So Johannes’s job as the protagonist of the story is to kind of shave off that integrity to commodify Charli. To take the edges off, sanitize the product and make it more palatable for a mainstream audience.”
But joking aside, Skarsgård added, “It’s really just a bunch of really insecure people, and people throwing out thoughts and ideas because they feel like they should probably have a thought or an idea. You can have no idea what you’re talking about, but people are reluctant to say, ‘I don’t really have an opinion on this. I don’t know if I like the white one or the black one.’ You have to have an opinion on everything and I think that insecurity comes across in the film, and I’ve definitely met characters like Johannes.”
The Deadline Studio at Sundance is presented by Casamigos.