Connecting with Eugene Kotlyarenko

Interview by Genevieve Blythe

Ahead of the Portland premiere of his latest film The Code, we had the chance to meet and pick the brain of filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko. The Code is a chaotic and charming look at relationships in this day and age, pushing boundaries toward a new form of cinematic language. We spoke with Eugene about timeless cinema, what connection means today, and even a bit about structuralism. He was generous, hilarious, and completely dialed into the contradictions of our time.

Photos of Eugene by Shea Satterlee

FILM SCHOOL: What is your experience with Portland?

EUGENE: I've spent limited time here, but it's clearly a bastion of a kind of hipster culture that disappeared when the Williamsburgification of the world was hybridized with the Ibizafication of the world. You had the aesthetic sensibilities of both of those things becoming the normal corporate branding of every pseudo-cultural thing—cafes, bars, whatever.

The Williamsburg culture was rooted in the idea of hipsters, and hipsters, for all their faults, were really into popular forms of culture and entertainment and art. They foregrounded and flexed constantly about their esoteric sensibilities—the art they liked, the movies and music. When everything got Williamsburgified, all that disappeared. You'd hire someone to almost algorithmically curate whatever books were on the shelf. It was the Urban Outfitters of it all, and it's really sad.

I don't know exactly if Portland is more in touch with the old forms of the hipster, but it seems that way to me. There's more baseline interest in music and books and movies—that older form that's really hard to find in places where I live in LA. I mean, it's there, of course. There are pockets of people who are exactly like that, and probably would never be called hipsters now because they dress differently and talk about the things they're into differently, but they're still into esoteric things. But it's not the baseline. Here it seems almost like what you could expect from a person you run into at a bar—that they're gonna be into certain random shit that would be fun to talk about.

FILM SCHOOL: We went to a screening last night of experimental shorts, one by Hollis Frampton, and it was packed. We were surprised. So I think that world does exist here. But there is also the fake corporate curation of course.

EUGENE: That's everywhere. That's every downtown and every touristy area—"Oh, people really want to come to our place, why don't we update it and make it look like generic corporate shit?" Unless the person who owns a business has a real personality, they'd rather just default to the thing that seems like it would be a stable comfort zone for money.

FILM SCHOOL: One thing with Film School is that we do screenings and our programming idea is moving through film history, showing films that we believe to be important and timeless that don't really get shown in Portland.

EUGENE: Canonical cinema, yeah.

FILM SCHOOL: So what do you believe makes a film timeless and lasting?

EUGENE: I'd be curious to know what films you guys have programmed in that series. But generally speaking, for me, what's very important is a combination of formal innovation and great storytelling. Something where you're telling something that's really entertaining or compelling or will make people laugh or cry. Truly, these are things you can't control. If you don't laugh, you're not gonna say that was funny. If you don't cry, you're not gonna say it tugged at your heartstrings. We don't lie about popular entertainment. That's the good thing about it.

So if you can do that while also formally or aesthetically innovating something—in fact, if you need to come up with something new in order to convey how you want to make people laugh or cry—then that is what I think is essential cinema in its form. There are directors who do it time and time again, who I love and who are pretty obviously well regarded, like Ingmar Bergman or Edward Yang or Robert Altman. Then there's people who are able to innovate intensely, but maybe not do that other thing, maybe are not as entertaining. Someone like Peter Greenaway who is a master. And maybe there's people who are extremely entertaining who don't really do a lot of innovation, but I'm blanking on those people.

FILM SCHOOL: Is that something that you've considered making your films? You have a really good balance of touching on these universal themes but doing it in a very new way.

EUGENE: I'm just trying to make the sort of movies that I'm inspired by without actually copying them. You can point to all these losers who are just trying to make Martin Scorsese movies. The way to make a movie like a Martin Scorsese movie is not to put a Rolling Stones song in your movie. It's not to put a snorricam on a guy who's getting drunk at a bar, or copying a tracking shot through the back of a restaurant. This is not how to make a Martin Scorsese movie.

You have to have an insane passion for cinema. You have to let all the stuff stew inside of you because you've watched so much of it. And then you have to say, "Okay, now how do I do a new thing? How do I do a thing that matters to me, that I feel urgency towards? And then how can I do a new thing with it? Or maybe I'll do an old thing. Maybe I'll do something I remember seeing before, but in a completely different context." That's how you continue the tradition of all the people that you admire.

There's a movie called War Dogs by Todd Phillips, who was most famously accused of Martin Scorsese derivation in the movie Joker. Before that, he made this movie about two guys who become accidental arms dealers, which is a mid movie. It takes place in Miami in the turn of the century, late nineties, early 2000s. They're at a nightclub in Miami, talking about something, and suddenly "Tumbling Dice" by The Rolling Stones comes on, and you're like, there is no fucking way that's playing at that nightclub. What's playing at that nightclub is DMX or a dance song or something like that. It's not playing "Tumbling Dice." It's just wrong. You blew it, buddy! You've shown all of your cards, and they're all twos and threes! Stuff like that gets my goat.

But what kind of films do you guys show in your series? What are some titles?

FILM SCHOOL: We've only had one screening so far, but we did City Lights. Something to introduce people to that was a little bit light and easy, and then we're going to show The Philadelphia Story.

EUGENE: Nice, I like that, keep it comedic. Well, you guys gotta start earlier. You can't just start with City Lights

.

FILM SCHOOL: I know—we feel like that was a good introduction for people.

EUGENE: It's good, it's easy to watch.

FILM SCHOOL: And then we're actually gonna do Pickpocket to get people into the more serious stuff.

EUGENE: Oh, yeah. I like that one, pure cinema. That's a good one. It's very cinematic. Well, you have one of the great American filmmakers from here, Gus Van Sant. When they show his movies here do people come?

FILM SCHOOL: Oh, yeah.

EUGENE: But what Hollis Frampton movies did they show yesterday? Do you remember?

FILM SCHOOL: They showed one called Nostalgia.

EUGENE: That's my favorite one. With the burning photographs? That's an amazing film.

FILM SCHOOL: And one called Wavelength, but it was not Hollis Frampton.

EUGENE: Michael Snow? Those are maybe the two most famous structural films. I love structural films. The thing for me—we're talking about what makes essential movies—I've always thought how could I take the power and the glory of structural films and short circuit it so it isn't challenging. Because the thing about structural film is that it presents a challenge. Nostalgia is insanely good, and not boring at all because you're constantly thinking from the beginning. But part of the contract with normal structural film is Wavelength where it actually is incredibly boring. It has to be boring because it's challenging our notions of viewing, of watching, of how we understand watching a movie. And then something will happen.

In Wavelength, did you guys have any feelings as you're watching it, maybe twenty minutes in? Anything hit while you're watching?

FILM SCHOOL: I was sitting on the floor, craning my neck. It was definitely this is physical, this is a physically visceral film.

EUGENE: That sounds like 4DX because the whole scene is just in a loft.

FILM SCHOOL: I liked that it was this endurance test. I can feel these sensations, and I'm in a safe environment because I know nothing's actually happening to me. I can experience hearing this pitch and just watching this image. But I felt super unsafe at the same time. It was so loud.

EUGENE: Oh, because there's a weird sound mix to it. I remember my experience of watching it for the first time. You're just watching basically a static image that's slowly shifting, but you almost don't feel the shift. I mean, you do and you don't—you know the concept going in. But you're watching it, and just nothing's going on. There's no story. There's one or two little intrusions, but it's really nothing. But as a viewer you do have to invest or fixate on something. So for me, I just invested in the chair that was in the center of the room. And then when that chair fucking disappears from the frame, you're like, "I have nothing left in my life! I was committed to that chair, I had a bond with that chair! Now the chair is gone? What am I gonna look at now?"

I think that's one of the classic psychological subversions of structural cinema, that you get used to the mode of what they're doing, and then they pull it out from under you. And then you're like, "No, I don't want to go back to normal things!" There's a lot of Michael Snow movies that do that. So I've always wanted to figure out how you can get people to impactfully feel that without boring them. And actually, in this movie, this is really my first attempt to do that. So maybe you guys will see some connection there in The Code.

FILM SCHOOL: Amazing.

EUGENE: Nostalgia, that concept of you're looking at a burning photograph and you're hearing narration, and you realize this narration doesn't really seem related to this photograph. And then you see the next photograph and you're like "Wait a second. Were they telling backstory on this next photograph? Fuck. Well, I gotta remember what they said while this one burns," and they're all burning on a burner. That is so ingenious, and I've also thought how can I transpose that sort of disjunctive concept of something being seen but not understood aurally till later or vice versa?

There was a thing I tried on one of my movies called We Are, where I wanted all the characters to have voiceovers. There's four characters in the film, and I wanted them to start linked to their voiceovers on screen, but then eventually, I actually wanted the voiceovers to leak into each other's scenes, to intermix, and suddenly you're looking at someone, but you're hearing the voice of another character. I don't remember if I actually even went through with it, but it definitely was an intention early on. Then I think that movie got away from me. I call it the lost masterpiece, but I think it's kind of my big failure. But it's fine. It didn't cost me any money, and it took four days to make. And people come up to me and they say, "Oh, I really love We Are!" and I say go with God. I would never cast aspersions on someone who tells me We Are, that's your best movie. I say, you are the best.

FILM SCHOOL: I think connection and disconnection are a really big part of your films—how we connect, especially with this new technology. I feel like The Code is going to be really specifically about this with surveillance footage and social media and everything. What do you see as the future of connection? What do you think connection even means these days?

EUGENE: Well, I'm not a social scientist, but I observe this stuff, in my own behavior and the behavior of people around me. I do think the biggest shift that people understand is that touch phones, smartphones, involve the sense of touch. And touch is haptic. Touch is super sensorial. It is our way to understand intimacy and everything else in the world, and the phone has now co-opted and colonized our touch factor, our intimacy factor, and then rewired our brain with all this narcissism, dopamine, and all this other stuff through touch. And it's the most effective way to rewire your brain, through the haptic sense. So it's really crazy and it is a really quick evolutionary shift that's happened to basically the entire world because we all have smartphones from Antarctica to whatever.

But I think the other thing that's a little bit less understood is this concept of immediate communication. Texting and DMing, how does that change the way we would expect to be social and how we expect to interact? This idea that we're never disconnected is really strange. I don't want to say things are good or bad or dangerous or evil. It's too simplistic to say that because clearly the reason we engage in all these things is because they're highly convenient, and they feed into our natural dynamics as human beings.

So yeah, there's this sense of immediate communication, and I remember in the before time—because I'm older than you guys—I didn't have a phone. In the before time, you couldn't text your friend, you couldn't call your friend, and so you were just gonna have to go over to their house and knock on the door. Just really quaint things. They might not be there. So really quaint, weird things that now would never even make any sense. You'd never waste time going over somewhere to knock on someone's door in case they may not be there. You'd be like "Oh are you home? What's going on? You want to make a plan?" Everything's really plan oriented. And plans are good, but they also cause anxiety. There's less room for improvisation or chance in life because everything is so figured out through text.

And the text is another thing. We're so literate now. I don't know if we're good or deep readers, but the quantity of reading and writing that we do would probably be unheard of to other generations. I'm not saying the levels of literacy, but just the frequency.

FILM SCHOOL: Do you think we're almost moving to a post-language type thing with just how much memes and shitposting and imagery is dominant?

EUGENE: I mean, language is a super broad word. But I don't think we're post-language. I remember them saying when I was a kid—we had Time Magazine for kids—that we're moving into a completely visual culture. It's not going to be based on words, it's going to be based on videos and photos and stuff. I guess that's sort of maybe happening a bit more, but I do think we're reading more than ever too. Every image and video comes with onscreen text or a caption or something.

So, again, I'm not a social scientist. I obviously think about this shit a lot, but I don't have a prognosis or diagnosis. My whole thing is to observe, report, and hopefully extract emotion from the observing, the reporting. And by report, I mean cinematically aestheticize the thing. Because that's how I report. A different person can report a different way.

I made the movie Spree. I realized that all of these school shooters and these manifesto writers and the videos that they put up—these people are trying to be characters. They are obviously emulating performances that they've seen before, and they're all really bad actors. They don't really have the star power to be actors. But they're doing their very best to be an anime villain or to be some sort of hero in some western or whatever it is. And I thought, well that's an observation I have about the culture that I haven't really seen anyone make, about these mass murderers. And who could make it? Could a newspaper make that observation? Could Obama go up on stage and say another tragedy has occurred, and the guy who did it is really emulating some anime he watched, and he's really bad at it?

So I was like this is my opportunity and my privilege and my job to have these observations and say I'm gonna put that into the culture because I think it's true. I think it's valuable. I think I did succeed in that film. You can debate it, but I do think I succeed in that film in making a kind of psychopathic, mass murderer character who, regardless of whether you have empathy or not for him, you definitely don't want to be him. He's extremely uncool. He doesn't do anything where you're like, woah that's fucking awesome. He just seems like a cringe loser. And I empathize with these people who do these horrible things as I empathize with everyone. I think it's one of the prerequisites for being an artist. But then I thought, yeah, I should put that in the role. I should make it so maybe someone who has an idea that they want to fight back in a really horrible way or they want attention through the most violent means will see this and be like, "You know what? I might end up being ridiculed and pilloried and made fun of on 4chan... I'm gonna hold off." Because that actually also did happen. There were several mass murderers who were made fun of on 4chan and other forums for being losers, essentially. So, whatever could deter people from killing a bunch of people, I think it's valuable. If I can add that to the discourse, then I'm happy to do it and have people think twice.

Spree (2020)

FILM SCHOOL: I love that film. I think you were successful.

EUGENE: Thanks I like that one. Because it came out during COVID, it didn't really get a release in a theatrical setting. How did you watch it?

FILM SCHOOL: Streaming.

EUGENE: Streaming, right? I think a lot of people watch it streaming. I'm very happy that a lot of teenagers and people in their early twenties watched it. That's the greatest moment to watch movies. That's when you really are excited about movies and they just feel cool. It just feels cool to watch movies as a teenager. I mean, it can feel cool now too, but you're more open to it then. But we didn't really get a release.

So now with The Code, even though I don't have bigger actors in it—I have just my friends like my other movies—I'm able to go on the road with it, so I'm very excited to just show it in theaters. We've been selling out a lot of theaters. We sold out in New York, a ton of screenings. And then yesterday, we had our first screen in LA, and we sold out a huge theater, 250 seats. And, it's just nice to go places and meet people who like movies and have the conversations and hear people laugh in the room. Because when they're just streaming it, they're alone or with family or with two or three friends, and then who knows how they like it. You just have to go on Letterboxd and you're like, "How autistic is this person who's writing about my movie? Okay, wow, it's a really long essay. They seem to say that they love the movie, but they're giving it two and a half stars." So then you click on their thing, and then you're like, wait a second, they actually don't give any movie more than three stars. Their rating system is shifted. Or wait a second, they actually need to have that A24 logo at the beginning to feel like a movie that they say they like is really good. It's funny to analyze this stuff. It's a little bit sick maybe, but it is interesting to me because I do feel like I'm making something for an audience. I'm hoping to make something for an audience. I like to understand how the audience thinks, and we've never had a tool as statistically insightful as Letterboxd to understand what movies people are into and how they think about movies.

It is also a little bit sad, the gamification of movie viewing. Because then you know that motherfucker is sitting there just watching a movie so they could figure out their witty blurb, their little tagline and stuff. So, it's sad this "everyone's a critic, but no one's getting paid for it" thing because it really robs you. It's not your fucking job to write this Letterboxd review. It's your privilege to watch a movie and enjoy it, but it's a little hard to enjoy stuff this way. Everybody does this to a certain extent—a second track or a third track in their mind. You're hopefully experiencing things in the first track, and then you're analyzing them in the second or third track. But to then involve the attention game, the social media game of "what is your take?" into just viscerally experiencing art is really—again I don't want to say dangerous, but it robs you of the purity of the viewing experience. And that's something that used to be only afforded to professional critics for whom that's your fucking job. You might not be able to go see the movie and just feel it viscerally, but you're getting paid money for it. You need money to think on these multiple tracks. But a normal movie viewer shouldn't be, it's not a healthy way to watch shit in my opinion.

The Code (2024)

FILM SCHOOL: What filmmakers who are on the scene right now are you excited about or do you think are innovating cinema or just putting out good work?

EUGENE: What do you guys think?

FILM SCHOOL: You. I feel like it's kind of always my answer. I think your films are really capturing this cultural moment and the psychological element of it while also innovating the form of cinema. I'm really excited to see all the different ways The Code does that.

EUGENE: Okay, forget me for a second. What do you guys think?

FILM SCHOOL: I really loved Janet Planet by Annie Baker.

EUGENE: I missed that one. I wanted to see it. It's a little bit of a nostalgia thing, right?

FILM SCHOOL: Yeah. It's really beautiful and slow, but not boring. It's amazing. I was reminded of Akerman.

EUGENE: Of Akerman? So that was the only case that I can think of a filmmaker who took the ideas of structural cinema and made a narrative film of a character, which is now considered the greatest film of all time—Jeanne Dielman. That's a movie where you have the effect of watching the repetitive minutiae of life, and that has its own built in critique, observation, whatever. But you do have to sit through that in real time as a viewer, and it is incredibly boring. Even though your mind is going through it and thinking, oh, I understand that this is critique and it's amazing this is being portrayed and represented and all this stuff is good. But it is really a slog that you're sitting there. Then when her routine is shattered in this violent fashion, suddenly you are rocked out of your seat! You're like, "Oh my God, what the fuck is she gonna do? How is she gonna explain this? How is she gonna cover this up?" So the next hour and a half of the movie is so thrilling. And so deep. You had to invest in the repetitive banality of the first half to really get the effect in the second half. That is the concept of structural cinema applied to a narrative form.

I think someone who's doing it in a totally different way, who has figured out how to short wire it is Christopher Nolan. I find that person to be a very innovative filmmaker. It's not just his storytelling, which is structural, but he's always interested in time and shifting what time means across different areas of the story, which is another structural thing. But, his editing style—he created an editing style that actually is super influential. People don't even really realize it, that he really almost reinvented what a scene is. If you watch a movie like The Dark Knight, there's almost no real scenes in there. It's you're cutting between middles. I'm not a guy who's seen The Dark Knight twenty times, I'm just saying the way it's edited, which is just basically two and a half hours of cross cutting, endless cross cutting between story lines, and you're meeting stories in the middle. You're meeting scenes in the middle, and you're filling in what you missed in your mind. It's very innovative and very good. And a lot of people think they get what they're copying when they're copying the Christopher Nolan thriller style, but they don't know what they're doing. Just like the great David Lynch, may he rest in peace. So many people try to copy what they think is a Lynchian style. They don't know what they're doing. He understood. He is such a sensitive craftsman of cinematic art that he knew how to actually decontextualize characters and narratives and play with that, and still his films are immensely watchable. You're never bored because his technique is so in the cut. His technique is everything you could feel in a horror or in a thriller or in something funny or erotic. He's doing all those things, and you don't even need to understand what the fuck is going on.

Sorry I didn't really answer your question. There are plenty of new filmmakers who I like, and I'm sure what they're doing in terms of innovation will be evident as we can reflect and look back on their work. Just simple things. It's hard to say. I saw the movie Friendship recently. I thought it was really good, really funny, Tim Robinson kind of style. There's a guy in it named Connor O'Malley who has a small part of it.

FILM SCHOOL: Love Connor O'Malley.

EUGENE: He's really unique, and his style is really good. He actually did a short film with a friend of mine named Dan Stripe, who is mostly a commercial director. They did a piece together called The Coreys, which to me was one of the few things I saw that was really actually Lynchian and capturing a David Lynch style.

For me, the baseline thing actually is this: if I'm entertained by something, then I think it's really good. Whether it's a TikTok or a four hour long movie, I think it's good cinema. If then while I'm entertained, I cry or I nonstop laugh, then I think it's really good. And then when I'm really enjoying it, I look for stuff. Something here has gotta be interesting or unique. I don't want to be hit over the head by it. I'm happy to be hit over the head by it, but if I really like something, I'm like, something here is unique.

I mean, there's a filmmaker who, when he was very popular in France, he didn't really get a lot of love from the critical establishment. His name is Claude Lelouch.

FILM SCHOOL: Ugh Claude Lelouch yeah. I love A Man And A Woman.

EUGENE: He made a zillion movies. He made one every year, and they were all really successful in France and some of them internationally, like A Man And A Woman. Basically what he did is he took the techniques, and maybe this is a little bit hypocritical of me because I was just bashing Todd Phillips Scorsese copying, but I think it's a little different. What he did was he took the formal techniques developed by the French New Wave directors who had started out a few years before him, and he's like, "How do I apply this to movies that are actually traditional genre films?" Traditional romances or traditional thrillers. And he did. His movies look and feel amazing. They have awesome changes in film stock and changes in perspective and handheld camera and then you have a crane shot and then you're doing jump cuts. And his movies look fucking great, and they feel good, and he uses the techniques. Plus they're actually thrilling. There is no Jean Luc Godard movie that has thrills and spills. I mean, I love Godard, but they don't... It's not the same. They're not thrillers.

And there's another director from that era named Costa-Gavras, who is a more politically inclined director, and he also did that. He took the techniques of the French New Wave that were oriented in an almost deconstruction of genre, that's what they were interested in deconstructing genre. But these guys weren't. They were just like, let's use genre and these techniques to make good genre films, or in the case of Costa-Gavras political thrillers were his bread and butter. But, yeah, I don't know why I brought that up, I guess it's sort of speaking to your point of all this stuff.

We ran out of time before we could ask everything, but later that night we saw The Code—a wild, sharp, and deeply felt meditation on connection in the modern age. It left us buzzing. The film is now streaming on MUBI—don’t miss it.

The Code (2024)