Commercial filmmakers are disengaged and resentful towards the American audience. The film industry can make me feel fatalistic because the things being made are not being made by people who love and appreciate what they’re doing.

ALEX ROSS PERRY: I loved The Rehearsal. What were your feelings about it?

TESS POLLOK: Well, I’m a big fan of Nathan for You and I thought it was a mature, thoughtful evolution of that–it’s nice to see someone with such a distinct set of impulses as an artist. I don’t like discussions about [Nathan Fielder] being autistic because they feel pathological to me and I think it takes away from the humanist instinct behind the show.

PERRY: My wife [Anna Bak-Kvapil] made a similar point about that the other day, about The Rehearsal and How To with John Wilson, that even as a huge fan of Nathan and John she’s always surprised by how sappy and earnest these shows are. People are too put off by their abrasiveness and confrontational qualities to notice that half of these episodes end with a message of: if this can bring people together and help me understand human emotions, then it was all worth it. That kind of earnest messaging just isn’t consistent with the discomfort of those programs. In both The Rehearsal and How To with John Wilson, the editing leaves you with the idea that this was an empathetic exercise in learning how to connect with people, not some irritating prankster exercise in being an idiot and fucking with people. So she was complaining about people who complain about the ethics and accuse them of being autistic, she said, “These guys aren’t autistic, they’re corny. They’re too emotional – why does no one talk about that? Are they so turned off by the rest of the episode that these earnest wrap-ups don’t land for them?”

POLLOK: The pilot episode of The Rehearsal is extremely earnest. That first guy, Kor Skeete, has a really intimate and life-affirming experience with Nathan at the end.

PERRY: It’s all so earnest. Some of the Nathan for You episodes can be kind of mean-spirited because the outcome is so subject-dependent, but you can tell when the subject is someone he feels warmth towards versus someone he finds to be a complete buffoon who he’s happy to embarrass. My big thing with The Rehearsal, and this is a production thing – and I have no doubt about this, I can’t believe this isn’t true – is that the first episode, which was clearly shot before COVID because none of the crew were wearing masks, revolves around this premise of using the entire world as a stage and putting a single unknowing performer on this stage, which is totally bizarre and interesting. It’s obvious that that was supposed to be what the show was, and then when COVID locked everything down, the compromise became: you can keep doing this, but you have to lock it down to a single location. I just can’t stop thinking about that. Because after that first episode, it turns into people going in and out of a single location–and no one would come up with an idea for a six episode show where the first episode is this completely disconnected prologue followed by five other episodes that loosely engage with that set-up. It seems obvious to me that he was looking at that woman, Angela, and realizing that she couldn’t sustain that premise, so then he went to LA and did something else, and then he went to Oregon and did something else, which everyone always forgets.

POLLOK: In Oregon he starts up with his original premise again and abandons it.

PERRY: My wife and I listened to some podcasts about The Rehearsal on a drive back from our vacation in August and not one of them mentioned the guy in Oregon. It’s such a disjointed show with so many pivots away from its characters and itself. It seems like the show evolved as it was being made, which is just how things work in production. It’s funny to read responses where people are, like, “Oh my god, he planned all of this.” He didn’t plan anything – you can tell he’s winging it the whole time.

POLLOK: It was pretty radically deconstructed in that way. It reminded me of Caveh Zahedi and The Show About the Show. Have you seen that? His show that’s about the making of itself? Each episode is inflected by whatever happened in the last one and what he can do with the space he has left. I think it’s an interesting way of making TV.

PERRY: I agree. I love Caveh. I think he’s cool.

POLLOK: You have similar work coming out, a new “semiotic experiment” per the New Yorker, it’s a hybrid meta-fictive documentary about the band Pavement. I don’t know too much about the project except that you’re shooting their reunion shows and there are other performance elements involved. How do you feel about making that?

PERRY: It’s been exciting. We’ve been talking to Pavement for years and making a Pavement Museum for them that contains artifacts from their entire lives, things from their tours that they wouldn’t even remember. So that’s been exciting for me to think about, what it will be like for these guys to walk into a room that’s filled with their entire life and legacy, surrounded by fans. How would someone react when having their legacy presented to them in such a maximalist way? We also hired an interviewer to “interview” them who’s actually just an actor, just to record their reactions to the whole thing.

POLLOK: What is the movie about? Them? The Pavement Museum? The legacy of the band?

PERRY: Fundamentally, it’s about them – the five guys who are in Pavement. But what we’re doing with the movie that’s unpredictable is fan reactions, because we want the movie to end on the idea that the reason this band has been kept alive for 20 years after breaking up is because of the way they live on in the hearts and minds of the fans. We’ve got a lot of footage of that, so I think the fan angle is working.

POLLOK: That seems exceptionally well-suited to the current obsession with metafictive work involving fans. Fans are basically human actors. I mean, actors are also human actors, but you get what I mean. Fans are actors on the stage of their own grandiose love?

PERRY: Totally. We filmed their first show in over a decade and it was incredible. The first people in line were this family – two parents in their 50s and two really handsome, cool, smart sons who had been raised by their Gen X parents to love 90s music. The emotional experience these people were having was just overwhelming. The sons were putting their arms around their parents and crying. Also, now they’re coming to the Pavement Museum, because we told them about it, so they’re going to pop up in other parts of the movie by accident. They were just people who were coming here to see the shows, so they were unwittingly subjects of that part of the movie, that 2022 documentary of their four final shows, but they stumbled into another part of the movie, which is the Pavement Museum that we made. I’m glad we have that family in there as a recurring element.

POLLOK: Are you a superfan of anything?

PERRY: No. My dad worked in radio his entire career and my family was always around music and the arts, but I’m just not that emotional of a person to the point where I’d be at a concert and crying with my family. There’s many things that I love, but the emotional legacy at play with earnest, thoughtful young people, that doesn’t exist for me having grown up in the ‘90s and not the 2010s. The closest I could come to that… Do you remember when Bruce Springsteen was on Broadway? For about nine months, Bruce Springsteen was performing on Broadway in a 1,000-seat theater, and usually you’d see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden with 30,000 other people. It was impossible to get tickets and if you did they were from a scalper and they were terrible, but I found great tickets through some agency connection I had, so I called my dad and he came up from Philadelphia because I knew he had to see this. His reaction to that was great and it was great being able to give that to him.

POLLOK: Aw. That’s really sweet.

PERRY: Yeah. He said it was his 13th or 14th time seeing Springsteen and that nothing could ever top that night. He said, “This is the final time I’ll need to see him perform.” I was very proud of myself for having created that experience for him.

POLLOK: The youthful obsession you’re talking about is really funny to me because I was having a conversation with someone the other day about if I would ever write YA fiction –

PERRY: Who was leading that conversation, you or them?

POLLOK: Them. They were, like, “would you ever do something like this?” I’ve honestly thought about it. It’s the most affecting experience you ever have in your life as a reader. When you’re 14 and you read Twilight for the first time, there’s no comparison to that feeling in the world. You literally think about the book all day long, you live in the world of the book, and you never feel satisfied with how much time you get to spend there, emotionally.

PERRY: When were you born? Where did you grow up?

POLLOK: I was born in 1997, in LA.

PERRY: Right. I think my problem is that when I was 14 the most important books in the world to me were American Psycho and Fight Club. My escapist indulgence from an early age was comic books, YA didn’t really exist yet. But my escapism was immediately into the dark satire and disaffected things written by Gen X authors, not the more earnest stuff written by people five or ten years younger than me. But it’s not like most people I knew were reading American Psycho in their sophomore year of high school. It just seemed like the thing for me, and for better or worse, it was.

POLLOK: When were you born? Where did you grow up?

PERRY: 1984. I grew up just outside of Philadelphia. I liked it just fine. It’s weird because I feel like there’s this spectrum and I wish I was on one end of the extreme or the other, but I’m just not. Most of the people I grew up with still live around the Philadelphia area, and then there’s someone like my wife who hates where she grew up. She grew up in Bend, Oregon, and she hated it, she resents having to visit. I’m just, like, “High school was fine.” I took it one day at a time and then one day I left and now I don’t want to live there anymore and that’s that.

POLLOK: You emanate a powerful stoicism. You wouldn’t cry at art and you think high school was just fine.

PERRY: I don’t know if I would say I’m a stoic. But with professional stuff having gone the way it has, and now having an almost 2-year-old, I get very upset and stressed out about any number of things and I’ve learned it’s important to be able to take things in stride. Stability. I don’t have the luxury of being unstable even though I work in a profession where everything is destabilized all the time. Going back to the Nathan Fielder thing, I employ overwhelming pragmatism in all possible life situations, maybe my wife would call me autistic or sociopathic. My emotions don’t enter the conversation for me until I’ve evaluated at least ten different pragmatic approaches to solving a problem. Stoic sounds so courageous.

POLLOK: I was trying to give you a positive spin. I could’ve said blasé or disaffected.

PERRY: I get those more often.

POLLOK: Stoic gives you the attributes of a knight. Does it help you focus on your work to be that way?

PERRY: I learned years ago that floating around and trying to live in an artistic, emotional, chaotic way that informs your work doesn’t make sense to me because I don’t have the personality or disposition to be creating a life that is in and of itself an art project. That’s a respectable and interesting way to make work, and I obviously love things that people make that are born of that process, but it’s not for me. I like to do things on a business schedule. I like to work from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Do you ever look back at something you made and have no recollection of who that person was, that person who did something you already did? I look at a couple of movies I’ve made – I look at The Color Wheel, which I made in 2010, or, Listen Up Philip –

POLLOK: You don’t recognize yourself in Listen Up Philip? I love that movie.

PERRY: I just already don’t remember the swirling world of creativity and influences that led me to be, like, “This is the story, this is the script, and this is how we’re going to do this.” In my mind it already existed as a finished product before we made it, which, again, is just me being lucky enough to say that I can see things very clearly. At that point I did, in a mild way, sort of enjoy cultivating a chaotic sense of the madness of the work and felt that everything had to be crazy and people had to work all the time. But three, four, five movies later it kind of became clear to me that people don’t like working that way and don’t like having their lives upended. That’s why I’m enjoying making the Pavement movie so much. We’re doing it in little bits and pieces and it doesn’t have to be on this production schedule that is basically an onslaught. For earlier movies, we’d be in the pre-production office for months, going into the office every day for two months of talking and questions, and then we’d shoot the movie for five or six weeks for eighteen hours a day, and then we’d finish on Friday, and then on Monday I’d be back in the office editing the movie for five months – so that’s seven straight months of my life that I’m out of the house all day, every day. It’s so labor intensive. It just doesn’t make the work any better to work that way.

POLLOK: It sounds more fulfilling to make work the way you’re describing.

I thought Under the Silver Lake was an iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, totally bizarre movie that was at once exactly like everything that inspired it but also unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was an overwhelmingly ambitious, sloppy, bizarre movie – just where you’re, like, the person who made this must be so up their own ass in the best way possible.

PERRY: It’s more like the romantic era of '50s, '60s, '70s New York theater where people would write a play and it’d be up for two weeks, and it might become a legendary performance or it might disappear and never come back. That’s more interesting to me than a grand life-consuming piece of work that takes over everything. But in terms of my stoicism, I just don’t have a lot of faith in why any of these things exist anymore.

POLLOK: Why any of what exists?

PERRY: The way art currently exists, the way filmmaking and television currently exist. Something like The Rehearsal is a vast and complex work that clearly has been worked on for years and years. Immediately, as you mentioned, nine out of ten people just want to pop the balloon. One of my least favorite forms of critical response is, “Well, actually…” It seems crazy to me to work that hard on something that’s supposed to be the summation of your life’s process and immediately have people be, like, “Well, what are the ethics of this?” The ethics are fine; this was made by a corporation. If you think HBO lets you be ethically dubious… There’s something that nobody in the world knows about except for people who make work which is called E&O insurance, errors and omissions insurance. Someone goes through your project with a fine-tooth comb and asks if you can be sued for anything or if there are any errors or omissions in your project that leave the company vulnerable. People just don’t understand. There’s so much complexity in a show like that and people’s only response is, “I’m actually troubled by the way children are used in this.” Those child actors probably got paid enough money to pay their family’s rent for six months for three days of work.

POLLOK: This is something that comes up a lot when we profile artists. I think people find oppressively moralistic interpretations of art to be very frustrating and draining. I experience it as an interviewer because it’s intimidating to participate in a dialogue environment that’s so polarizing and aggressive. I also feel like less is expressed through criticism and feedback. You see less and less of people’s personalities in their taste and opinions.

PERRY: There are rare instances where that’s the case and it’s always really electrifying. I love someone like Richard Brody at the New Yorker, obviously a great supporter of mine, but also someone I admire as a critic for being distinctly personal and idiosyncratic. Some of his opinions are insane. That’s fine. Everyone’s opinions should be insane. No one should have the most mild series of correct opinions. Someone like him is indispensable to the world of criticism because you never know what he’s going to say but he always makes a great point and reasons himself correctly. Speaking of critical circuitousness, did you read the Manohla Dargis review of Cha Cha Real Smooth?

POLLOK: No. I didn’t see the movie or read the review.

PERRY: It’s this milquetoast Sundance coming-of-age feel good dramedy that just looked like very much not my thing. I would never see this even if I lived to be 100 years old. But that’s fine. It was just received as a gentle, honest, sweet, good movie. Dargis reviewed it and said we cannot say that this is a good movie, we cannot say that this is a promising filmmaker, we cannot say that this is what we expect of independent voices. This is appalling on an artistic and emotional level and people are just into it because it’s nice and gentle.

POLLOK: I haven’t asked you yet about contemporary cinema, which I will, but I have another thought relating to this that I want to mention first. I don’t like this trend towards the symbolic, across all contemporary art forms. I feel like filmmakers like Nathan Fielder and Caveh Zahedi are reacting to that dominant tendency towards the flat and overly gestural – they’re this opposing force that’s interested in things that are hyperreal. I also feel something about the erosion of narrative and how art about art-making is becoming more genuine than art about human life. I was watching a movie the other day. Do you remember Encino Man?

PERRY: Of course.

POLLOK: I was just so taken aback by how funny and genuine it was and that it was a big commercial multimillion dollar movie. The premise is obviously hammy, that a caveman wakes up in modern day Los Angeles and has to live there, but it’s really funny basically because of the chemistry between Sean Astin and Pauly Shore and the freedom they allowed them as actors. It felt almost mumblecore compared to big budget movies I see now.

PERRY: That’s the power of Pauly Shore for you. The other thing, that’s neither here nor there, is that in 1992 when this came out there was a base level of aesthetic and technical competence in the world. Even the dumbest and most lowbrow movie would have competent set decorates and production designers. That’s completely gone away because those things take 5% longer and cost 5% more money.

POLLOK: What inspires you from recent memory or contemporary cinema in general?

PERRY: I thought Under the Silver Lake was an instant masterpiece.

POLLOK: Who directed that?

PERRY: David Robert Mitchell. I thought it was an iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, totally bizarre movie that was at once exactly like everything that inspired it but also unlike anything I’d ever seen. It was an overwhelmingly ambitious, sloppy, bizarre movie – just where you’re, like, the person who made this must be so up their own ass in the best way possible. The world just didn’t care about that movie. It barely got released. People thought it was a mess and way too long. Like me, he hasn’t made a movie in years. I also don’t plan to.

POLLOK: You don’t have any plans to make more films?

PERRY: Not right now, no. I’m not thinking beyond the Pavement movie. It’s just a huge undertaking on its own and it’s interesting and enjoyable to make something that, in every sense of the word, I’ve never seen before. It’s a meta-exercise in blending fiction and reality. It’s a feature film but nothing about it is a movie-movie. It’s an experiment in storytelling. If you’re not aiming for something like that, then what are you doing? I’m very much checked out of the system you have to play in to get commercial filmmaking opportunities. It’s not something I want to do, it doesn’t seem fun, and I don’t want to work 18 hours a day and not make that much money and not see my child just to not have fun working. It’s an uninspiring world. Actually, the other day I went and saw my friend Ti West’s new movie Pearl, which I had seen the rough cut of, and that was pretty good. I think Ti’s a great filmmaker and those are great movies. They made me feel inspired to make my own version of a period horror film, maybe.

POLLOK: What did you like about Pearl?

PERRY: I just loved it. If X was a throwback slasher, Pearl is a psychological deranged melodrama about this singular woman and it’s just Mia Goth going wild as an actress. It’s really fun and that’s what I find inspiring about it. Ti’s experienced immense success in the world of genre filmmaking so there was a lot of trust built up in him and he was able to make a movie during the pandemic in New Zealand where he was left totally alone – that sounds great to me. But it’s a lot of work. The shelf life, and this is a boring argument that many people have made, but the shelf life of a work is much shorter now. In a world where discourse subsumes things with identical opinions immediately and the lifespan of any work is days or maybe weeks instead of months or years, it’s really hard to imagine spending years of work on something when the attention put on it lasts a week or two weeks.

POLLOK: That’s bleak. I sometimes feel that way about writing a novel. It’s such a time-consuming process but I have this fantasy that working hard will make me happy. But you’re right that the ratio of time and effort to reward feels off.

PERRY: A novel is years of work, but at least it’s solitary, unmolested work. That’s kind of the virtue of writing. I mean, it’s not like things are only allowed to exist if the life cycle of the attention economy allows them to. But doing a movie about a legendary band has been really inspiring for me because I know exactly who we’re doing this for: we’re doing this for fans of this band. I have no belief that this project can break out of that or become a talking point, nor do I want it to. It’s comforting to have a small target that we can throw a big projectile at like that.

POLLOK: It’s a project that comes imbued with purpose.

PERRY: Exactly. The band has trusted me to do this and it’s a huge responsibility. That’s something I can respect. It’s not a responsibility like a huge corporation is giving me $30 million to make content; that’s not a responsibility that I would take seriously at all. That’s not a sign of faith in me as an artist the way that this band has put their faith in me to tell their story. That’s just a sign of greed for clicks and tweets and whatever else – who the fuck cares about that? It’s all very silly and it’s all very dire.

POLLOK: Again, this is so bleak.

PERRY: Yeah. When I talk about these things on podcasts and such, the takeaway tends to be that things are bleak. But I don’t think that means there’s anything going on in the world today that wasn’t always going on. I’m just hypersensitive to the realities of how imbalanced the work-response-creator relationship has become as someone who is first and foremost an audience member. I consume things every day, but most people who make things are not voracious consumers of the things that they make. Most people who make movies watch, I don’t know, maybe 30 or 40 movies a year, so by and large the people making movies are not the people watching them. That leads to directors, executives, and so on not really understanding their audience and therefore resenting them. If there’s one thing that me and my friends do well, it’s be an audience member.

POLLOK: What other disconnects do you sense between filmmakers and audiences?

PERRY: Commercial filmmakers are disengaged and resentful towards the American audience. I always think about this when people say, “People don’t want to go to the movies anymore, it’s too expensive. Tickets are $20, plus concessions, plus parking.” Let me stop you right there. That’s only true in New York and LA. Everywhere else in the country tickets cost $8 and parking is free because families are parking in the parking lot at the mall or multiplex where they’re seeing the movie. For a family of four living in New York, yeah, it’s a $150 night out, but for a family in Indiana, it might be $40 or $50. People in the industry don’t understand that and are totally disconnected from that reality in a number of ways. In general, the film industry makes me feel fatalistic, because the things being made are not being made by people who love and appreciate what they’re doing and therefore they have no respect for their audience and no respect for their work.

POLLOK: You’re reminding me of the movie Don’t Look Up. Did you see that?

PERRY: I did.

POLLOK: I thought that was one of the most cynical, deflated, pathetic movies I’ve ever seen. It was also incredibly stupid.

PERRY: That was kind of why I liked it.

POLLOK: Really?

PERRY: Yeah. Of the Oscar movies, it was among the top tier for me in terms of what I’m willing to engage with. It was just so transparent in its disgust for people.

POLLOK: I thought its contempt was so hideous. I watched it and thought they were all a bunch of snarling, piggish elites.

PERRY: That is true. That is definitely true. But I liked that they at least knew what they were trying to say. I liked that they weren’t trying to pander to anybody.

POLLOK: So, in terms of commercial art, it mostly has no opinion and no personality, and one step up from that is for it to have a bad personality?

PERRY: Something like that. I don’t know, it worked for me. I’m trying to compare it to other movies from that year but I already can’t remember them. CODA won Best Picture. I didn’t see it because I don’t like feel-good Sundance movies.

POLLOK: I feel like ten years ago CODA would’ve been considered a Hallmark movie.

PERRY: Exactly. I’m sure it’s fine and hits every beat but I have no interest in that. Don’t Look Up is a messy, poorly edited, sloppy, angry movie, but at least they felt something while they were making it. At least they weren’t just blandly manipulating their audience by going, “Oh, do we have the right orchestral swell here to make people cry?” The movie is mean and nasty and dumb and everyone in it is saying the same thing, it has contempt for its audience and contempt for society, but I’d still rather see that than something that’s, like, “I want to hold your hand and make you cry.” That I have no interest in.

Alex Ross Perry is a filmmaker based out of New York City. His previous works include Listen Up Philip, Her Smell, and Golden Exits. He is currently working on an upcoming documentary about the life and legacy of the band Pavement.

Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.