“I Just Want To Capture The Spirit Of The Films And Filmmakers That I Appreciate And How Do I Make It New?” Interview With SPREE Director and Co-Writer Eugene Kotlyarenko

A little under a week ago, I first watched Eugene Kotlyarenko‘s Spree, and it hasn’t left my mind since. I found it an engaging, darkly funny critique on social media as well as a sad rumination of the dangers of the modern generation’s endless search for validation. I found that Kotlyarenko efficiently utilized the tight space of a rideshare car in order to create a claustrophobic and tension-filled social media odyssey. Ever since the initial Sundance hype, I had been intrigued, but after finally watching it, I was fully sold on Kotlyarenko‘s ambitious vision. As one could probably expect, I was elated to find out I was given the opportunity to interview Kotlyarenko! The following is the interview I conducted with Kotlyarenko, during which we discussed the movie’s themes and cultural relevance as well as where Kotlyarenko drew inspiration from for the movie.

Owen Butler for Film Inquiry: Hey, how’s it going?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Good, man, how are you?

I’m doing good, how about you?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I’m so excited, we had the premiere of the movie last night at a drive-in, and you know, there were lots of cars and lots of people cracking up, and it was really cool, you know?

Yeah, that’s good to hear! All the drive-ins opening up and whatnot and the theaters opening up soon so hopefully, you know…

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Yeah, I hope people get to see it because we’re so glued to our phones during the quarantine shit and that’s exactly what the movie’s trying to make fun of and what it’s about. So it’ll be nice for people I think to leave the house and go out into a communal environment where there’s a bunch of cars or a bunch of people in seats six feet apart and try to watch something that will hopefully give them a language to discuss some of these things that we’ve become complicit with, you know?

Yeah, it’s definitely like a collective community thing. I haven’t been to a drive-in in ages but whenever I would go it was definitely a big event.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Yeah, I mean also the movie itself is good for a drive-in because it’s like you’re so claustrophobically in the car in the film itself, so watching it from a car has a surreal, meta quality to it, you know?

Yeah, for sure.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: So what’s up?

Alright, so did you draw inspiration from any older films while writing Spree, and if so, what kind of themes that lie within those did you take and place into the context of your story? Because I kind of felt some Taxi Driver and Nightcrawler vibes, so I just wanted to know exactly if you drew any inspiration from those types of movies while writing it.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Yeah, for me, you know, this is in the lineage of media critique, so Gene McHugh and I, we thought about films like Network, and To Die For, and The King of Comedy, and there are some ’50s films that are very good like A Face in the Crowd, and Ace in the Hole. Ace in the Hole is a movie where they use this sensational, sort of tragic event to generate publicity with the media circus, and A Face in the Crowd is a film about someone who’s a fringe member of society, who, through his sort of weird tactics and craft, these sensational tactics, becomes super popular and super famous and super powerful, and the kind of sickness that the media allows for those things to happen.

So those were films that I think Spree is in the lineage of, and then there were certain other films that I kind of shared with the cast and crew, like King of Comedy, like, you know, there’s an Iranian film, Taxi Tehran, by Jafar Panâhi, that was all shot in a cab and all shot with real cameras and stuff. There’s a movie called Man Bites Dog which is kind of like a mockumentary about a serial killer. So, there’s a bunch. I always think about “how do I capture the spirit of the movies I like” and “how do I make it feel contemporary”. You know, that’s sort of my approach. I’m not big into quotations or remaking shit, or like allusions or whatever. I just want to capture the spirit of the films and filmmakers that I appreciate and how do I make it new? How do I update it? How do I make it relevant to contemporary audiences?

Yeah, definitely. I did some research and I found out that one of your close collaborators influenced your decision to add the “Draw My Life” as a part of the film’s opening moments. How did you feel about including that, and do you hope that as a result of moments like that that viewers might be able to find a more personal resonance with the soul of Kurt’s character? Because even though he’s a really dangerous individual, you know, at heart he’s very fame-obsessed like a lot of people are. They just want to be noticed, and it’s kind of sad.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Yeah, there’s an inherent sadness to him, right? And there’s an inherent monstrousness to him, and Kurt is a reflection, I think, of the kind of little monster that lives inside all of us, where we crave that attention, we crave the dopamine hit of feeling validated and loved, in a statistical way, right? Because that’s how social media is built, there are like numbers and stats and shit. So, I think the “Draw My Life” was an exercise that was suggested by our social media consultant Honor Levy, and it was very helpful for Joe and I to kind of figure out the background of this character and then somewhere along the way we were like, “well this could just be a really good way of helping an audience enter the film”, and kind of give them a quick sort of shortcut into who the character was because, you know, the movie itself plays out in real-time, kind of like in the moment, and so what you’re getting in terms of background, you sort of fill it in as the movie goes, as opposed to kind of more generic films about monstrous characters.

You almost wait halfway through the movie for the breaking point or something, and this movie just dives right in. So yeah, that opening montage of social media kind of attempts at being a really useful way of getting people involved in it. But I think Joe played it really well, giving people access points to what’s sad and pathetic about this character and what is relatable, but at the same time, we were very explicitly kind of creating a monster and creating someone that the movie is making fun of, right? Like, it’s a satire, it’s a critique, we’re trying to make fun of an influencer who would use sensationalism to go viral because those are kind of sicknesses in our society, people who do immoral things for attention, you know?

Yeah, definitely. I often see that on social media a lot. It’s sad, that superficiality that’s created by these sites, it’s sad to see how it’s devolved over time. I mean obviously some people are really creative and use their platform for good but there are some that see it as just an opportunity for… numbers.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Well, I mean, even people who are creative, like for instance Jessie Adams’ character, played by Sasheer Zamata in this film, you know, she’s a “good” type of influencer, right? She uses her brand to, you know, have comedy but also expose injustices that she sees, but she’s still complicit in this sort of attention economy where human beings become branded entities, and we sort of lose a sense of our humanity where everything we post is content, our personal expression is sort of boiled down to mediated content. Every experience we have has to be mediated and quantified, and there’s something that we lose when that happens, even if you are being creative or kind of striving in the right direction in terms of how you use social media. So, it’s part of the larger structural critique of this thing that we’ve all kind of signed up for without really wanting to understand the repercussions it has on our relationships and sense of self.

Speaking of relationships, I want to bring the conversation to your previous two films, which both focused heavily on relationships. Did experience telling those stories at all impact shifting the focus to a character like Kurt, who I don’t want to say lacks social skills, but is pretty bad at reading body language? Kurt focuses heavily on a platform that’s often used to promote superficiality and he’s very much a loner in a sense that he kind of just does his own thing.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: I mean, yeah, I think Kurt is kind of a living embodiment that the culture at large has missed, where we basically all agreed a while ago that sharing is inherently good, and sharing is not inherently or morally good, it’s just kind of this thing that brainwashes the thinking because the platforms want to use our content, and they want to mine our data and stuff, and so Kurt is basically almost like an anthropomorphic version of that principle, that sharing is inherently good. But, you know, yeah, I made those relationship films partly because I had the resources to make them, you know, they were extremely personal, and also extremely low-budget to make, and Spree is a much more ambitious story, an ambitious form of storytelling, and so I’ve been, since my first movies, trying to make something that was kind of like more genre and more high-thrills. And while I think hopefully I’ve been able to accomplish some big laughs and entertainment from A Wonderful Cloud and Wobble Palace, every story has its motive of storytelling, and so I just hope that the journey that Kurt goes on, the journey the viewer goes on, and the way we presented this movie through these formal decisions of live-streaming and iPhones and all the comments, all the different social media elements, serves this film well. So, you know, that’s kind of like the evolution, every story has its own way of being told.

The film’s journey is very much a nocturnal odyssey of sorts that kind of reminded me at times atmospherically of films like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. Did you already know in your head how Kurt’s story was going to kind of begin, play out, and end? Or did it come to you more naturally while writing the script?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: You know, we had a good long writing process on-and-off for about two years, but yeah, inherently, if you’re doing a movie about a driver and passengers, it’s going to be kind of an odyssey like After Hours where it is episodic, where you have characters that come in and not reappear again, and the main character is kind of a vehicle, for lack of a better word, for the narrative. And what’s rare, I think, about our film, is that the monster is at the head of the story with Kurt. Jessie is the hero, and so Kurt, the monster, is the one who you go on the journey with, and that is kind of where the horror comes in because you’re stuck there, you’re trapped in there, through this evil scheme. But yeah, I think once we realized we were doing a rideshare movie, we knew it was going to be like an odyssey, and that appeals to me, that structural mode, because in a movie like Naked, or a lot of Paul Schrader films actually have that, the ones he wrote like Taxi Driver or the ones he made like Hardcore, it’s about a character’s sort of journey through hell, and in this film, the viewer is going through hopefully a fun and entertaining, you know, sort of hell, being on this ride.

Yeah, that’s what reminded me specifically of After Hours, you know, even though that guy is put through hell in this really, really long night, it’s really fun to watch, and you’re unsure whether it’s supposed to be or not, but it is.

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Yeah, I hope that’s the feeling, right? I mean, that’s a super high-energy movie, and I love Scorsese movies. I was actually watching Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore the other day, and that’s a super high-energy movie about a middle-aged woman trying to find love, in her singledom, in her motherhood. But it’s super high-energy, and I’ve always respected that so much about Scorsese, that he really finds unique and energetic ways to tell stories in a way that’s respectful of the characters in the story but is also part of his energy, and hopefully when people watch Spree they’ll kind of like bond over the creativeness that we applied to this story.

Well, it was awesome talking to you!

Eugene Kotlyarenko: Great talking with you Owen, thanks very much.

Yeah, no problem, have a nice rest of your day!

Eugene Kotlyarenko: You too!

Thank you!

Film Inquiry would like to thank Eugene Kotlyarenko for taking the time to speak with us!

Spree premiered at Sundance 2020. It was released on digital and VOD on August 14, 2020.

Watch Spree