Afleveringen
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In this episode of vHopeful Conversations, I sit down with writer-director Peter Glanz to talk about his bold new period satire Savage House, a 1715-set black comedy that uses wigs, corsets, and a pox-ridden elite household to mirror the madness of our own political moment. We dig into how January 6th and QAnon-era unrest pushed Peter toward a story of social climbers trapped at an opulent dinner, why he and his team pursued “beauty in the rot” through tactile production design and candlelit, Barry Lyndon-esque cinematography, and how paintings by Hogarth, gossip rags like Tatler and The Spectator, and films from Withnail and I to Culloden shaped the film’s tone. Peter shares the path to casting Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy, the psychological layers behind the film’s recurring pig imagery and nightmare sequences, and what Savage House has to say about class, patriarchy, and our endless urge to climb the social ladder even when it slowly kills us.
Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World, & Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen
Vanessa Hope:I’m really excited to be joined by filmmaker Peter Glanz, whose movie Savage House Ted and I just saw in a special screening and totally enjoyed. Peter is a writer-director whose work blends sharp political observation with dark comedy and a distinctly feminist lens, which I really appreciate. With Savage House, he steps into period filmmaking while keeping one foot firmly in the present, using the rituals and excesses of an elite historical world to interrogate contemporary power, class, and leadership. Known for crafting precise tonal balances where satire, anger, and humor coexist, Glanz has quickly emerged as a filmmaker interested in how systems of privilege perpetuate themselves and how individuals within those systems either perform, resist, or unravel. Peter, welcome.
Peter Glanz:That was a great intro. I mean, I couldn’t have written that better myself. That was amazing.
Vanessa:Thank you. Okay, good. Yeah, your film is deep. I mean, there’s a lot in there, and it is not an easy film to make. So… in your intro when we saw the film, you shared that there’s some maybe familial or personal connection to this kind of a story, but that it’s also speaking more broadly to the times that we live in. Can you share how you started writing this one and where it came from and how you wove these ideas together?
Peter:Sure. I would say that the familial side of it… you kind of never start, or at least I don’t, trying to write about yourself or your life. You try and write the thing farthest from it, and inevitably, it ends up being yourself. It’s just— you can’t help it. It’s just who we are.
And you’re just watching this madness unfold on television. And I was just like, okay, this is such a mad world. I had to find some way to cathartically let it out. But you never want to do something set today because I think it’s very difficult to release the preconceived baggage.
And so to somehow reflect this mad world, I just Wikipedia’d and went through history, just trying to find a year. And I stumbled on 1715, in which there was, in England, a disputed king. There was an uprising. There was complete political and economic unrest. There was a pox outbreak. There was even an eclipse, which, around that time, there was this big eclipse in L.A. And I was just like, okay, that’s amazing as a backdrop, and just tried to think of a story.
And for whatever reason, I got locked on an image of a nobleman at the end of a really long table with his wig askew and his makeup running and just looking at a table of food he’ll never eat, at a portrait of a life he’ll never live. And I was just like, who is this man? And I began to reverse engineer this kind of, as you were saying, a family of social climbers who led to this dinner, this kind of Waiting for Godot kind of, you know, without giving away anything, to this moment.
And hopefully in that stew, I was able to comment on all the political schemes of today. And just the more I researched that time, the more I fell in love with him, the more I saw the black mirror to today and just kept leaning into it more and more. And then strangely, you know, I think parts of myself, as in any script, start to come out.
Vanessa:Super smart approach, actually. You made me immediately remember two excellent films that did directly look at whether January 6th or President Trump, neither of which got any distribution whatsoever, or very limited. There was a documentary about January 6th following those guys. And the Ali Abbasi film, The Apprentice, I thought was excellent.
Peter:Incredible.
Vanessa:Incredible. Sort of disappeared.
Peter:I mean, that’s the beauty of period and even science fiction. Some of the most political films ever are science fiction films. It gives you distance and it allows you to see yourself. It allows you to laugh at it. And it allows you to really poke, I think, sometimes a searing kind of political lens at it without it being prescriptive. Because you’re like, oh, that’s not like me, they’re dressed in wigs and corsets. But… yeah, hopefully at the end you have a conversation with your partner and it becomes much deeper after all the laughs and corsets.
Vanessa:That was a good way to put it, the black mirror effect. So, in a pragmatic logistical sense, or production process sense, how did you get this movie going? Because a lot of the listeners are filmmakers and they love to hear how people make extraordinary movies and get them out.
Peter:Yeah, not for the faint of heart. Not easy. Not enough money or time — always the case. I had had a film that was about to go and it fell apart during COVID around this time. And then I was just kind of scrambling and then January 6th happened, and I’ve never written a script so fast in my life.
Wrote it quick, got it into the hands of my intrepid, amazing producer, Oliver Roskill in England. If anyone needs one, he’s great. And he got it into the hands of Mike Runagall, who runs Altitude, which is a foreign sales company. We kind of talked about, okay, how can we actually make this crazy thing?
And I just got so fortunate. Richard E. Grant is a legend. I’ve loved him in Withnail and I, you know, How to Get Ahead in Advertising. But even smaller, you know, The Player, L.A. Story. He just steals every scene. He’s amazing. I love this man.
Vanessa:He’s incredible in your film. He’s outstanding. You got just a stellar performance from him.
Peter:Yeah. I wrote a very larger-than-life character. Someone who’s absurd. And if he has anything, he has this superpower. He’s able to be so big and so crazy and so absurd and yet so human and so tragic and so heartbreaking. And he was just so perfect.
And he— I mean, I’m sure some of your listeners know his story. He was going through a tragedy at the time. He’d just lost his wife. And my script, when he read it, he said was one of the first things that made him laugh after this tragedy. And it was just this kind of cosmic timing that he read this crazy thing, and I brought a smile to his face, and we had lunch at The Ivy and he was like, “Let’s do it.”
And then it was Paramount UK — John Fletcher, who’s amazing — and Sage in here, Paramount Global, also great. John Fletcher loved Richard, loved Withnail and I, he immediately came on. And then it was a journey as a team to find who our Lady Savage was. And I can’t believe we thought of anyone other than Claire Foy. It was a journey.
Vanessa:She’s so good.
Peter:She’s so good. I think at first the instinct was to cast someone kind of Richard’s age. But the truth is, the more historically accurate thing to do — which became, I think, a North Star thread — was she would be much younger. And the moment we made that shift… Claire was our first person. I can’t even believe she said yes. I am so fortunate for it.
And the moment she said yes, she fought for me to have more days and more time, and she was just such a partner, and so was Richard. And yeah, once the two of them were together, it was a sprint. And I’m so lucky that I had that journey up until that moment to storyboard my frames and to scout and kind of build it. So once the prep started, which was quite rushed, I had already done soft prep for like a year during that process. So yeah, that’s helpful.
But yeah, I mean, Paramount came on super early in like a negative pickup to a small budget, which allowed me to have final cut, which is amazing. And I edited the film myself and it allowed me to kind of have— as long as I kept it a certain very small number, I won’t say how small, but very small— it afforded a lot of freedoms on casting, on crew hires, on our process, and it was an A-plus team. A-plus.
Vanessa:I can’t imagine you had much of a budget considering that you were dealing with a period. It’s a period film, and you’ve got tremendous authenticity. I don’t know how you did achieve that, but I felt completely immersed in that world in ways that were almost too authentic for me. Like, you know, most period films look back in kind of a glossy way and they make a nice patina over everything. So you think, “Ooh, what pretty costumes they wore and what interesting makeup,” or something. But yours has the gritty reality — like the hygiene. So you have this tonal balance that’s like a combo of playful and comedic, but gritty, real, serious, deep. How did you do that?
Peter:I find the two things are not antithetical. They’re actually intrinsically tied together. I think our North Star became just finding the beauty in the rot — the death and decay and decadence are all kind of intertwined.
And just the more truthful we made it, the more honest it was, the more grotesque, sure, but also the funnier it was and the more timely it became. And it’s interesting, like, our whole concept of that time, and all the great films that have come after — and there have been so many great masterpieces I am in awe of — they all are kind of built on a fallacy, right?
Our whole image of that time is paintings that are commissioned to make everyone look richer and skinnier and prettier and all of these things. And then, for whatever reason, all the films and all the TV shows that exist after are just carrying that image. And so the rich look romanticized and Jane Austen, and the poor are like Monty Python with their crooked teeth and their mud-soaked existences.
The truth is they were much closer together. And what these people put themselves through, it was barbaric. And I obviously drew a very clear, lineage connection between what people do now for Instagram and TikTok and what they put themselves through to create this image. And I was like, okay, the more real I make it, the more we’re going to create that connection and the funnier it will be.
And so the two things were tied. I’d never seen a movie where, you know, a fancy lady had a slop pail of waste underneath, just stenching up the whole place. I’d never seen the actual leeches, or that they’d brush their teeth with sticks until their gums were bleeding at lunches. It was just so horrific.
They knew, they knew that there was lead in their powdered makeup. I think Princess Isabel in Spain had died from it. They all knew. And yet they still did it every day because the paler you were, the more regal you were. And so they were so in pursuit of this social ladder, this social esteem, that they were willingly killing themselves slowly.
And I was like, there’s such a sad, tragic, but also funny parallel to today. And so I just kept leaning into that. And I felt like it got funnier and grosser and more timely. And so the two things… it wasn’t like a “tonal balance.” They were connected, at least in my mind, in the pursuit.
And I was so lucky that all my heads of department, like the DP, were all about finding the texture and the grit and the grime. Adriano Goldman, who’s amazing — we never put a light in a room. All the light came from outside or was candlelit. You know, very Barry Lyndon. We used these crazy old Panavision anamorphic lenses, which, again, create texture and barrel.
My costume designer, Alex Bovaird — amazing, does The White Lotus and things — there’s a tattered gold robe that he has. He showed it to me, he’s like, it’s beautiful, but there’s huge holes in it, of the time. And I was like, the holes are perfect. I want the holes. Give me all the holes. And everyone was just about finding the beauty in the rot, and I felt like the realer we made it, the funnier it became.
And it also carved a very small sliver that made us unique, because there’s so many great films before us. Even The Favourite recently — amazing. The Favourite doesn’t show that, does not show that. Or The Great. So I just felt like that was our sweet spot. So I leaned pretty heavy into it, yeah.
Vanessa:And then you really do get these tremendous performances all across the board. Everyone in your cast, it’s so well cast. But you must have really found the sweet spot with Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy, that they have never been better. I don’t know how you pulled that off.
Peter:Yeah. First, Carmel Cochrane, my casting director — she’s the best. She’s amazing. Everything from Saltburn to Nosferatu, she’s the best.
Yeah, Richard and Claire are very different in their approaches, as every actor is different. Luckily for me, I feel like their approaches were analogous to the characters themselves. And so there was a meta quality to all of it.
Richard, like I said before, is absurd. The first day, I wrote an absurd script, but then I realized what he was doing with it. And rather than trying to put reins on him, I let him just run wild and just followed him. And I’m so happy I did that.
There’s a scene where he’s like— I think it’s in the trailer even — he’s drinking wine and he starts regurgitating it like a demon, and it’s spewing out. That’s not in the script. He’s just like, he thinks the meal is foul. He makes it… foul. Richard has this other thing where in real life, every plate of food before he eats it, he picks it up and inhales it. He has this olfactory sensory thing. I was like, I’m putting that in the movie. So every time in the movie before he eats, he inhales. He’s just so crazy and absurd in such a beautiful way that he just was Chauncey. And I was really just trying to catch his wildness and those moments he created.
Claire is— I’m in awe of Claire. I storyboard every frame. I am so prepared. I pale in comparison. Her script is… she’s so intricate. She’s so fastidious. You never need more than two takes. And if you do, you better have a good reason or the camera went out or something. She is so rock solid, so incredible.
And I’m just in awe. The whole movie hinges, in a way, because these are despicable characters doing despicable things. You have to believe, as an audience, that she loves Richard, and her love for Richard — or Chauncey, the character — allows us to love him too in all of his wild ways.
And there’s a scene in it in which she professes that love to the valet. I wrote my monologue knowing this. Her performance of that monologue was my favorite day on set. Her eyes… and my favorite scene. It’s not a funny scene, so I’m not going for the joke. But seeing her eyes search and emote — I mean, even right now, I’m going to get choked up thinking about it. It was so beautiful. And she made me sound like a better writer than I am. You love Richard because of her in that moment.
And I mean, I could talk about— I mean, Bel Powley, she’s amazing. Bel Powley is like the chicest, most beautiful woman with those fishbowl eyes. And we gave her crooked yellow teeth and frizzy red hair. And she came in with this Yorkshire Northern accent, which is amazing.
And Jack Farthing, who plays the valet, he is one of the most versatile, incredible actors. And the neighbors — I love my neighbors. Phil McCabe, Vicki Pepperdine, who play the two neighbors, the Bennetts. They probably cracked me up more than anyone. Phil McCabe goes— there’s a scene where they’re about to do a duel, very funny, he goes, “It’s going to be an absolute riot,” and he does all this— his excitement and enthusiasm for the imminent death of these people is so hysterical to me.
And yeah, I don’t know. They’re all great. I just got really lucky. I could go on and on about my actors.
Vanessa:You did a great job as a director, too, let’s just say. So, you mentioned there’s a poster behind you, but I’ve seen another of your posters where it’s like a pig in a wig, right? And finding the beauty in the rot or the ruin sounds like it was a theme, but also that question of: can you dress a pig in a wig and change them into moral people, or a different class? Or will that help them wield power more morally? What were you thinking around those questions of class and power and the big themes that you convey in your poster? And we’ll put a link to the one that’s behind you because we can’t quite see it.
Peter:So, that poster with the pig head — Richard does not like this poster. But I love it. The pig head with the wig on it. Because in a way, it was interesting, again, in writing these characters and creating them, what was the tragedy of this character? Why did he want to climb this ladder so much?
And whether it was the paintings of William Hogarth — Hogarth, Hogarth, Hogarth — the movie’s just inspired by all things Hogarth. I just want to say it is all Hogarth. He has a series called The Rake’s Progress, which is about a similar character with a similar end. And I have frames in my movie that directly copy the paintings of Hogarth.
But the pig… I was just researching and researching what kind of humble beginning this man could have come from. And I think I had stumbled on some story that was talking about pig farmers and this pig farmer that had infiltrated this house. I can’t even remember where in the research it is. But I just became obsessed with this image — that equally, a roasted pig was a sign of elite delicacy and yet, at the same time, him coming from pigs.
And this idea that there would be a pig stable in which they were killing pigs and farming pigs right outside, and that in some way, on a daily or monthly basis, he’d be confronted with this upbringing, and that everything he did in the movie was to bury this upbringing of being the child of a pig farmer. Just bury it and bury it, and again and again it keeps poking through.
To the point where, I mean, it’s very kind of Barton Fink surreal. There’s a wandering pig in the house throughout the movie. And I obviously don’t really think that pig is real. It’s him — he is the pig in the house. That pig wandering is him just being a pig lost inside this regal world. And he keeps trying to hide it.
And we even say at the beginning, he’s of kind of Yorkshire descent, a Northern descent. Again, lesser, kind of… not his regal upbringing. So the whole movie he has a fancy Richard accent. And then there’s this one nightmare sequence where his bed is now suddenly in this pig barn where he grew up. And in that scene, Richard beautifully plays with a Yorkshire Northern accent. In that one moment in his dreamscape, he’s suddenly a child again. His whole mask, his façade, is kind of crumbled.
And, you know, largely Richard’s idea of finding moments where to poke holes in the mask and the façade. And it’s just so beautiful. And obviously throughout the movie we play with auditory pigs. He’s constantly hearing the honking and all the pig stuff. And at the end, I don’t want to give it away, but he ends up in a place that could possibly be back in his childhood pig farm. It could be read multiple ways.
And I just thought it was a beautiful way to get into his psychology and to make him— as fun and crazy as he is— to make him heartbreaking and tragic. And I think that’s why the movie works, because of the tragedy in him.
Vanessa:Again, I don’t want to totally give it away, but the surreal nighttime nightmare sequence with a pig — and it is deep. It is psychologically deep. And the poor man has been wounded various ways and fed terrible drugs to deal with it. Medicine in that day and age was not good. And so who knows? And then he wasn’t even following the doctor. I mean, he was constantly drinking. So… yeah, that was very moving. It’s very moving and surprising.
And so… what are you suggesting to us about class and power that viewers should understand from the film?
Peter:I think what you realize when you do probably any historical thing — but what I realized doing this — is just nothing changes. It’s all the same. Whether it’s that Instagram stuff I was talking about or obviously the January 6th of it all, history repeats itself. And every time the price goes up, as they say, right?
I just love the idea of dramatizing, you know, but also very humorously, hopefully, the social ladder. I love that every single— and again, reflects today— every single person is trying to climb a rung on the ladder, whether it’s the help who want to be the Savages, the Savages who want to be the duke and duchess, the neighbors who want to be the Savages, the Savages who want to be the neighbors. Just seeing everyone climb that rung on the ladder so desperately — it’s equally funny, but it is also very human.
There’s something so human about all of them just wanting a little bit more, just wanting a little bit more. And I think there’s something very timely about today in that. And there’s even a scene where Bel, who plays the lady’s maid, dangles a mouse over a flame. Again, there was no animal harmed. It was forced perspective, he was like ten feet away on a long lens to make it look like that.
But the only creature lower on the ladder than her was that mouse in that moment. And it’s weird — it gets fed better food than her. So she has to steal food from the mice. There’s just something so heartbreaking and tragic about it.
And my hope is that people take away that there are these systems in place, that this ladder and us trying to all climb it — to what end? And… yeah, I don’t know. Just, yeah, the fallacy. But yeah.
Vanessa:Yeah. That’s really well said. You were making me think— at first I was thinking, well, what about— aren’t we better at poking fun at these systems of class and power today than they might have been back in the day? But then I was like, wait a minute. You know, Mozart— that movie Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s movie, is one of my all-time favorites.
Peter:Masterpiece.
Vanessa:Yeah, masterpiece. And of course there was a separation of classes and what entertainment they received. So the fancy operas that were for the fancy people versus the working-class people who get the bawdy… But it’s making fun of wealthy people, of the rich. So there’s always been a sense of, we need to do something about this imbalance and inequality. And some have more sense of it than others.
You have these characters in your movie, the Jacobites. And along with the pox that’s hanging over like COVID, and the eclipse that’s hanging over threatening doom — which I guess we also had an eclipse during COVID, you reminded me — suggest some kind of uprising could be coming. And we can follow up on this question with how we make progress in this world. But I think it might be through artists leading the way. But tell me about the Jacobites and all of the impending doom forces that are weighing on this family.
Peter:Yeah, I would just say the first part that you were saying made me want to say Hogarth again. He was really the first one to skewer the elites. He was the first one to tear them down. And his frames and his pieces — he was kind of like the first storyboard artist. Maybe that’s why I love him so much as well. He would do these eight-piece or five-piece series. They’re so funny and they’re so cinematic and they’re so detailed and they get all of it in there. The Rake’s Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode and all of it.
Between that, and I should also say that around the same time arose these gossip magazines called Tatler and The Spectator. They both started around the same time and they are the most honest and true voice of that time. They say— I don’t know if I’m allowed to curse on this, but they say “c**t,” “s**t,” “f**k.” I’m not putting that stuff in as anachronistic voices of today. They spoke that way and were far filthier. And I found that between Hogarth and reading those magazines and hearing the voices, there was something kind of true in that.
So, as far as the Jacobites go, again, like I said, it came around the QAnon time and that madness and that fever dream and the kind of divided America and our disputed monarch — no kings — all that stuff. The Jacobites, it was a similar thing. It was a break in the bloodline and James Edward Stuart was trying to get the crown back, and there was a German king and there was their version of xenophobia and all these things going around.
And I just felt, what an amazing stew, what an amazing mix, what an amazing weird mirror of now to poke fun at. And again, like I said before, the more you lean into the truth of it, the funnier it is. The real mantra of the Jacobites was “Down with the Rump.” And this is what they’re saying. And the more I wrote “Down with the Rump” in different ways in my path, I saw that oh, it can kind of look like “Down with Trump.”
There’s a scene in it where it’s graffiti.
Vanessa:By the way, on this podcast, you can say “s**t,” “c**t,” “f**k,” but you can’t say “Trump.”
Peter:Great. It also appears in the movie a lot. Richard E. Grant’s favorite word is “c**t.” He improvises it into almost every scene, so there’s a lot of that.
But yeah, so “Down with the Rump” looks like “Down with Trump,” and so that’s graffiti. And again, I just found every time the more we did what was real, what was truthful, the more it reflected today and you saw how little changed.
There’s also— it’s a movie, it’s a mockumentary— but there’s this great British filmmaker named Peter Watkins, and he made this movie called Culloden, which is about the 1745 uprising. But he does this fake BBC newsreel, interviews with the Jacobites during the uprising. And it is so hysterical and so funny and beautiful. It’s only 40 minutes long. I think you can watch it for free on YouTube. Everyone should. That also became a touchstone in the timeliness of it. I mean, he was using it to comment on England at that time.
But it’s… yeah. Just time and time again, if I told their true story, it reflected ours. Like all the crazy things they’re saying about the eclipse then. None of that is fake. I have it printed out. It is word for word from The London Gazette about the eclipse at that time. They thought dark spirits were going to funnel from the sky. They thought it was going to be the end of the world. And… yeah. Just keep it true. Truth is stranger than fiction. That’s where you can create a heightened truth, you know?
Vanessa:Yeah. Okay. You gave me some hope that maybe we’ve made progress in science and some areas have been developed.
Peter:A little bit.
Vanessa:A little bit. Even if there’s something socially rotten at the core, if we can’t figure out how to do something about patriarchy and hierarchy and the way we’re structuring our social existence.
Peter:I mean, it just keeps happening. I mean, it’s just crazy what’s going on right now. I think if I hadn’t made Savage— I mean, you know, something I’m writing now, we’re always just trying to process the madness of today into some story. And sadly, history just shows us it just keeps repeating.
Vanessa:Yeah. Yeah. And history and movies like yours are so important to watch. So how can we tell people how to see this film?
Peter:It’s on all platforms right now. In America, it’s on Apple and Amazon and all of that. In England, I think it’s still in a few theaters and they have a longer rollout. But yeah, here, on all the usual platforms— rent it, buy it, tell your friends.
Vanessa:Exactly. And look out for your next movie because you’re already making progress.
Peter:I mean, I’m trying. You know, it’s always hard when you’re making things kind of left of center, as you guys know. I’ve got like three horses in the race right now, and so hopefully one reaches the finish line. I also have a newborn child, so I’m not rushing to go behind a camera just yet. So I’m writing still, but hopefully next year we’re mounting one of these things.
Vanessa:Great. Well, you’re an amazing writer and we look forward to your next movie.
Peter:Thank you.
Vanessa:Thanks so much.
Peter Glanz is a British-American writer and director based in Los Angeles whose work spans indie features, major studio screenwriting, and highly stylized commercial and music video work. He made his feature debut with The Longest Week (2014), adapted from his Cannes and Sundance-premiering short A Relationship in Four Days, and has since co-written Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World (2025), written the forthcoming film adaptation of Philip Roth’s Nemesis, and is developing Chopin and Beyond: My Extraordinary Life in Music and the Arts for the screen alongside a slate of other prestige projects. In parallel, Glanz has built a prolific career in advertising and music videos, directing visually distinctive campaigns for brands such as Chanel, DKNY, Tommy Hilfiger, Carolina Herrera, Marc Jacobs, RAM, and YSL, as well as Carly Rae Jepsen’s hit video “I Really Like You” with Tom Hanks.
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In this vHopeful Conversations episode, I sit down with legendary San Francisco–based documentary duo Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine to talk about their new film, PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN. They trace the project’s unlikely origin—from a Linda Ronstadt–invited cabaret night at Bimbo’s to deciding to build their own documentary loosely around Peter Asher’s memoir show. The conversation explores how they used the cabaret as a backbone while expanding outward through interviews with James Taylor, Carole King, Linda Ronstadt, Kate Taylor, and others, and how editor Darren Lund helped shape a sprightly, archival-rich portrait of a producer-manager whose taste and loyalty transformed modern music. Along the way, they discuss Apple Records, Paul McCartney’s friendship and support of Peter, and the ’60s–’70s cultural milieu, the ethics of handling painful chapters in Peter’s life, what it means to resist repeating oneself as artists, and the challenges of getting a film about a “behind-the-scenes” figure into theaters when gatekeepers underestimate audiences’ curiosity.
Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World, & Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen
Vanessa Hope: I’m very excited to be joined by our friends from San Francisco, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, who are a San Francisco–based co-directing and producing couple known for formally inventive, deeply researched documentaries that braid cultural history and intimate character portraits. Over more than 30 years of collaborating, they’ve made films including BALLETS RUSSES, SOMETHING VENTURED, THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR: SATAN CAME TO EDEN—so, so good, everyone must see this film—and HALLELUJAH: LEONARD COHEN, A JOURNEY, A SONG. Their latest feature, PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN, is in theaters now; it world-premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival and extends their work to the life and career of producer, manager, and performer Peter Asher.
Dan Geller: Hi Vanessa, it’s really fun to see you again.
Dayna Goldfine: I know, it’s so fun to be here. It was great to get your invite.
Vanessa: It was so fun to see San Francisco at the beginning of this fantastic documentary. You’re kind of panning down from Bimbo’s sign.
Dayna: It’s an old speakeasy-slash-nightclub-slash-performance space that’s been going since before Prohibition.
Vanessa: When we lived in San Francisco, we went, and I was so, so happy to see that and then to be taken into this incredible venue for this performance by Peter Asher, which I understand your friend Linda Ronstadt invited you to. And in the middle of watching, you turned to each other and thought, “This has to be a documentary.”
Dan: That happened in December 2019, but backing up to 2011—and actually Dayna would have turned to me, I suspect, but in 2011 Dayna was invited on a plus-one ticket by her high school boyfriend, who’s a friend of ours. So she couldn’t turn to me in 2011. It took eight years to turn to me.
Dayna: Mostly I just thought, “Oh man, I wish Dan was here.” So what happened is, in 2011, Peter was just starting out with doing his show, and he came to San Francisco. My lovely still-friends-with-high-school boyfriend, who’s really close friends with Linda Ronstadt, called out of the blue and said, “You know, Linda’s got a spare ticket to see Peter Asher.” At the time, he was performing at Hotel Nikko in the Rrazz Room. And I said, “I have no idea who this guy is, but if I get to sit at Linda Ronstadt’s table, I am so there.”
I walked in, it started to unfold, and I was like, “Oh, I thought I was here to meet Linda, but I’m really here because this is an amazing show—and if Dan were here, I think he’d agree.” Mostly I was frustrated that there had only been one ticket, because I knew that Dan would feel the way I felt.
Dan: Well, frustrated also because there was someone filming right then and there at that actual performance, and filming in the lobby afterward.
Dayna: Right. As I was thinking, “Oh man, I wish Dan was here, this would be a great documentary,” I looked across the room and there was a woman with a camera, and I was like, “Oh my god, someone’s gotten here first.” So I walked over to her, introduced myself, and said, “Are you by chance making a documentary about Peter?” And she said, “I am.” And I said something which I very rarely say because I really don’t feel this about many projects, but I was like, “Wow. I’m very envious. I’m jealous of you. I think you’ve got a great project on your hands, and I wish you well and I can’t wait to see it.”
Dan: So we actually then, over the intervening years, got to be friends with Linda. At a certain point, because we heard nothing bubbling up about a Peter Asher movie, we asked her to check out what was happening, and she said that Peter told her the project just went nowhere. We kept following up as we got to be better and better friends with Linda, and eventually, seven years later, Linda said, “By the way, that’s not happening.” And then she said Peter’s coming back to town in a couple months, maybe Dan should come see the show as well.
I did, and you see it in the movie: as soon as Peter starts to talk on stage, he’s so charming and such a fun storyteller. He’s telling this wild tale but also sort of amazed at his own good fortune—or luck, although he doesn’t believe in luck, whatever you want to call it. We have to invent a new word for what Peter considers this thing that keeps happening to him.
Dayna: I think sometimes he uses the word “happenstance,” and I think if you really press him, he has to acknowledge there’s a certain degree of good fortune, if he doesn’t want to call it luck.
Dan: But anyway, he does end up in the right place at the right time. It’s what he does with that opportunity that makes him so unique.
Vanessa: That’s a great way to think about it. And how did you figure out the way in, if it wasn’t going to simply be filming this one show? You expand our understanding of him, and the world of the film expands too. How did you put it all together?
Dan: We knew that, in fact, when we approached Peter after the show—he came over to Linda’s table, we went over to Linda’s table—we said we wanted to do something loosely based on his show.
The show is really entertaining, but it’s limiting at the same time, because you only get Peter’s perspective. This way, we could—with any good fortune on our part—get Carole King, get James Taylor, get Linda Ronstadt, get Natalie Merchant, get all these people into the movie and have their perspectives, not only on Peter, but on what Peter did for their own lives and careers. And then really begin to roll in a lot of archival material that we went on the hunt for: great stuff from the ’60s and ’70s, even before, when he was a child actor. We knew from the beginning that was the aesthetic and the challenge we were throwing down for ourselves.
Dayna: And then it was a lot of trial and error to find the balance: how long do we hang with the show, when do we move away from it, when does it feel like we need to get back to it? We had seen things like Spalding Gray’s SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA—there are amazing documentaries that are truly based only around a one-person performance—but that never really occurred to us. It was always: what kind of challenge would it be, and can we actually achieve it, if we use the show as a backbone but also as a springboard?
It was interesting in the editing room to figure out how to weave in and out. A lot of trial and error before we got the mix to work, and then a lot of it depended on: is Peter a reliable narrator? What if we go talk to these people and find out he’s just making up stories? It was really fun to get their perspective, but mostly he was a pretty reliable narrator.
Dan: Exactly. Mostly, we thought: take this stage performance, shoot it multi-camera, and then figure out where and how and when to weave it in and out of interviews and archival material.
Vanessa: You do it so well, though. You truly bring his whole life arc into our view and understanding. I have many memories now from your film—this cute family of redheaded siblings who get discovered and cast in movies; then he meets this friend Gordon in school and suddenly is part of a duo, Peter and Gordon, and they’re performing everywhere.
Then his sister starts dating Jane Asher, who sticks with acting, and dating Paul McCartney when the Beatles are kind of in London and he needs a room. It’s in their family home, so then he’s kind of next door to Peter making music. So Paul gives him some songs.
It’s wacky. It’s crazy. How did you figure this out, and how did it come together to illuminate everything about this person?
Dan: I definitely want to give credit to Darren Lund, who is the prime editor on the project—so good and so collaborative. He and Jason Reid started editing together just to try to get as many things going as quickly as possible. They’re based up in Seattle, and we met them because Jason was a producer and editor on a documentary called SAM NOW, which we were supportive of when it was doing its Academy run. We really admired the editing in that, asked if he’d want to come on and do this, and he said yes—and that he had this partner, Darren Lund, who ultimately became the lead editor. Jason stepped off to produce something else, so Darren really did an incredible job.
Dayna: Dan and I, as we always tend to, jumped in later in the editing process to start reworking scenes and trading scenes back and forth with Darren. Bay Area legendary filmmaker, director, and editor Bill Weber came on board for a while toward the very end, really worked some of the scenes with us, and helped build a beginning and an ending. They deserve an enormous amount of credit, especially Darren.
Dan: Some of what makes the film so sprightly, beyond Peter’s own aspect as a character, is that Darren—who is, you know, in his early 40s—didn’t grow up with this material, didn’t grow up loving Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor because it wasn’t his era of music, didn’t know the culture around it. He was so excited to discover all this that I think it communicates through the film in the editing style and pacing he brought to it.
Dayna: The other thing is, once we really started delving into Peter’s story beyond what he talks about and performs in his memoir show, we realized there were a lot of other things and a lot more richness to each chapter. In a two-hour cabaret show, with a lot more songs sung in their entirety, there’s only so much he can put in. His show more or less stopped at the Rolling Stone cover; it didn’t really spend much time with Linda Ronstadt, it didn’t have any Kate Taylor, it just touched upon Apple for a brief period of time. So we amplified a lot of moments and really built the Linda Ronstadt story because we were quite moved by that. We went into much greater detail about the swinging ’60s epicenter of the Indica bookstore and art gallery.
Vanessa: I love that. I’ve watched all these films about John and Yoko and had no idea that Peter Asher was behind the creation of this bookstore, this happening site in London, which is where John and Yoko met. I mean, it is remarkable. And you’ve spoken to that question of being in the right place at the right time—the culture that’s around you—but then having an ear and knowing what to do with your talent and skill at the same time. He kind of discovered James Taylor. Yes, he had a friend who had recommended him, but still, that was a leap, and their first album didn’t hit.
Dayna: And also, what I think is really fascinating about Peter is that he has an ego—obviously, you can’t do all the things he’s done without having an ego and being secure in your own abilities—but he’s also willing to admit when he’s maybe made some mistakes. As an example, that first James Taylor album: I’m very impressed by Peter’s willingness to say, “Maybe it’s overproduced; maybe it’s certainly my fault that it didn’t catapult James out.” Then he took what he learned from doing that overproduced album and weeded everything out, brought it down to the basics when he went into the studio in L.A. to record SWEET BABY JAMES.
Dan: The difference is, on the original James Taylor album, he set out to prove to people that James was not just another long-haired folky. So he imposed something on the songs, and he learned from that moment on to always honor: what is the artist trying to do and say, what is the vibe and style around that artist, and how can Peter support and enhance that without imposing something on it? I think that’s an unusual thing for a record producer to do and to acknowledge so early in his own career.
Vanessa: And then they’re in Los Angeles, and he’s paring down, focusing in on James Taylor’s sound, and he finds Carole King to put on piano.
Dayna: It’s not that he just “found” her—he sought her out based on hearing her demo tapes and understanding something about her piano playing, thinking, “She could really match well with James,” and pulling her kind of out of the Brill Building orbit. By then she wasn’t literally still in the Brill Building, but he heard something in her playing that made him think she should be on this album.
Vanessa: Right—that’s huge. I know. That’s his spectacular ears, which are so rare, and then to focus on her and say, “Maybe you’d like to do your own album,” and produce that. He figured out Linda Ronstadt. This is really huge. What would we do without this music?
Dayna: I know, right? No idea. Because Carole King making TAPESTRY and then going out on the road with it—you know, would it have happened? She probably would have recorded TAPESTRY, but she wasn’t going to be a performing artist by her own admission. And she’s such a good performing artist. All these little things—that’s why, when we contacted people to be in the movie, they all really quickly said yes, because they know Peter has done something amazing for their lives as artists, just their lives, and yes, financially too, I’m sure.
Dan: That’s not why they did it.
Dayna: No, no—of course not. I’m just saying he’s benefited them in so many different ways. But mostly, their wanting to be part of this project had solely to do with their feeling of incredible gratitude for what Peter had done for their art.
Vanessa: And then also, as directors, obviously they would trust you to handle it well.
Dayna: Not all of them knew our work, but a lot of it was us knocking on their doors and saying, “We’re doing this thing about Peter Asher.” In the case of Carole King, it was interesting because her daughter is her manager. We emailed her, and she wrote back really quickly and said, “This is a really nice ask, but Mom doesn’t really do interviews anymore.” Then she said, “Because it’s Peter, I will pose the question.” And to her amazement, within a minute, Carole said, “Sure, tell them I’ll do it. When do they want to come?”
Dan: That kept happening over and over again. I think it’s a tribute to what Peter gave them. In the case of someone like James Taylor, what he gave him wasn’t just in terms of his art, but in terms of sticking by him through ups and downs, and managing him the way he managed Linda and James. I’m not being flip about what that did financially—it brought them enormous wealth and enormous careers. Peter knew, having been managed in the ’60s as part of Peter and Gordon, what it would take: how do you build a career, get a record contract, put someone out on the road and build an audience over time, negotiate that kind of contract back and forth. It’s a double barrel: he could bring producing skills, because he’s such a great musician himself and has great ears, and management skills. That’s an unusual double hit.
Vanessa: And when that career transition or transformation happens, isn’t it James Taylor who tells you in interview that he called Paul McCartney to ask, “Do you think I should ask Peter to manage me?”
Dayna: Peter broached the subject with James. James was in rehab at the time. Peter calls James—he’s in McLean Hospital, or some such place in western Massachusetts—and says, “We’re both here in the United States now. I think maybe I should manage you and go out and try to find you a record deal.” And then, as James says, “I didn’t know anything about business. I was kind of a junkie coming down from drugs.” So he called Paul McCartney and said, “What do you think of this?”
Dan: Then he says a line I love: he asked Paul, “What do you think I should pay a manager?” And Paul said, “I don’t know—one percent.” Then we cut to Peter, because we told him that in the middle of an interview, and Peter just started laughing and said, “I did slightly better than that.”
Dayna: And also, when James said that to us in the interview—James has a hilarious sense of humor, but it’s very droll. He’ll say something without cracking a smile. When he said, “And then Paul said one percent,” I just sat there staring at him, calculating in my head and thinking, “That is so off.” He waited, and said, “Dayna, I’m kidding.” He was kidding. Paul was kidding.
Vanessa: So funny. For you guys, I look at the film—the Apple Records moment is coming to mind, because James Taylor was part of Apple Records for a minute, right, before they both moved on. He was the first artist signed outside of the Beatles. This is all in your film; I’m learning this from your film, because I know the artists and their music but I never knew the full story of the culture around them, how they got produced, how they developed as artists. It’s all really fascinating to learn.
Now I’m thinking: in today’s world we have Apple Computers, and Steve Jobs might have been inspired by the other Apple. But where have we come? I feel like Peter talks about this revolutionary spirit in the ’60s—maybe it was just sex, drugs, and rock and roll—because it was coming out of stiff upper lip, postwar Britain. He’s in your film talking to his friend Eric Idle about being Baby Boomers, post–World War II, stiff-upper-lip generation, repressed ’50s that then let loose in the ’60s and ’70s. Were you thinking about these questions of music and culture, and how much they can transform our world in great ways, but are always up against power structures? Because now we have Baby Boomers in office, and look what’s going on in the world.
Dan: I don’t know. I think music survives no matter what. If music is reaching a big audience, then moneyed interests are going to try to take it over and wring whatever else they can out of it. But I do think music perseveres no matter what, and it’s coming from all corners of the world now.
Economically it’s difficult—there are like one or two acts in the world, maybe three, that are making huge money, mostly from touring, not from streaming or record revenues. But what’s interesting now is that you can get all sorts of music: Afro-Cuban, music coming out of Thailand, you can get anything. That’s the upside. Unfortunately, it’s all funneling through Spotify or Pandora or something, so the economics aren’t great, but the exposure is amazing.
Dayna: Honestly, for me, when we were in the process of researching and filming and editing, I wasn’t thinking at all about what’s going on today. If you look back at our last several films—not our first ones, but for sure starting with BALLETS RUSSES—we were looking at an era that didn’t exist any longer, but we felt was very important to capture before it was gone.
So I wasn’t thinking, “Oh god, Baby Boomers are running the country now and look how screwed we are.” I was thinking more, “Here’s a series of pop-cultural moments this guy lived through, and he can take us on a journey that’s unique.” We’re documenting it for posterity. Mostly, I would say Baby Boomers are the primary first adopters of this film, but when we sit in audiences with younger people—like it played in Long Island a couple of weeks ago and a woman in her late 20s came up afterwards and said, “Wow, this was so moving. My question to my peers is: where are our troubadours going to be? Where can we find the clubs, the gathering spots that fostered all those different cultural moments, whether it was Indica in the ’60s or the Troubadour in the ’70s in Los Angeles?”
I love that it might be allowing a different generation to percolate and think. There was an article in The New York Times recently about these social get-togethers, these clubs—puzzling clubs, people who do puzzles; or intellectual discussions—that you can sign up for online. There’s a draw for people who say, “It’s too lonely to be at home, too lonely to be scrolling all the time. We’re missing something. Unless you go to a bar—and most people don’t like to meet people in a bar unless you know them already—there’s a movement starting with a younger generation to say, ‘We need to find each other, look each other in the eyes, sit and talk and do things.’”
Dan: I think that’s one of the reasons why the movie might resonate with younger people—to say, “That is how it was before everything got mediated by the other Apple, Apple Computer Corp., and every technology company that says, ‘Oh, you don’t need other people, just look at a screen and that’s it.’”
I’m hoping the music from that era, which is so largely underproduced and unmediated, can reach people.
Vanessa: I think that’s such a great point about the longevity of music and culture—that it outlasts, and it will stay with us, also thanks to technology. I wonder, when you were going deeper on Peter’s story, whether the more challenging moments in his life—his father’s death, his split from his first wife—and the way he wanted to talk about them or not surprised you. How did you figure out how to handle that?
Dayna: It didn’t surprise us that he didn’t want to talk about them. None of those moments are in his show, clearly. Peter is a British gentleman from a certain era, and he’s not comfortable talking about his feelings. But we also knew we needed to make him go there at least a couple of times, because otherwise it wasn’t a real reflection of what anyone’s life is. No one’s life is all roses.
Dan: I think the moments where we did probe are like a rest in music—the note that’s not played. He says something, and then at that point it’s cinema: it’s the look on his face, his body language, looking out the window and letting the silence sit. You can see how uncomfortable he is, and that invites an audience in to understand, instead of talking it away, to feel what it must have been like in that moment—his father committing suicide and discovering that in the house, or with his first wife Betsy, with whom he was such a creative partner, falling apart from drug addiction and mental illness.
Dayna: For certain people, we might have pushed and asked more and more and not necessarily gotten anything more emotionally than just watching him answer as briefly as he did and then literally hug himself. It was really excavating and pulling back these layers of an onion we had no idea were there.
With his father, the way we even found out about his suicide was that one of our archivists in the UK said, “You know Peter Asher’s father Richard killed himself, right?” And we were like, “No.” He said, “I’m going to send you the newspaper articles because it was a huge deal.” And we were like, “Oh, wow.”
Dan: Peter’s current wife Wendy said, “I didn’t know. I’d been married to Peter for ten years before I knew.” She happened to go to the UK with Peter, got sick, went to see another doctor, who said, “By the way, you’re married to Peter Asher—did you know his father committed suicide?” Great bedside chat.
Dayna: With Betsy, we were being interviewed in Santa Barbara for the film festival there, and the moderator said, “After seeing your film, I’ve been searching all over for anything about Betsy Asher. There’s nothing on Peter’s Wikipedia page, nothing here, nothing there.” We were like, “We know—it was really a digging job.”
Vanessa: It brings to mind the James Taylor song—that he was transforming the pain and challenging difficult moments into something musical as a way to process it. If Peter was producing, they were both kind of in it, understanding each other and transforming it, as artists, into music, which is beautiful.
Dayna: I think it is. We had no idea that song was about Peter and Betsy. Even music critics have said to us, “We always thought that song was about Carly Simon and James. We had no idea it was about Peter and Betsy.” So that’s powerful. And I think that says a lot about him as a musician, artist, and producer.
Vanessa: Okay, Ted had two questions I’m going to throw in, since you mentioned Kate Taylor, James Taylor’s sister. That’s a really interesting story that neither of us knew. How did you work that in and figure it out?
Dan: Jeff Alan Ross, who was the musical director for the show we shot at Bimbo’s and co-wrote the original score with Lauren Stuber for this movie, said we should make sure to have a ticket for Kate Taylor to come to the Bimbo’s show. We shot a Saturday night and a Sunday matinee, stocked them with invited audiences so we could control the situation in case we had to do restarts and things like that. We said sure, why not. She flew herself out, and when we met her and realized she is the antipodes of James in terms of her volubility and larger-than-life embrace of people—and yet looks a lot like James—we said, “After the Saturday night performance, before the Sunday matinee, come back down to Bimbo’s. We’ll use part of the bar area that’s not part of the main show and sit you down for an interview.” We shot it right then and there and started to learn all about her story.
Dayna: What happened is, when she first got there—we met her probably the night before the first Bimbo’s shoot—I think one of us said, “By the way, how do you know Peter Asher? What’s your connection here, other than being James’s sister?” She told us the story about the swimming pool, and we were so captivated by it. We were like, “This is something no one knows.” So we said, “You need to tell us that story on camera.”
Vanessa: Great. The other thing that’s really remarkable is the length of Peter’s life and the ongoing stories—he keeps working. Obviously he loves the work, he loves performing. He’s seen many of his friends die in recent years and keeps going. It’s interesting; I wonder how you thought about that. This is a bit of a Ted intervention, but we’re both impressed and fascinated by your body of work. HALLELUJAH really focuses in on one song, and here you’re expanding out into someone’s whole life up through his 80s, and he’s still going. For you as filmmakers, how did that feel, or what was different?
Dan: We’d done our Isadora Duncan movie, the first movie we made together, and then we wound up making basically three films in a row about young people, with young people as the main characters. Then, when we started with BALLETS RUSSES, I realized BALLETS RUSSES, THE GALAPAGOS AFFAIR, SOMETHING VENTURED, HALLELUJAH, and this film are all about people who have lived a fair bit, if not a lot, of their lives. In GALAPAGOS AFFAIR, a couple were cut short, oops, but especially with BALLETS RUSSES and SOMETHING VENTURED, they were still, in one way or another, doing what they started doing out of passion and love.
If they weren’t dancing center stage at age 80, they were setting ballets on companies. The VCs were still investing in companies because they had such fun doing it early on. With Leonard Cohen, yes, HALLELUJAH is focused on one song, but there are 22 other songs in that movie by Leonard. It’s the arc of his life as seen through the excuse of the song, and we see him performing well into his 70s in incredible world tour concerts.
It feels like there are people radiating something so passionate and fulfilling that it leaks off the screen and makes you—it certainly makes me—feel like, “Yeah, that’s great. I want to be able to do that too in my dotage.”
Dayna: For me—and I don’t want to speak for you too much—the world wants artists to repeat themselves. Once you’ve made one film, it’s much more comfortable if you go on and stay within that form, whether it’s vérité or personal, or it’s a music doc. When we finished our first film, the Isadora Duncan documentary, which was finished in 1988 and premiered at Sundance in ’89, the first question we got—over and over—was, “What’s the next dance film you’re going to make?” It was shocking. I was like, “Why would we make another dance film? We’ve already done that.”
It made it hard for us to raise funds: foundations didn’t want to fund us before we made ISADORA because we’d never made a film, and then they were like, “Why would we fund you to do a vérité documentary about life in a freshman dorm when you’ve never proved you can do that?” It happens a lot, not just to us. The world feels more comfortable if they’ve pigeonholed you. Once you leave that little pigeonhole, they don’t know what to do with you.
When we finished HALLELUJAH, I don’t think either of us thought, “Oh, let’s make another music documentary.” Actually, we’d seen Peter’s show before we started HALLELUJAH. If I saw it in 2011, we started researching HALLELUJAH in 2014. Peter was kind of here in the background, mostly in my head, because you hadn’t seen the show yet in 2019. HALLELUJAH wasn’t even, “Oh, let’s make a music doc.” Honestly, we were sitting with David Thomson, the great writer about film, having dinner, and he randomly said, “Have you ever considered making a documentary about a song?” That ultimately led us to think about HALLELUJAH.
Dan: I’m thinking about what Leonard says in the HALLELUJAH movie—that sometimes he thinks, “First thought, best thought,” and sometimes, “I don’t have a thought at all.” First idea, best idea; sometimes, “I don’t have an idea at all.” I just leave the mind open to find something, rather than force it.
Dayna: I haven’t read her Substack on this, but documentarian Penny Lane—who I really admire—has a Substack where she talks about her process. I think last week’s headline was something like, “Why I sit down every morning and come up with five new ideas.” I was like, “That’s so different from what we do.” We just sort of waft through life, and all of a sudden we get the chill when David Thomson says, “Have you ever considered making a documentary about a song?” We first say no and shrug it off, and then HALLELUJAH comes into our heads. Or randomly, I want to sit next to Linda Ronstadt at a concert and then there’s Peter.
Dan: I like leaving the mind open for something to present itself, rather than saying, “What if I did this? What if I did that?” I don’t think that way—not to put it down at all. For me, I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard this as a process.” I think a lot of authors and filmmakers are asked, “Do you have six ideas for your next book?” But what you’re describing, and the way you keep transforming, in a way makes you the perfect filmmakers to have told Peter Asher’s story.
Dayna: Oh, thank you.
Dan: Yeah, thank you. It was definitely a fun one, and it was frustrating and hard. I personally love to be slightly terrified when we start a new project. I want it to be so new in terms of topic and approach that I’m not comfortable. That makes it more fun. I’d be terrified about repeating and being bored by a movie.
To me, there’s that Diaghilev line he would tell all his choreographers and dancers: “Astonish me.” I feel like, as far as feeling the weight of responsibility—that can be scary—I feel like we need, in some ways, to amaze people, because the material we’re working with, the person’s story or the group’s story, was so amazing in the first place to trigger this response of “Let’s make a movie about it.” We have to preserve that and transmit it somehow. Above all else, that’s the most important thing: can that sense of amazement that struck me in the first place sustain and come across the screen?
Dayna: And not worry in advance about what the gatekeepers are going to say. We’ve had a lot—there were many distributors we approached. It was amazing that we got such a great distributor in Greenwich Entertainment and Ed Arentz. Almost every other distributor said, “No one’s going to know who Peter Asher is; therefore, we will not distribute your film.” Our response was, “Why do you need to constantly tell an audience about something they already know? Maybe they actually want to go into a theater and learn something new.”
Dan: It’s amazing how hard it is to get gatekeepers to buy into that concept. I think it’s why, in Hollywood, they just keep doing number one, two, three, four of the same blockbuster. We’ve been gratified to see that people are enjoying learning about this.
That’s also why the Beatles, at a certain point, said, “All right, we’re going to no longer tour and we’re going to go into the studio and make things that cannot be toured. We probably just blew up our careers and no one will ever buy a record from us again—but it’s what we want to do.” There’s that sense: it’s such a wonderful motivating story. There are many like that—a person or a group that says, “We won’t keep going with what got us here.”
We made a survival movie about Tim Rollins and the art group KOS. When they hit it big, one of their most requested paintings was based on Kafka’s AMERICA, the unfinished novel. It’s on a matrix of book pages and it’s a design of the Golden Horn: if you were designing your own flawed sense of what a democracy could be. It’s the last scene of the book—a discordant group coming together to celebrate America and freedom, blowing horns, all out of tune with each other. It’s total chaos, but that’s the messiness of democracy. “What would your horn look like?” So the kids, on that collaborative concept, would each draw their own horns. It was a beautiful idea. They made several of the paintings; one they put as a large-scale mural on the side of the Board of Education in New York. Then Tim said, “We’re never making one again. That’s it. If we just keep cranking these things out, it’s not why we started doing what we did. If we lose our patrons and client base in the art world, we’re artists. We have to keep doing what we want to do.” I found that inspiring too.
Vanessa: Totally inspiring. And thank you for making this movie against all odds and bringing that sense of wonder and astonishment to viewers who get to meet Peter Asher through your film. It’s really wonderful.
Dayna: Thank you.
Dan: Thank you so much.
Dayna: Again, I feel like it’s not as much “against all odds” that we made the film, but against all odds that it’s getting out, which to me—
Dan: I bet Ted would have lots to say about that.
Vanessa: Hell yeah. We’ll put all the info for the upcoming screenings—you’re rolling out in theaters across the country, you’re going for Q&As, this is happening now.
Dayna: Yes. Now it’s actually going to so many cities that we can’t really do Q&As everywhere. I think it’s playing in 15 cities right now, and opening in another 10 this weekend. I think there are at least 70 bookings so far; Ed’s guesstimating it will be at 100 before it’s done.
Dan: Ted would be intrigued by this whole idea of what the gatekeepers see and don’t see, and then how you navigate a world where the people who are in control of things have very little imagination—or very little willingness to take a risk, because it is risky.
Dayna: It’s risky. Everything’s a risk. I think it’s a risk opening MINIONS 10.
Vanessa: We noticed that Morgan Neville was an EP on your Peter Asher doc, and then realized we hadn’t yet seen his Paul McCartney MAN ON THE RUN doc. We watched it last night. Everything you were just saying about how you transition into a new phase in your artistic, creative, musical career when you’ve been pegged—talk about pegged, you can’t ever get away from being a Beatle—but you can start a new life and band and make music and go on the road. It was addressing exactly what you’re talking about. In your film, Peter Asher does it again and again and again.
Dayna: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah. And since you brought up Morgan—Morgan’s amazing and so generous. He actually came on as an EP on our HALLELUJAH doc too, which was so generous and so important because we had never made a music doc. He gave us some street cred we needed when we entered that realm—not so much with funders, but with Sony Music and whatnot. It really helped to say, “Morgan believes in us and this project.”
Vanessa: That’s beautiful. Well, we do too. Everyone should see this movie. It’s totally incredible. Thank you again.
Dayna: Thank you so much.
Dan: Thanks. It’s been really fun.
Dan Geller — Director/Producer/Camera
Dayna Goldfine — Director/Producer/Location Sound
For over 35 years, Emmy-award winning directors/producers Geller and Goldfine have jointly created critically acclaimed multi-character documentary narratives that braid the personal stories of their protagonists to form a larger portrait of the human experience. Their most recent film, HALLELUJAH: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song, debuted in September 2021 at both the Venice and Telluride Film Festivals, had a worldwide theatrical release via Sony Pictures Classics and was shortlisted for a documentary Oscar. Hallelujah is currently streaming on Hulu.
Geller and Goldfine’s work also includes The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013), which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and its European premiere in Berlin, and played theatrically internationally; Something Ventured (2011), which premiered at SXSW and went on to play festivals and screen internationally, as well as in educational distribution, VOD and DVD worldwide, including a national PBS broadcast in January 2013; Ballets Russes (2005), which was recognized as one of the top five documentaries of 2005 by the National Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review, appeared on a dozen critical top-ten lists, including Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, the San Francisco Chronicle and Slate; Now and Then: From Frosh to Seniors, which premiered theatrically in October 1999 and aired on PBS in October 2000 as the lead program of the Independent Lens series; Kids of Survival: The Art and Life of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (1996), a feature-length documentary about the South Bronx-based art group, which aired on Cinemax in September 1998 and was the recipient of two national Emmy Awards; Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm (1994); and, the award-winning Isadora Duncan: Movement from the Soul (1988).
Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine were admitted to the Documentary Branch of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in June 2014.
The film is currently playing in theaters as it expands nationally, tickets and showtimes are here:
https://peterashermovie.com
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with filmmaker Valerie Veatch about her Sundance 2026 documentary Ghost in the Machine. We dive into the dirty wiring behind today’s AI boom—its roots in eugenics and race science, its extraction‑driven infrastructures, and the white male techno‑fantasies shaping it. Veatch unpacks how a “secret” artist program around OpenAI’s Sora jolted her from curiosity to resistance, why she chose a scrappy, Zoom‑based, self‑funded film over platform‑friendly series formats, and how archival discoveries (from Norbert Wiener to Claude Shannon) reveal an unbroken line between so‑called neutral data and explicitly racist projects. She connects Kenyan data‑labeling sweatshops, water‑hungry data centers, and venture‑funded rationalists in Silicon Valley into a single story about power, misogyny, and the abandonment of the earth. Above all, she makes a bracing case for refusal—arguing that saying no to AI in our workflows, schools, and cultural institutions is not Luddite panic but a necessary act of care, clarity, and democratic self‑defense.
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This vHopeful Conversation features director–producer Rowan Haber and Emmy‑winning producer Caryn Capotosto discussing their documentary We Are Pat, which revisits SNL’s 1990s “It’s Pat” sketches through a contemporary trans and non‑binary lens. We talk about why this is the right cultural moment to unearth Pat again, how Ro’s realization that “the punchline wasn’t about me, it was me” became the emotional engine of the film, and what it meant to bring Julia Sweeney into a room with younger trans and non‑binary comics to rewrite and restage the sketches. We explore the tension between humor that harms and humor that connects, who gets to tell which jokes, how power and perspective shape comedy, and why We Are Pat is designed less as a political treatise than a joyful, community‑building conversation starter about gender, art, and the possibility of talking across difference.
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In this vHopeful Conversations episode, filmmaker Katie Camosy joins me to talk about her new Greenpeace‑backed documentary GASLIT, which follows Jane Fonda, Connie Britton, and Maggie Rogers through Texas and the Gulf South as they bear witness to LNG export terminals, petrochemical corridors, and the communities living in their shadow. Katie traces how a shocking first encounter with the Permian Basin’s fracking fields grew into a feature‑length film about liquefied “natural” gas, export‑driven extraction, and the human cost of America’s fossil fuel build‑out. We dive into GASLIT’s balance of grief and hope—devastating stories of illness, loss, and dispossession alongside shrimpers, ranchers, faith leaders, and organizers who are fighting back with thermal cameras, citizen lawsuits, historic‑preservation tactics, and cross‑political alliances. We also unpack the ways GASLIT counters the narrative promoted by hit series like LANDMAN, explore the global reach of companies like Formosa Plastics and the international struggle against LNG and single‑use plastics, and highlight concrete pathways for viewers to plug into the movement—from GaslitDoc.com resources to voting out fossil‑funded politicians and joining local campaigns.
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This vHopeful Conversation features creator, producer, and host Janet Hsieh whose journey runs from MIT pre‑med and the long‑running Discovery travel series Fun Taiwan to funding and creating her new YouTube travel show GET AWAY with Janet Hsieh. We talk through the “drought” Janet faced moving back to the U.S., how a chance reunion with high‑school friend and Emmy‑winning producer Joe Litzinger led to their three‑person production model, and why YouTube’s flexible runtimes and small‑crew freedom let them chase eruptions in Hawaii, 24‑hour love letters to Taipei, and spontaneous, music‑infused moments like playing violin atop Mauna Kea. Along the way, Janet opens up about brutal beauty standards in Asian entertainment, eating disorders, IVF, pregnancy, perimenopause, and aging on camera, and how honesty, vulnerability, and “Janet of all trades” curiosity have turned her travel work into a coming‑of‑age series for midlife—one that invites everyone to embrace imperfection, adventure, and bridge‑building across cultures.
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In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope speaks with Emmy‑nominated documentarian Ivy Meeropol about her new film Ask E. Jean, a portrait of advice columnist and writer E. Jean Carroll that goes far beyond the courtroom headlines to explore her Miss Cheerleader USA past, gonzo magazine career, TV show, and late‑in‑life decision to publicly confront Donald Trump. They discuss the challenge of balancing E. Jean’s buoyant, hilarious persona with the gravity of the assault and its lifelong impact, the complicity and constraints of the boys’‑club media world she navigated, and the transformative power of women’s friendship and lawyering embodied by Carroll’s bond with attorney Robbie Kaplan and her close circle of friends. Throughout, Ivy reflects on how E. Jean’s willingness at 75 to reckon with her past, revise her own advice‑giver legacy, and insist on telling the truth offers exhausted audiences something rare in the Trump era: a story that is both deeply sobering and unexpectedly joyful, galvanizing viewers—women and men alike—to see sexual violence, patriarchy, and American democracy as inextricably linked.
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In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with Brazilian filmmaker Marianna Brennand about MANAS, her powerful narrative feature debut rooted in a decade of documentary research into sexual abuse and exploitation of women and girls in the Amazon rainforest. Brennand discusses why the story had to become fiction rather than documentary, how she transformed real testimonies into a protective and dignified narrative, and how she worked with first-time lead actress Jamilli Correa and an extraordinary cast to build the film’s intimate family dynamic. They also explore the film’s cinematography, its use of the river, tides, landscape, and silence, Brennand’s commitment to confronting violence without showing or aestheticizing it, and the hope that MANAS can help break taboos, shift shame away from survivors, and inspire dialogue and action around the world.
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Actor, musician, and storyteller Gina Gershon joins Vanessa Hope for a Mother’s Day vHopeful conversation about her fearless new memoir, AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs, tracing how she became an “alphapussy” in life and art. They dig into Gina’s path from Valley tomboy to Naked Angels co-founder, her iconic work in films like The Player, Bound, and Showgirls, and the wild twists of fate that led her to spar with Bob Dylan in a boxing gym and form a band with members of Guns N’ Roses. Along the way, Gina shares how she navigated misogyny, nudity, and power dynamics on big studio films, learned to own her body rather than shrink from others’ projections, and eventually reframed Showgirls as a sharp critique of “ugly America.” At the heart of the episode is a deeply moving meditation on mothers: Gina’s hard-won journey to understand, forgive, and fiercely love her mother in her final years, how learning her mom’s and grandmother’s stories helped heal generational wounds, and how honoring that complex love can free us to stand in our own power as Alphapussies!
Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World, Apple, or Spotify
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In this vHopeful Conversations episode, I speak with producer Ivan Orlic about Mistura, his first Spanish-language feature and first film set entirely in his home country of Peru. Together they explore how the 1960s‑set story of Norma, a high‑society woman cast out after her husband leaves her, becomes both an intimate melodrama of personal reinvention and a larger reflection on gender, class, race, and Peru’s extraordinary culinary and cultural diversity. Ivan shares how he and writer‑director Ricardo de Montreuil built a richly detailed period world—using archival headlines, partnerships with El Comercio and PROMPERÚ, virtual production technology, and a food stylist—to ground Norma’s journey in a rapidly changing Lima, and discusses the film’s all‑star cast led by Bárbara Mori and Afro‑Peruvian musician‑actor Pudi Bayumbrosio. They also talk about Mistura’s remarkable box‑office run in Peru, its sold‑out festival screenings and U.S. theatrical release, the deeper thread of democracy and “being seen” that connects his work from Pelé: Birth of a Legend and La Cocina to Invisible Nation, and why he hopes this cinematic love letter will inspire audiences everywhere to open their hearts—and maybe seek out the nearest Peruvian restaurant—after the credits roll.
Transcript lightly edited. Podcast available on Dream of a Better World, & Apple, or Spotify
Vanessa Hope: I’m very excited to be joined today by my friend and producer Ivan Orlic. He is a Peruvian–Croatian film producer based in Los Angeles and founder of Seine Pictures. His recent productions include La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios and starring Rooney Mara, which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival; Invisible Nation, which Ivan produced alongside Ted Hope and which became one of Taiwan’s most popular, highest‑grossing documentaries of all time and comes out on PBS this May 1 (today!); and Eating Our Way to Extinction, narrated by Academy Award–winner Kate Winslet, which won the Environmental Media Award for Best Documentary. Ivan’s earlier credits include Pelé: Birth of a Legend, produced with Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment. Today, we’re here to talk about his film that is out in theaters right now, which we want everyone to go see. We love it: Mistura. It’s Ivan’s first feature set entirely in Peru, and the first he shepherded as sole producer, which became the highest‑grossing local drama of 2025 in Peru. Ivan, thank you for joining.
Ivan Orlic: I’m so excited to be here, and thank you for having me. It’s so nice to talk to a friend as well as a collaborator. You know how much I admire you and your work and how much I have enjoyed our collaboration on Invisible Nation, which, for everyone out there, continues to be touring universities all over North America, and that’s super exciting. It’s launching, as you said, in May on PBS, which we’re also really excited about. It’s such an important story, and I’m so proud to be a small part of it.
Vanessa: Ivan, thank you. That’s so moving. I feel the same, and you’re so kind and so amazing to work with. It’s such a pleasure to be able to talk about this fiction film from Peru! And it’s a country Ted and I need to visit with you.
Ivan: Yes, that’s pending on our list. On our to‑do list.
Vanessa: Yes. So, it’s your first film set in Peru and your first Spanish‑language fiction feature. Can you describe the film in your own words, and then also maybe share what it meant to you personally to finally make a film about home?
Ivan: Yeah, so I am from Lima, Peru, and that is where the film is set. But it is set in the 1960s, when I wasn’t yet around. It’s still really, really special after about fifteen years of producing films shot in different countries and set in different countries, to finally go and tell a story that comes from where I come from and that represents so many people—all of us Peruvians. Peru is a very diverse country and has a very storied history, and a very diverse cuisine that reflects the diversity of our people. It was very special for me. I was looking for a few years for the right story that would bring me back home and also help me tell a story from Peru to the world.
About ten years ago, I met the writer‑director Ricardo de Montreuil. We actually met at Imagine Entertainment, where I was working with them on a great film called Pelé: Birth of a Legend that I really love as well, and Ricardo was working on his film Lowriders, which has Demián Bichir and Eva Longoria and is set in the lowrider culture of East L.A.—it’s a really cool film as well. Ricardo is one of the more prominent filmmakers from Peru.
Mistura is a story that, firstly, is very enjoyable and crowd‑pleasing. The story is about a woman who is from the high, high society of 1960s Lima, Peru, and she gets ostracized from society in the aftermath of her husband leaving her, at a time when women were judged for their husbands leaving them as though it was their fault. It’s like, your husband cheated on you and left you, so you must have done something wrong. It’s so ridiculous, but it was so commonplace. Setting it in the sixties allows the story to unfold at a time when the opportunities given to, and almost allowed to, women were so limited that the story of our protagonist, Norma Piat, is an original story but almost an amalgamation of a whole community of women at the time who, because of these societal restrictions, had to depend on a man in their lives—first a father, then a husband. And in many instances, that man left the picture for reason A, B, or C, and they had to figure out their own way.
This is the story of one such woman who does so by embracing her own skill and passion for food and building a team that, intentionally in the film, is very representative of Peruvian diversity. That also allows the opportunity for this story to be the story of a community coming together. I’m not saying this kind of discrimination is gone, but setting it in a period when it was more noticeable and more marked in society, I think, allows the character arc to be a bit stronger. She has more to overcome. She is judged more harshly by the society around her and ultimately finds her own way—that true friendship is not defined by who we are in society, but who we are as people, and that what we have in common ultimately is so much more important than what differentiates us.
Vanessa: Yes. Okay, that was brilliantly put. You made me think of two things that are interesting ways to attract audiences to this particular story, because it is timely, and I think there’s something in the zeitgeist right now. There’s a memoir by Belle Burden called Strangers that is completely exploding culturally, a New York Times bestseller.
It’s about her husband leaving her all of a sudden and her grappling with putting their life back together. As with your protagonist in Mistura, she’s a high‑society, upper‑class woman who would normally never speak about this, and speaks about how her mother and her grandmother endured tons of infidelity from their husbands or partners and never spoken about it. And so for Belle Burden, it’s incredibly important in her processing—and in helping her children process the changes—that she speak about it.
So I feel like Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers and Ivan Orlic’s movie Mistura go together: if you love this book, you will love this movie. Also, you mentioned Eva Longoria, and I rarely indulge in watching travel food shows, but on the way to Taiwan last June, when we came out in theaters there with Invisible Nation, I was working on the flight and I watched Eva Longoria’s food tour of Mexico, and it’s so good. First of all, Eva is so cool—she’s so politically right‑on and brave and speaks up. But she really gets into the culture and history of the country and her heritage and the food. And so if you love Eva Longoria’s food tour of Mexico, you will love Mistura. Those audiences also fit very well together.
Ivan: You mentioned “Ivan Orlic’s Mistura,” but it’s really everyone’s. Firstly, the writer‑director’s, but everyone who made the film. It was really done with what in Peru we would call “the jersey”—everyone wearing the jersey of the national team—with a lot of heart and passion. It really belongs to everyone who made it, but it’s also our love letter to our own country, as well as, hopefully, something that will resonate around the world. I truly believe not only that Peru has a lot of special things to offer and that Peruvian food, in my humble opinion—or maybe not so humble in this case—is the best in the world, but also that the detail‑oriented work that was done in the making of this film makes it very specific. And in doing so, whenever we are telling a story as specifically as we can, it opens the potential for it to resonate as universally as possible.
Vanessa: Yeah, exactly. That’s so true. And it’s very true with this film, which is why I could also see my mother’s story in it a little bit. Opening a restaurant has certain characteristics that are very unique. So fans of The Bear television series may also be drawn to it. That’s also very zeitgeisty—the restaurant drama set in Chicago. Such a great show.
Your cast—I understand there’s some history between some of the actors, as well as some big‑screen debuts, and your cast is almost entirely Peruvian?
Ivan: Yes, and I almost can’t believe that I would go on this long without mentioning Bárbara Mori, who plays the lead character, Norma Piat, in the film. She’s just incredible in it. She has now won many awards for Best Actress and been nominated in several instances. Just last week she won Best Actress at the most important award show celebrating entertainment in Peru, where our co‑protagonist, Pudi Bayumbrosio, was also nominated for Best Actor, and of course our film was nominated for Best Film.
But Bárbara is incredible. She was born in Uruguay and moved early on to Mexico, where she resides now, so her natural accent is very much Mexican. But not only did she do an incredible job portraying this character and living the role, she did so through the lens of an accent that was very precisely worked on with an accent coach. It’s not just a Peruvian accent—it’s a high‑society Lima accent from the 1960s.
Vanessa: Wow.
Ivan: The co‑protagonist is César Bayumbrosio, who loves to go by his nickname, Pudi. He’s one of the most wonderful people I’ve encountered, and he is also the best percussionist I’ve ever seen in my life. He is the percussionist for Peru Jazz, the most important jazz band in our country, and his entire family, for generations, have been the most emblematic of Afro‑Peruvian music. So his inclusion in the film is not only about him personally and his charisma and great performance, but also brings a lot of meaning and richness to the film itself because of who he is and where he comes from. This is his lead‑role debut, and whenever we mention that in front of an audience that has already seen the film, there are first gasps, followed by applause, and it’s very well deserved. Just a great performance.
Starting with him, the entirety of the rest of our cast is Peruvian, and also features Christian Meier, who serves as an executive producer and plays the husband who leaves her. Audiences tend not to love his character, but it is really well done—so well done that it only takes a second for the audience to understand he’s the antagonist when you see him, even though in real life he is one of the nicest, most charming people you’ve ever met and has been known in Peru as “the most handsome man in Peru.”
Vanessa: Wow. Excellent, excellent.
Ivan: Yes, there is history, and they have worked together four times now. They usually play husband and wife, and their first collaboration happens to have been on a film called My Brother’s Wife—or La mujer de mi hermano—which was the feature debut of our director, Ricardo de Montreuil, about twenty years before this. So this was a great reunion of three artists who were already very high‑profile and very talented at the time and have since only become more so, and I think you can see the results on screen.
Vanessa: Yes, yes, yes. Your film tracks Norma’s transformation—you’ve just been talking about Norma—as she builds alliances with people from different communities whom she was raised to disregard. It’s very daring of her to open a restaurant, especially in the way that she opens the restaurant. I wonder how you thought about balancing the intimate melodrama of the story with this broader social commentary.
Ivan: Yeah, so again, it’s an original story, so it was already in Ricardo’s screenplay. This was important to all of us: even though it’s an intimate drama—it’s a very intimate story, and you can see it and feel it both in the plot and in how it’s executed—we didn’t want to lose the fact that most of the story is taking place inside her bubble. Even though she has real problems and a lot to overcome, it’s still a story taking place inside a high‑society bubble. To some extent, some of her problems are what we would often say are “first‑world problems,” you know. We didn’t want to lose the fact that this bubble exists within a bigger context of a country that was still developing, at a time when Peru was experiencing increasingly widening inequality—something that is happening again today.
I think it was important to us not to lose that, so one of the ways in which we keep that alive and the story grounded and rooted in that reality is by showing a couple of real clips from archival footage of the time on the characters’ TVs. These go towards showing that there was dissatisfaction from the wider population and some political turmoil, as well as through newspaper headlines. We worked with the paper of record in Peru—like The New York Times would be in the U.S.—the Peruvian equivalent, which is called El Comercio, and they were a partner in the film, providing us not just with real headlines of the time, from which we selected some that highlight both that Peru was a destination—again, something that has come back—as well as that there was turmoil and not all was well outside of this high‑society bubble.
But these newspaper headlines are not just real—they’re printed on a printer from the ’60s that the newspaper still had, and they generously made that available for us. During pre‑production we also created a big PDF we called the “1965 Bible” that informed every head of department in the film, to try to pay as much attention as possible to the details. Once we had it, we went back to the screenplay with Ricardo and did some adjustments to dialogue to make sure that we were using expressions and words that were used at the time and we weren’t being anachronistic, you know.
I think there is some mirror between the ’60s and the 2020s in Peru, where again the country had a bit of a spotlight. One of the newspaper headlines, for example, tells of how Mr. Rockefeller is not coming to Peru for the first time but is returning to Peru, and it became a destination in the way that it has again—now more because of the archaeology and also culinary tourism, which is becoming a real driver for tourism. We worked with a Peruvian government agency called PROMPERÚ that is always promoting everything to do with Peru around the world. They were instrumental in the logistics and even helped us with visas for people to come in during the production.
We work with them because this film, as much as it’s a personal story—and I think people will find it engaging and moving and inspiring on a personal level—is also, on a country level, a movie that really invites you not just to visit Peru but to try our food. In live screenings, appropriately, we give people a warning before they watch it that this film may—and will—make you hungry.
Vanessa: Yeah, very much. Ivan, you have me curious: in terms of the different classes in Peru, is it waves of immigration from Europe? Because I feel Norma’s character—her father is an ambassador, it’s France—
Ivan: Norma, the character played by Bárbara, is the daughter of the former ambassador from France to Peru, so the character moved to Peru as a young girl. She and her son in the film speak Spanish and French, but because they grew up in Peru, their French is accented almost as badly as my English is accented. But yes, classism is definitely a problem in Peru and has been for a long time. Much like other forms of discrimination in most countries around the world, it’s something that has improved over the last several decades, but where we still have room to grow.
I think—like in the U.S., the phrase “we are always working to create a more perfect union”—that sentiment is present all over the world, no? Our societies are overall in a better place than in most of our past, even if in our recent times there is, to my taste, too much polarization. That was one of the inspirations for this story. In fact, it is one of the director’s theses for the film: that all of us being different, but being together, makes us much stronger and better, in the same way that any one dish would not be as good if you removed any one ingredient, even though each ingredient is very different from the others.
Vanessa: Yeah. I imagine, knowing what a good son you are, that this movie very much pleased your parents, and that maybe capturing 1960s Peru—every aspect, food, class, race—in the storytelling was pleasing to them, that you could bring it to life, that you could show how the differences have contributed to the Peru we have today.
Ivan: Well, as far as I know, yes. They love this film. And I think all of their friends—well, I think they love hearing how much their friends love the film. We had an amazing experience in the theatrical release in Peru. We were able to release the film in 109 out of 111 total cinema venues in the country, so it was a wide release, like a blockbuster, which doesn’t normally happen for a drama. Because the word of mouth was so strong, we were able to stay in theaters for nine weeks, even though the normal amount of time for that market is three to four weeks, even if you’re doing well.
I’m really proud of that. It was incredibly rewarding that audiences in Peru would have ovations after commercial screenings—something I’ve seen mostly at festivals, but not very frequently at commercial engagements. I would go and stand outside some of the cinemas toward the end of the film, because at first I wasn’t ready to just believe the distributor telling me this was happening all over the city, all over the country. So I went to several cinemas to check it out, and there it was: people clapping at the end of a movie. It’s been really rewarding.
We actually opened in the U.S. on April 24th, so last week, and I was able to go to a handful of engagements here to do Q&As after commercial screenings. In speaking to the audiences, we’re also hearing the applause before we walk in, which was super nice, and I really hope that it continues to resonate like this.
Vanessa: Yeah, me too. It’s crazy, Ivan. You had two films in theaters last year in two different countries—Taiwan and Peru — you had these two movies become big phenomenons in two countries at the same time. It’s very unique.
Ivan: (I edited out the effusive praise Ivan heaped on me and our team and the team he worked with on Mistura before saying…) The correct answer is “thank you.” I’ll take the compliment.
Vanessa: Take the compliment. Yes, you have to take it. Mistura only took about six months from first draft to assembling partners and starting pre‑production, and that is also remarkably fast. I wonder, from your producing standpoint, what made that speed possible?
Ivan: Yes. I had the idea that I needed—I think that’s the right word—to make a Peruvian film as part of my career, and hopefully it will be more than one. I had this idea for years, and I was actually working on my own version for like three years before Ricardo sent me the script for Mistura. When I first read it, I felt like, “This is accomplishing everything I was trying to accomplish with the script I was developing—except in this one, it’s working.” So I didn’t hesitate and jumped in right away.
Because Ricardo had previously worked with Christian Meier and Bárbara Mori, their coming into the project really early was facilitated by that pre‑existing relationship between them. Once those elements were together—and the film actually had some financing come in early as well, which ended up falling apart; that was one of the big challenges of this production, putting it back together during pre‑production—we were able to do that.
The other reason it came together so fast is that I worked with a local producer named Enid Campos, who prefers to be known by her really cute nickname: Pinky. She is one of the most talented producers I’ve worked with and, in Peru, renowned for her work, especially in art‑house film. She has a long history of working with all the more established heads of department in Peru, so she helped me. We interviewed all the top choices and ended up building the team very fast.
I will also say there was an outside date for the shoot because Bárbara Mori is also one of the protagonists in an Apple TV+ show called Women in Blue—or in Spanish Las Azules—which tells the story of the first women police officers in Mexico City. It’s another period piece, but a limited series, and they were shooting right after us. So we had an outside date by which we had to wrap her, and as the protagonist that means we had to wrap the film by then, not just her. So in one way it had to come together so fast, but in another it was almost natural for it to do so because everyone who came into contact with it jumped in without hesitation, and because Pinky really was instrumental in finding the right fit for each department head very quickly.
Vanessa: Do you want to speak a little more about if there were any challenges because you were working so quickly, in terms of creating that 1960s period look and feel for Peru?
Ivan: Yes. So after working with that team of historians and having the 1965 Bible, during pre‑production there was a lot of attention paid by, especially, Mario Frias, our art director; Leslie Hinojosa, our wardrobe designer; and Laura Quijandría, our hair and makeup designer; and of course our DP and director of photography, Nicolás Wong, who’s amazing. We’re lucky that his work has received some well‑deserved recognition.
We are also the first film made in Peru to work with virtual production technology. I think most of your audience will know what it is, but in case some don’t: it’s the modern version of green‑screen technology that was first popularized by The Mandalorian, whereby instead of using a static green screen during the shoot, we used giant LED screens to encompass the set in which we were shooting. The LED screens were projecting images we created before shooting, instead of adding them in post‑production. The advantage, of course, is that the actors don’t have to imagine their environment—they get to see it and live in it during the shoot— and the director can watch every take as it will appear in the film instead of having it full of green to be filled out later.
The company that helped us model, design, and create a 3D photorealistic model of all the streets in Lima that the cars in the story drive through is called La Escena Virtual. This was the first time they were working on a feature and the first feature in Peru to ever use this technology. I think it worked really well—we haven’t had anyone question it; it looks great.
Also in terms of the food itself, we are the first Peruvian film to work with a professional food stylist. Paola Musso is someone who was trained in Europe and has worked in film before, but she also does a lot of commercials and is at the top of her field. This was her first feature in Peru, and of course she’s Peruvian. She not only made the food look really nice—I think it looks beautiful and delicious—but also adjusted the dishes to how they were more commonly presented in restaurants and even at home, how people would have recognized them most in that period.
Vanessa: So no more talk from film producers anywhere about “period is too challenging, period is too difficult.” It feels like with new technology, there’s really opportunity to make interesting period films.
Ivan: I mean, it certainly adds a layer, right? It requires more attention to detail, a bit more work, more budget. But it’s within reach, especially when you have the opportunity to work with talented and committed artists like we were lucky to have.
Vanessa: Mistura had its international film‑festival premiere at Mill Valley, and you’re excited it’s in theaters now here in the U.S., and it sounds like you just had an extraordinary response in Peru. And everyone needs a warning that they’re going to come away hungry.
Ivan: Yes. We’ve been lucky—there hasn’t been an exception in any festival screening so far that it’s not sold out. That’s always rewarding, to see that people are interested in the work we’re doing. I’ve had the good fortune of being present myself at over a dozen of these festivals that were kind enough to invite us, meeting audiences at sometimes one, sometimes multiple screenings per festival, doing Q&As, and listening to their reactions. More or less half of the questions we get are long‑winded compliments that are incredibly appreciated and usually have to do with how people perceive that we executed the period really nicely, that the cinematography looks beautiful, the acting, and how much they felt inspired by the film.
Vanessa: That’s so beautiful. What does success look like for you with Mistura, beyond the celebration, box office, awards, all of that? Maybe you’ve spoken to it just now, or is it about how this representation of Peru might influence Peruvian stories globally?
Ivan: On one level, I’m in this field, in this world of film, because I really believe that stories have the power to transform people. We empathize with a protagonist who is necessarily different from ourselves, unless it happens to be a biopic on us. In doing so, I think we expand our empathetic imagination—our ability to relate to and empathize with different people—and that in itself makes every story have inherent value, in addition to the artistic work itself. So I hope that Mistura will travel.
Yes, we are soon to announce distribution in more countries, which is very exciting, including theatrical releases in more countries, which is not a given, especially for a film from a country that is a relatively smaller market. But we are very proud to be able to accomplish this, and that wherever this film travels, it opens hearts and minds. For me, that’s really important—and I think it naturally will flow because of what the story is.
On another level, I hope we are breaking the stereotype of what a Peruvian would look like. I think to challenge that stereotype, as well as to invite, through the film, more people to visit Peru and try our food wherever they live, is important. I think it’s a fortunate time for those interested in trying Peruvian food around the world, because there has been such a boom since the early 2000s. When I first moved to the United States in 2001, I couldn’t find a Peruvian restaurant in most cities. Now I can’t find a city that doesn’t have multiple.
And that’s a very welcome change for me because not only do I think Peruvian food is amazing, but I also miss it. It’s one of the ways I get to continue to feel connected to my home country—eating our food wherever I go, whether it’s here in Miami or in New York or in L.A., and also in smaller cities.
Vanessa: Side question—because I’m realizing as I’m speaking with you that I’ve had this thread going through the podcast series. So many Brazilian stories and Brazilian filmmakers—from the amazing documentarian Petra Costa (Apocalypse in the Tropics), to Kleber Mendonça Filho (The Secret Agent), Gabriel Mascaro (The Blue Trail), Fisher Stevens, Chelsea Greene, who made the documentary We Are Guardians…
Ivan: That was your most recent episode—
Vanessa: That was the most recent, yes. I wonder, what is the relationship between Peru and Brazil, politically and culturally?
Ivan: I think it’s a great relationship. Of course, in Brazil Portuguese is spoken, and in Peru Spanish. We share the Amazon rainforest, and it both connects us and sits between us—it makes the cities on both coastlines relatively far away geographically. But I think that connection is really important between us. Also, both happen to be the countries in Latin America that have the most immigration from Asia, historically, and so we share that connection as well. My favorite food, for example, is Nikkei food—Japanese‑Peruvian fusion. The chef in Mistura comes from these backgrounds, I think on purpose.
I also, as you know, worked in Brazil and was able to have the honor of telling the story of one of their most beloved sons of the country, the King of Soccer, O Rei Pelé, whom I also had the privilege of being friends with until his passing in December 2022.
Vanessa: All these Brazilian filmmakers and all of Brazil can also support Mistura. That’s where I’m going.
Ivan: I think yes. I think identity is really important, and at the same time it should be something that connects us, not something that divides us. This is not a film just for Peruvians. This is not even a film just for Spanish speakers or just for Latin Americans.
Vanessa: We’re now adding Asians into the mix as well—people from Taiwan.
Ivan: We’re all connected. Exactly. And anyone who loves and supports independent film. I really appreciate supporting all independent film, wherever it comes from. I really appreciate theater chains and all they do for cinema, but independent theaters in particular, I think, are such champions—they matter.
Here in Miami, for example, the Coral Gables Art Cinema has been a real champion of our film, Mistura. In New York, it’s Cinema Village that’s championing us, and we’re about to work with Laemmle in California, who are one of the most iconic, legendary supporters of independent film through the years.
Vanessa: Okay, great—so my stepmom in Miami: go to the Coral Gables theater. My mom in New York: go to Cinema Village. And all our friends and family here in Los Angeles, California, please go to the Laemmle theaters. When you were speaking of champions of independent film, you were making me think about Ted, of course. The way Ted always describes your involvement with the Taiwan documentary is that, like us, you’re a champion of democracy—that you care about democracy, that that’s the thread connecting us.
In a way, you can read this film, Mistura, as a story in which that kind of personal liberation is connected to a larger politics—where an ideal version of democracy supports everyone in their individuality and their differences to feel part of a larger whole, to feel free, to have rights, autonomy, respect, integrity, all of that. Across your filmography—from Pelé to Eating Our Way to Extinction, La Cocina, now Mistura—what do you see as the connective threads in the stories you back?
Ivan: Yeah. I really am passionate about democracy, and I am proud to be a part of Invisible Nation. I’m a big believer that all peoples have a right to self‑determine their own destiny, and democracy is the tool through which we can do that. When we’re unhappy with a situation, we get to choose to change it. I’ve become very familiar with the U.S. political system and modern history, because in a system like the U.S., neither party is effectively and significantly improving the lives of the majority of the people who are not doing well already. This is true in all sorts of countries, including Peru, and it creates a sense of dissatisfaction that I think inspires people to vote for more and more extreme options.
Vanessa: Your opening thought about self‑determination—that’s really the key. That’s really in Mistura; that’s what takes the personal to the political.
Ivan: Yeah. It’s universally resonant. Also, the story of Mistura takes place only a handful of years before Peru lost its democracy—we became a military dictatorship for a few years. My family left during those years and returned when democracy returned. That’s why in countries like Peru, where this has taken place or similar things have taken place, I think we’re much more aware of how fragile democracy can be. It’s that U.S. phrase—and forgive me for not being a better U.S. historian—but “It’s your republic, if you can keep it.” That is so true. It really depends on all of us to fight for it, to keep it, and to continue to strive for it to become a more and more perfect version of itself, whether it’s a union like here or a different system.
I think the through‑line, especially of the last few years for me, is also a lot about being seen and how beautiful that is. I’m more of an art‑house and independent film lover than a big‑blockbuster lover, but I had a chance to briefly speak to James Cameron once about the Avatar movies, and one of the things I really love about them is the “I see you” phrasing. That is, to me, the through‑line of my work over the last few years.
In Invisible Nation, overtly in the title, it’s: can we finally see a whole people that aren’t being fully seen? La Cocina is based on the play from the 1950s in the U.K. by Arnold Wesker, but heavily adapted for this film to take place in Manhattan—in a world where we’re telling the story of one day in the lives of people who work at a restaurant.
Vanessa: It’s an excellent restaurant film. It’s an excellent film, La Cocina. This is with Rooney Mara—brilliant, brilliant.
Ivan: And in North America it’s currently available on the platform MUBI—check it out. Please, do check it out. La Cocina is one day in the life of these people who work at a restaurant, and they represent one of the segments of people in society that during the pandemic we learned to call “essential workers.” They’re the people who make society run. They are also people that we don’t really see that often—we kind of look past them and see them as part of the service being provided to us instead of as a person who has a job and a life. So I think Invisible Nation is “let’s see these people who aren’t being seen”; La Cocina is “let’s see this community that isn’t really being seen”; and Mistura is the personal, individual‑level version of this, where there’s a woman who on one level is being seen by everyone, but being seen for her position in society—for who her husband is—not for who she is.
It’s really the story of how someone—in this case her driver, who is Afro‑Peruvian, again played by Pudi Bayumbrosio, who I love—finally, finally, someone is seeing her for who she is. Beneath all that, she loses her status, she loses her money, and suddenly all that can be seen is who she really is. Because that is seen, and they start to see each other, they can build this team and transcend the restrictions and limited beliefs, the discrimination of the moment of the ’60s—which in Peru is more comparable to the ’50s in the U.S. socially.
Vanessa: Okay, I have a new and very challenging last question for you, Ivan, because I feel we need to tell people where they can have dinner and see your movie. I feel they should have dinner, if they can, at a Peruvian restaurant, ideally one that has the Japanese‑Peruvian fusion. Luckily there are lots of options. And what’s the name of your favorite dish that’s Japanese‑Peruvian fusion?
Ivan: Yes. So my favorite dish is probably ceviche, and the Japanese‑Peruvian fusion version is called tiradito. The film actually tells the real, sort‑of‑fictionalized story of how tiradito comes to be. That reminds me: the chef in our film, who is a chef in real life, grew up with his father having a restaurant in Peru, which was the first restaurant that chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa was head chef at. Nobu came from Japan to Peru, picked up a lot of Peruvian ideas and traditions, and then opened his own restaurant, which has become an empire—Nobu across the world—which has a lot of influence from the Peruvian menu. So that is always going to be an option.
But there’s a group that have been doing the good work—they’re called the Peruvian Restaurant Guide: peruvianrestaurantguide.com. You can go there and find the Peruvian restaurants nearest to you, wherever that is.
People will be able to see and hear our conversation starting May 1st, right? Starting May 1st we will be at the CMX Dolphin, at the AMC Aventura, and at the Regal Sawgrass in the Miami area. In New York, we will remain at Cinema Village as well.
Vanessa: You’re being held over.
Ivan: Yes, we’re being held over, which is always an exciting thing to learn. I’m particularly excited that starting May 7th we are returning to where this relationship with the audience started. As you mentioned, our world premiere was at the Mill Valley Film Festival, and starting May 7th we are playing at the San Rafael Film Center.
Vanessa: Ooh, I love that theater.
Ivan: I’m really excited. I love that theater, and it’s so special to go back to where our first public screening was held. It’s special to be here in Miami; I think the community here is so rich with immigration, and the Peruvian food in Miami is amazing. In New York, similarly, there’s so much immigration. There are many Peruvian restaurants in New York as well.
On May 8th we’re opening in Los Angeles, as well as San Diego and Sarasota. Los Angeles will be extra special for me because it’s the city that has become my home over the last fifteen years. We will definitely be at the Laemmle Monica and the Laemmle Glendale, and I believe the Regal South Gate as well for our first week.
I know that everyone in this audience knows this, but I’ll still say it:
the opening week and opening weekend in each market that a film opens, especially an independent film, is critical—most important.
Vanessa: Get to the theater when it opens, please.
Ivan: The more we do, not only the more opportunity this film will have to reach more people, but the better independent film does in general in theaters, the more those theaters will remain interested, open, and excited to continue to support independent film.
So this is my plea to please come support us, as well as follow us on social media. We are @MisturaFilm—M‑I‑S‑T‑U‑R‑A, Mistura Film—where we continue to announce releases in each city. We hope to be in more cities in North America over the coming weeks. I know that starting May 28th, for those of you in Puerto Rico, we are definitely opening on several screens. In July we will be in theaters in the U.K.
Vanessa: Ooh, fantastic—in July. And Puerto Rico. I love Puerto Rico. This has been a wonderful conversation, and it’s been so great to see you!
Ivan: Thank you so much, Vanessa. Thank you for having me. Always great to see you. Thank you, thank you. I hope everyone enjoys the film.
Vanessa: Me too. I know they will.
IVAN ORLIC producer
Ivan Orlic is a Peruvian-Croatian film producer based in Los Angeles and founder of Seine Pictures. His recent productions include La Cocina, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios and starring Rooney Mara, which premiered in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival and went on to win five Ariel Awards; Invisible Nation, directed by Vanessa Hope and produced alongside Ted Hope, which received multiple awards including at the Cinema for Peace Awards in 2024 and became one of Taiwan’s highest-grossing documentaries of all time; and Eating Our Way to Extinction, narrated by Academy award winner Kate Winslet, which won the Environmental Media Awards for Best Documentary. His earlier credits include Murder of a Cat, produced alongside Sam Raimi, and Pelé: Birth of a Legend, produced alongside Brian Grazer and Imagine Entertainment.
Most recently, Orlic produced Mistura — his first feature set entirely in Peru and the first he shepherded as sole producer. Following a successful theatrical release in Peru, where it remained in cinemas for nine weeks to become the highest grossing local drama of 2025, the film opened in U.S. theaters last week from April 24th 2026, through Outsider Pictures, a distribution company specializing in bringing Spanish language and foreign films into the North American market.
He is also a guest lecturer at University of California, Los Angeles, a speaker at international industry forums, and a graduate of The Second City conservatory program.
MISTURA SCREENS BY DATE
NOW PLAYING
MIAMI1. CMX Brickell -- likely to hold over2. Coral Gables Art Cinemas3. CMX Dolphin -- likely to hold over4. AMC Aventura -- likely to hold over5. AMC Tamiami6. AMC Hialeah7. AMC Sunset Place 8. Regal Southland Mall9. Regal Kendall Village
FT. LAUDERDALE10. Regal Sawgrass -- likely to hold overNEW YORK11. Cinema Village -- confirmed to hold overDALLAS12. America Cinemas (Ft Worth)PORTLAND13. Battle Ground Cinemas 814. Sandy Cinema 9ORLANDO15. Regal Waterford Lakes16. Regal Pointe
OPENING MAY 1
BUFFALO1. North Park TheatrePALM SPRINGS2. Desert Film Society
MIAMI
3. TBC: Silverspot Brickell
OPENING MAY 7
SAN RAFAEL1. San Rafael Film Center (San Rafael)
OPENING MAY 8
LOS ANGELES1. Laemmle Monica (Santa Monica)2. Laemmle Town Center (Encino)3. Regal Southgate (Norwalk)SAN DIEGO4. Digital GymSARASOTA5. Burns Court
OPENING MAY 22
LOS ANGELES1. Maya Chino Hills (Chino)2. Maya Fresno (Fresno)3. Maya Bakersfield (Bakersfield)
OPENING MAY 28
SAN JUAN1. Fine Arts Popular Center2. Fine Arts Café3. Montehiedra4. San Patricio
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In this special vHopeful Conversations episode, Vanessa Hope spotlights Fall of Freedom, a nationwide wave of creative resistance to rising authoritarianism that began last fall and now returns with more than twenty May Day film screenings across multiple states. She highlights powerful new work from award‑winning filmmakers, including Steal This Story, Please! about fearless journalist Amy Goodman and Democracy Now!, directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin; Homegrown, directed by Michael Premo with writing consulting by two‑time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Lynn Nottage, examining the rise of right‑wing extremism in America; Soul Patrol, J.M. Harper’s Sundance‑winning drama about an elite unit of African American special‑ops soldiers in Vietnam; and Chelsea Winstanley’s feature debut TOITŪ: Visual Sovereignty, following Māori curator Nigel Borell as his groundbreaking exhibition becomes a battleground over Indigenous self‑determination. She also shares news of Invisible Nation, her documentary on Taiwan’s struggle for democracy, premiering on PBS this May Day, along with programs like Fall of Freedom: Labor of Love and Damned in the U.S.A.: A Fight for First Amendment Rights with legendary lawyer Martin Garbus—inviting listeners to join a communal declaration that truth matters, art matters, and courage is contagious at falloffreedom.com.
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In this Earth Day edition of vHopeful Conversations, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with producer Fisher Stevens and co-director Chelsea Greene to discuss We Are Guardians, their urgent and deeply human documentary about Indigenous forest defenders on the frontlines of the Amazon. Chelsea traces the film’s origins to the 2019 Amazon fires and her decision to drop everything to document communities risking their lives to confront illegal loggers, while Fisher reflects on joining the project, helping shape its verité approach, and supporting a multi-year impact campaign grounded in accountability to those same communities. Together they explore how the film braids intimate character stories with Brazilian electoral politics, the economic drivers of deforestation, and the outsized influence of agribusiness giants like Cargill and JBS, all while arguing that “action is the antidote to despair” and inviting listeners to see themselves as guardians too.
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In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with multi‑hyphenate indie director Pete Ohs to unpack his Warsaw‑set “volcanic experiment” Erupcja, a Charli xcx–starring anti‑romantic comedy in which a stranded vacation and a rekindled relationship with a Polish florist explode Bethany’s sense of who she is and who she wants to love. Ohs traces his journey from an exhausting seven‑year, $200,000 “traditional” first feature to a radically lean, joy‑forward process—tiny crews, half‑outlines, writing scenes over breakfast, shooting in story order, and treating each film like a table made of bubbles that can’t bear the weight of industry expectations. Together they dig into how low‑budget tools, liberating constraints, and a “movies as vacation” mindset let him collaborate with performers like Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Will Madden, and Jeremy O. Harris while encouraging filmmakers everywhere to ditch perfectionism, question what they’re told they “need,” and just go make movies with their friends.
Transcript lightly edited. podcast available on Dream of a Better World, and Apple or wherever you listen
Vanessa Hope: I’m very excited to be joined by Pete Ohs, who is an American multi‑hyphenate filmmaker in the truest sense: a writer, director, producer, cinematographer, editor. He’s known for his inventive, low‑budget, genre‑bending features that have become fixtures on the U.S. indie festival circuit, including the hybrid documentary I Send You This Place, the desert sci‑fi fable Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, the horror satire Jethica, his recent workplace comedy‑drama Love and Work, and the new film, which I’ve just learned how to pronounce with a Polish accent, Erupcja, which we were mispronouncing “Erupcia” in case that’s what people read when they see it. It’s playing at New Directors/New Films, (ND/NF) in New York City, April 11th and 12th. Then coming out in theaters starting April 17th. Thank you so much for being here, Pete.
Pete Ohs: Happy to be here.
Vanessa: Ted and I, who you just met, and it was so fun to talk to you before this interview—we’re both filmmakers, and we often talk filmmaking at breakfast. Well, pretty much all day long into the night, as well as questions of how to have a creative life in this chaotic and ever‑changing world. So we look for new models for work and life and study and examine prior movements. And your way of working is particularly exciting to us.
If you could take us through your path to this new film, Erupcja—no, no, that wasn’t the right pronunciation; how do I say it again?
Pete: Erupcja.
Vanessa: Erupcja. All the films that came before, and how this became your method, which feels like a really amazing articulation of long‑live cinema (!) in the purest form. You’ve said that your way of working now is partly a rejection of, or reaction to, this not‑fun first feature film experience, which had a bigger budget. How did you arrive at this new moment?
Pete: Yeah, so I’m a kid from Ohio. I didn’t have parents in the creative fields. I have creative parents, but not in the creative fields. And I really was just a kid with a video camera, borrowing his parents’ video camera or friends’ parents’ video camera, making videos with friends as a hobby.
This was in the 90s. This was before there was YouTube. If there was YouTube, probably we would have been uploading them, but at the time, all we were doing was making the videos and then going down to the basement to watch them together again. This was like my favorite thing to do, favorite hobby.
But I didn’t go to film school. I was never really aspiring to be a director, actually. I wasn’t some little Spielberg kid. I was just making videos with my friends. And I ended up going to a liberal arts college, studying computer science, still doing videos as a work‑study job and as my hobby, but still not fully recognizing that that could be a career path.
My senior year, that clicked, thanks to a mentor—one of our advisors in the video program pointed out that, oh, I could have a job as an editor, as a videographer at a production company. So that’s what I then did. I did not use my computer science degree. I went straight into a small television production company in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I was doing that for a few years, making music videos, and eventually just naturally worked my way up, within myself, to the point where, oh, I want to try to make a feature film now. It just felt like a gradual progression, but I was still very much outside the system, didn’t know what I was doing.
I sort of manifested this feature hybrid documentary that got into one cool film festival, Full Frame. Each little increment was just enough to keep me going, along with the fact that this is what I was enjoying doing.
The next progression, just based on what I was observing from the world, was to write a narrative feature script and try to get that made. And as I’m trying to get it made, I’m also learning what that even means—to “get it made.”
We miraculously get cool cast attached. We don’t really even know what that means, to be attached. Each thing we thought, “Oh, I guess we make a movie now,” and then months later, the movie has not happened yet. And then you get producers, and you’re like, “Okay, so now we make the movie,” and then all that stuff, until like a year and a half later you’re finally shooting the movie.
Again, this is new to me. I know this is not new to other people who have done that, but this is my first time doing it. And then you shoot that movie. It’s almost a $200,000 budget. That’s a lot of money to me. I keep being told that’s not a lot of money for a movie. We make this feature film with a 20‑ish person crew, a 20‑ish day shoot—big and small, you know, it’s in that in‑between zone.
I’m really proud of that movie. It stars a pre‑Ozark Julia Garner. All these magical things were there. And I was certainly dreaming in my mind, or imagining in my mind, that I was going to live the dream. I was going to premiere at Sundance, my life was going to change, the golden gates to heaven were going to open and I was going to get to walk through, and happily ever after.
And then you don’t get into Sundance, and you don’t get into those big festivals. That film ended up premiering at the Los Angeles Film Festival—which no longer exists but was a good film festival—but still isn’t… not exactly Sundance. Great festival, great programmers, connected to film, and all these really good things, but you’re having to recalibrate the dream.
You have that and you’re like, “Okay, so I didn’t get launched from that project. What does that mean now? What does that mean about what I’ve done?” And for me, that film, that first feature, took like seven years from just having the idea to then making it. And then it didn’t really instantly, light‑switch change my life. And it made me question: okay, seven years—that was a long time for what came of it, which was not a lot of joy, really.
Vanessa: Yeah.
Pete: For seven years. Certainly some bits and pieces, but I was like, I don’t know if that was an adequate return on investment of my time in my life.
Vanessa: It’s so much waiting. I mean, so much of it when you speak of attachments with cast, or waiting on producers, or waiting on your financing, and you’ve already got the script and the idea and you’re ready to go seven years ago. It’s a frustrating process.
Pete: It can be. It can be really frustrating. As I would vent, complain, share about this experience to other people—other filmmakers—the thing I would hear, or I remember hearing, although this was years ago now, was that the reason it wasn’t as enjoyable is because you only had $200,000 and you needed $2 million.
And I, as this kid from Ohio, I’m like, I don’t even know really how we got $200,000. I don’t have another person waiting to give me that money. How am I going to get $2 million? Still, this is what people are sort of telling me to do. So then I write another script, I make another pitch deck, I start sending emails, I try to get meetings with production companies and producers.
I’m having those meetings and they’re sort of into the script, but sort of not. And I’m leaving those meetings thinking, “They didn’t like it.” And then I’m like, “But they weren’t even cool. Why do I care what these people are saying?” But I have to care because I need this thing from them. And it just wasn’t fun.
I felt myself going down the same path I had already gone down, that I know I didn’t really enjoy. And so I stopped. I remember I was walking on Sunset Boulevard back from a coffee shop—another day of “working,” where you’re sending emails and revising things, lookbooks or whatever—and I was like, why am I doing this? Why am I actually doing this?
For me, the reason I was doing it was because I loved making videos with my friends when I was 15. And I thought, why can’t I do that now, even though I’m a 30‑something professional filmmaker? Can we make a film like I would have when I was 15? And I recognized that nobody—only I—would stop myself from doing that.
So that’s where this new process came from, this new way of making movies, which is: make every decision the way you would have made it if you were 15. And so all this stuff is like: would I have a budget if I was 15? No. Would I have producers? No. Would I have permits? No. Would I have a script? No. I would have a camera and some friends and we would just go have fun. We’d make stuff up, we’d try to make each other laugh, and we would do it until it was time to eat pizza.
Vanessa: Amazing.
Pete: So that was the experiment I wanted to try. As I was even moving towards that film, which is this movie called Youngstown, it was just made by me. The main shoot was just me and two actors, two friends—everything as small as it could be, all trying to just be for fun.
And even as I was moving towards going to shoot it, like a month out, I still felt bad. I still felt like, “This is stupid. This is a waste of my time. This is going to be terrible.” And that’s where this metaphor came from that I have been saying a lot, which is “a table of bubbles.”
It was like: this film, this experience is a table made of bubbles. It cannot support anything. Do not put anything on it. Do not put a plate on it; it will just fall through. That’s not what it’s for. So don’t put your hopes, your dreams, your budgets, your expectations on this thing—just appreciate it for the magical object that it is.
That is all centered around the belief and experience that pressure does not help creativity. It doesn’t help enjoyment. So essentially, let go. It becomes almost very Buddhist in a way. These things are a table of bubbles. Keep that in your mind as you’re moving through every aspect of making the movie. Try to remember that this is supposed to be for fun. This is just supposed to be enjoyed. If it’s too hard—not that I don’t like working hard—but if it feels like you’re having to force it, it’s not worth it. Protect the bubbles, you know?
Vanessa: I love it. And you’ve repeated this method a few times now, to where we’re talking about this amazing new film we just watched.
Pete: Yeah.
Vanessa: Right?
Pete: Right. Well, so after that first movie—even as we were leaving the Airbnb where we stayed—before I’d even edited the footage together, I was like, that was too much fun to not do every year. Even if it didn’t result in a movie, I don’t care. Just that two‑week vacation of play with these friends is such a rewarding, fulfilling experience. I’m going to do this again no matter what.
Next year was 2020, so the pandemic got in the way. But then 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, I’ve just done another one and another one. I like to challenge myself. I like to try new things. I like to make sure there’s some sort of progression, whether internally or externally, in my life and my projects. And so they each have nicely progressed in some way.
Such that now, I have made a movie the exact same way as I made that first movie, but it just happens to star Charli xcx, it happens to have been filmed in Poland, and it happens to be having its New York premiere at New Directors/New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center.
Vanessa: That’s so great! That’s so exciting! So let’s talk about this film with Charli xcx that’s premiering at New Directors/New Films at MoMA. It’s been called—you’ve called it—like a “volcanic experiment in Warsaw.” You made it with a tiny crew over two weeks. And it’s like an anti‑romantic comedy, would you say? It also feels like a story about artists and risk and blowing up your life. Where was the spark of that story for you?
Pete: The way all these movies get made is that it does start with a location. If you’ve made things, made films, you can skip ahead of so many logistical problems just by starting with locations that you actually have access to and that ideally you are also inspired by.
I was just living in Warsaw at the time. I had been living there for almost a year and wanted to make a movie in this place that I lived.
Vanessa: “Why Poland?” I know you lived there for a year, but I don’t know why you chose it. I went for the first time with my doc to the Millennium Docs Against Gravity Film Festival in Warsaw and loved it! They truly understand emerging from an authoritarian past and embracing democracy.
Pete: The fact that I was living there at the time is the most crucial.
I got connected to Poland through American Film Festival in Wroclaw. They have a great lab-like program called “US in Progress” for American indies with films in post to connect with international sales agents and Polish post-houses. In 2021, I was at the festival screening Youngstown and also with Jethica in the US in Progress program. That year I had my own “Before Sunrise” type adventure where I met a woman, extended my trip, took a train to Warsaw, fell in love and started a relationship that would eventually lead me to moving to Warsaw.
I also saw this cool opportunity to make a foreign film. I always like to do some sort of genre experiment, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I can make a movie that gets to have subtitles. That’s exciting and fun.”
So much of the way that I make these things is about using a resource—using your resources, putting yourself in a sandbox and only playing with the sand that is in that box. Warsaw is that. And then my collaborators have become that as well.
So Jeremy O. Harris—I had just made a feature with him the previous year. Will Madden is an actor who had been in two of my films before. I always like to bring back people who already know the process because it is quite new and different, and that can be disorienting for people.
Then Lena Góra was this cool actress I had met who is from Poland, but also has this really nice Poland–America existence, where a big chunk of her formative years were in the United States. She had made a movie in English in America so she and I had met when it screened at a film festival in Poland. It’s all these nice serendipitous things around.
And then, like three months before—I had already decided I was going to make a movie in August in Warsaw, not knowing what it was going to be—and then I met Charli just randomly at a bar in New York when I was hanging out with Jeremy. I described this process that I just described to you, and that was really exciting to her.
We didn’t really know it—I didn’t know it—not only that Brat was about to happen, because it was pre‑Brat, but also that she was interested in acting and wanting to expand this area of her creative career, her expression in the world of film. So it was just a project that aligned so nicely for all of us.
That’s a thing I really like: when you’re not forcing things, you’re just open to the offerings of the universe, and you’re ready for them, and you move towards them with intention as they present themselves. That can create a really exciting, thrilling, and kind of natural, organic way to create and to experience.
It lets you not feel precious about things, because it’s not that you spent years on this script. It’s not that you spent all this money and time. These are resources that make it harder to let go of something when it’s not working. So by keeping things light, it allows you to be literally nimble and also creatively nimble. And that is the strength of making these movies in a small way.
You can’t make every movie this way—every movie requires its own approach, essentially. If a movie is going to have a bunch of dangerous stunts and explosions, then you’d better make sure that’s safe. But if your big risk is creative, then the safety is a different kind of safety. It needs to be that there’s not a lot at stake. That’s how you can then allow yourself and your collaborators to feel empowered to take those risks, to make those leaps—by literally telling them, “It’s okay if we don’t make a movie.”
So little is being spent. If we just have a really meaningful two‑week adventure together, then that’s fine. That’s our baseline. If a movie is on top of that, the movie is actually the icing.
Vanessa: Wow, that is incredible. That’s such a smart, fun way to look at it. Such a brilliant way to look at the creative process and what you can do. I also heard that in that infamous bar meeting, Jeremy O. Harris was talking you up. So you had worked together, he loved your work, and he talked you up to Charli xcx. So cool.
You were saying you don’t go in with a fully preconceived or written script, and you’re building it with your collaborators. How did that look on this new film?
Pete: It looked, as you describe, the same as on all the other movies. With each film—and it’s funny—as the films have kind of gotten bigger, with more eyes on them, I’ve also sort of challenged myself to have less and less preparation.
You would think, “Okay, you should be more prepared,” but with each film I’m kind of like, “How little can I get away with?” That’s also one of the theories I like to test. So in the first movie, there was a full outline. Then the next one it’s like, there’s an outline and a half. At this point, it’s like: at least half of an outline—but that’s all the outline.
It’s as simple as: “They arrive at the Airbnb.” That’s one scene. And then: “She goes on a walk.” Scene two. It’s that basic. And there are lots of reasons—there are lots of reasons for basically everything I do. I try to have everything be wearing multiple hats—not just me, but my collaborators and the decisions being made.
Vanessa: Just in that simple description of the first two scenes, I already know, having seen your incredible film, how much is actually going on in those scenes. Whether you’re talking about Charli and her boyfriend—it’s Will Madden, did you say is his name?
Pete: Yeah.
Vanessa: And their interaction, which—the way it played for me, and how I read them as a couple—absolutely played out. It was hinted perfectly. If you had written it in the script, you couldn’t have written it better for the way the story unfolds and their relationship plays out. Because it felt just a little cringe, like there was more love coming from him than her, and she needed to get away and take that walk.
She knew more about Warsaw, and then we later understand she chose it. And that walk is very meaningful, and you shoot it in really interesting ways. So I wonder, again, in your process—as you’ve said, you’re wearing so many hats, you’re really the only person shooting it, and you’re thinking about it from all of these different angles at once.
Pete: I mean, I’m shooting it. I’m eventually the editor. I’ve shot lots of things—not just my own things—but when I first moved to L.A., one of my ways of paying rent was doing behind‑the‑scenes videos of music videos and commercials. And I just got more and more efficient at the shots I would get, knowing what angles are good, what communicates what.
And I am always in dialogue with myself as the editor, where I try, as the cameraman, not to shoot shots that my editor doesn’t want. It makes my life easier when I’m eventually editing the film. So that rinse‑and‑repeat makes me more and more efficient at these things.
Vanessa: Yeah.
Pete: Yeah, it’s practice—it’s practice and love. And then knowing the different aspects of the art form, basically. By doing it a bunch, by practicing, you learn the tricks. You learn what works, you learn what doesn’t, just by doing it a bunch of times.
The journey from the Airbnb to the flower shop, I just did that in real life one day and just paid attention to what things I responded to. Then when we were there, we just did it again. But now we have Charli. Now I have Charli with me. I’m like, “Stand here, walk past this, see this cool blue glass thing—there’s a thing we can do with that.”
Vanessa: So you walk through as an actor, too. You’re in their shoes all the time too.
Pete: Right. I’m trying to have everything be kind of method. That’s also one of the cool things that comes from shooting the story in order: you really get to just experience the story in real time and the movie in real time. So you physically can respond to the kinds of shots we’ve been doing.
“We’ve been doing a lot of close‑ups, we want to feel something else. It’s been too many close‑ups for too long. We haven’t done this kind of move in a while, we haven’t done that kind of move in a while.” You just know that naturally. You don’t actually have to plan for it; you just have to stay present and you will continuously feel it.
The reason I don’t write scripts is not that I’m anti‑script; it’s that I’m trying to be really, really efficient. Who needs the script? You write a script—who actually needs the script? My collaborators don’t; they are down to not have it. I don’t need it. We don’t need to present it to financiers—who, often, that’s who you really need to provide it to, because they’re like, “What am I putting this money towards?” We don’t have those. And so, let’s not do it.
That can be scary, and it can be like, “What happens if you don’t?” And it’s like, let’s find out. The stakes are low enough that it’s okay. There’s also a very long creative process to filmmaking that is not just the shoot. The storytelling continues in the edit and in the sound design. There are a million tricks that can keep happening. It’s not like “fixing it in post,” it’s just “keep making the movie in post.”
Many of the things that don’t make sense on the day, or that you didn’t properly connect, you will have ways later to connect them. It’ll make it seem like you knew what you were doing the whole time. But you don’t need to. And the idea that other people do, on these big movies that have scripts, is a lie. They don’t either. And if they go through the process as if they do, I think that’s what results in the movies that I don’t even like—because they stop engaging through every step of the process and bringing more and more ideas.
Vanessa: Yeah. Your metaphor was so evocative—I kind of want to go back to the table made of bubbles. And I don’t mean to overload it, but I wonder whether you think about the different bubbles also including the contributions of your collaborators. Because I’m curious: how do they have these negotiations or conversations with you each day about what their character is going to do and say, and where they’re going to walk, and how?
Give me an example of one of your collaborators contributing to all of that—your actors.
Pete: It all is happening simultaneously. Even the outline—that outline came to exist via conversations with them. The idea for the whole movie came from conversations with them. It’s all happening together so that they are on board; they are already having input for everything. They are naming their characters. They are coming to understand who their character is at the same time I am—ultimately at the same time the audience is, too.
Vanessa: You realize, by the way, every single actor in Los Angeles and New York—wherever they are, actually—is listening to you say this, and they’re like, “How can I meet Pete Ohs? How can I become one of his collaborators? How can I make a movie with him?”
Pete: I know.
Vanessa: It’s the best way.
Pete: So the literal way it looks is: we shoot three scenes a day. We know what the first half of the movie is roughly going to be. It always changes by day three in meaningful but medium‑sized ways—often not huge ways where the whole movie has changed; you can’t go that far. But there will be changes.
The things we’re engaging with are just dialogue, which you do the night before or the morning of. I do a first draft of it—I’m just typing that into the Notes app on my phone. You can text that to the group text, and then everyone has that note on their phone. It’s collaborative, so as I update it, it updates. If they want to add to it, they can too.
So it just becomes this breakfast‑meeting writers’ room, where we’re both eating breakfast, we’re writing the script, we’re also rehearsing it because this is them going through the lines as well, having their input. Such that by the time we finish breakfast, we have our shooting script, and they already have an intimate understanding of the motivations for why their characters would say these things.
Often we’re also writing—and this is the best thing that can happen—you’re writing and conceiving of those scenes basically in the locations where you’re going to shoot. So there’s already an understanding of roughly what the blocking is going to be. We’re already starting so much further down the line of creative decisions that need to get figured out. That just makes the shooting that much more fluid and that much more natural.
Vanessa: And I noticed in the credits of your film, all of these actors—don’t they also have producing credits? They are your producers, they’re producing with you, or they have more than one credit, I would say, almost all of them.
Pete: I mean, they all have more than one credit. They’re also writers. Jeremy’s a producer as well; he produced the previous movie as well. And then Charli’s a producer as well. A big part of Charli being a producer is: she’s a massive star. So she has that kind of value to bring to it.
The thing I also think about, as far as the table of bubbles and what we’re doing, is trying to be aware of what I’m asking from different people. That’s also the reason why the shoots are only two weeks long—because it’s enough time to make a short‑but‑feature film, and a short enough time that basically anyone could fit it into their life.
Even if they are an international pop star, they can slot in two weeks. If they are a caterer in L.A., they also can get time off and not lose their job for two weeks. That again makes it not putting too much pressure on their real lives. Not too much is at stake just to go have this experiment, to go and play, and to go do something that might not result in anything, but also might result in something really cool and life‑changing.
Vanessa: I actually—this just popped into my head—but now that you’ve had this successful rhythm of one of these movies a year, are you being approached by investors who are like, “Oh, let me get involved with your process”? And are you rejecting financial offers? Will you? How do you handle that?
Pete: We have rejected some financial offers, because part of it is: more money, more problems. Help doesn’t always help. Don’t be greedy. Try to be lean.
Vanessa: So how are you making a living? This isn’t how you’re making a living?
Pete: No, not at all. I’m a freelance editor. I live very frugally. I don’t take vacations. The filmmaking is the vacation. And then if you do a good job of it, you get to go to film festivals, and that becomes a vacation too.
Vanessa: Totally how we look at it, too. That’s our life too. Okay, so where can we add to all that you’re sharing? Honestly, it is so inspiring hearing you speak and knowing that you’re having so much joy in the process, and you’re so creative and so collaborative and so productive. And by taking the weight and the pressure off, you enable better work.
If you were going to advise young filmmakers—or any filmmakers of any age, really—who are watching this and stuck, and feeling like they want to make movies in that “regular” way too, what would you advise them?
Pete: It’s not the first time I’ve had this question. I think often we all are asking each other these types of questions—just like, what advice, what are you learning, what useful thing have you brought back to the village for us to make our lives better?
One of the things that I’ve thought about a lot, as I’ve gone down this one‑man‑band approach, is the awareness that this is what all this tech has been for. That’s why we can edit on a laptop. That’s why these cameras shoot like they do. The camera I’m shooting on is from 2012. Cameras have been good enough for a long time.
The accessibility of that means something different: it means that movies shouldn’t be made the way they were before. It maybe means that filmmaking can be more like a hobby, in a way that can be good—in a way that I think more people should make movies.
We don’t all need to see everyone’s movies. Everyone doesn’t need to see my movie. But the good that can come for humanity from more people getting together without ego, but with creativity and empathy, to explore stories and learn things and maybe stumble across something that should be shared with more people—but maybe it should just be shared amongst your household, your small group.
So many good things come from it that I often just want to be encouraging: go make a movie that you don’t even need to post. Just go have fun doing it. Don’t think it’s going to pay your bills or change your life, but you still will be happy that you did it.
And don’t do it thinking, “I should max out my credit card.” We don’t live in that world anymore. That’s what’s cool about the technology. You can make a good‑looking movie—not through AI, but through actually engaging with the real world and with real people—and make something that feels fun and cool and is a cool experience for you.
And then for the people who are imagining and dreaming about it being a career, a life pursuit in that way, and are at those earlier stages—or at any stage, really—where they’re once again feeling these blocks or challenges or the uphill battle. It’s not that the uphill battle is going to go away. It’s always climbing a mountain to make a movie. People climb mountains for fun. People go climb Mount Everest for no reason except just to enjoy doing it.
But the thing I like about how I make movies, and with so little, is that it sort of proves all these things that you don’t actually need. I don’t need a script. I don’t need a sound guy with a boom pole. I don’t need a first AD. I don’t need a schedule. I don’t need to storyboard. I don’t need hair and makeup. I don’t need an art department.
It doesn’t mean that we don’t value those people when they’re needed. But you don’t need them just to make a movie. So as you’re conceiving your film, and if you’re feeling frustrated that you can’t just go make something, I want you to question all the stuff that you’re told you need just to make it—because you very much might not.
Try doing it without it, and then finding out that you actually do need it. That’s why it’s like, keep the stakes low so it’s okay that you fail. But if you test this theory—“What if I don’t? What happens if I don’t have that stuff?”—and it still works, then you’re a superhero. Because you can do this thing without all this. You can jump out of a plane without a parachute. How freeing is that? How liberating?
Vanessa: Those are brilliant last words for this. And we did hit the 32‑minute mark, except I feel like I just want to hear what you shot on, what you edit with, and how you do your score. Because if you don’t have money but you’ve got this excellent sound design and score, how did you pull that off?
Pete: I very much believe everyone is creative, and if you simplify things, you can become like a razor—you can become like a slicing razor. It doesn’t need to be a big thing ever.
So I’m shooting—I’m using basically nothing. I’m shooting on a hacked Canon 5D Mark III. This is just the camera I’ve owned since 2012. It shoots 1080 only. The hack allows it to shoot RAW, which means more color depth for the color grade. But it’s not necessary. Love and Work we shot on the same camera and we didn’t use the hack; it was just normal 5D. Again, that’s good enough. And “good enough” is still good.
For sound, they’re just wearing Sennheiser G3 lavs running into a Zoom H4n that I’ve owned since 2012—just the original one, the crappy one we all bought for like $350 in 2011. I just monitor it with earbuds. You don’t have to ride levels; you just have to make sure it’s not peaking.
I’m editing in Premiere Pro on a MacBook Pro. The way I do music is—when I started my career, my journey, I was doing a lot of music stuff. I loved music. Music was my identity: going to shows. I had a band in high school, I had a band in college, I had a music blog in the early aughts.
Vanessa: You’re totally confirming my theory that good directors have good musical taste and are musical. I think they’re very connected, the two art forms.
Pete: And so I have all these friends, these musician friends that I have collaborated with, made music videos with. It’s really fun to get to do that step of the process with them. But the first feature we made, we just did the score ourselves—me and my co‑director Andrea Sisson. She is very creative; she’s not necessarily a trained musician. I’m also not a trained musician. But if you just simplify: a score can just be the sound of, like, you know…(Taps a mug) If you actually committed to that, and you did your whole score as tapping on a coffee mug—that actually would be completely sick.
As opposed to, it doesn’t need to be orchestral. It doesn’t need to be any of those things. Nothing needs to be anything. You just need to be creative, engage, think about what it means. What does it mean for the score to be tapping on a coffee mug? Hopefully, there’s some connection to the movie. Hopefully it’s about an office worker who’s addicted to caffeine or whatever. And then it’s like, okay, that’s an amazing idea. But also it could be something equally simple.
So yes, music and sound are one of the tools in your toolkit to tell a story, but it doesn’t need to be John Williams. Often when it’s trying to be, it sucks. When you’re trying to do something you’re not, it feels bad. You don’t really reach that. But if you just not even tried it and had gone your own direction, it becomes something way more interesting and exciting—to me, anyway, and I think to a lot of other people as well.
Vanessa: Yeah, I love this. Incredible. And let’s remind people: they can see your new film—Erupcja—in theaters starting this Friday, April 17. How else—how can people follow you, find you, see your movies?
Pete: So it’s screening at New Directors/New Films April 11th and 12th in New York. It’s also going to start coming out in theaters the following week. It’ll be in L.A. and New York that weekend, and will be in Chicago on April 24th. That’s certainly the biggest release rollout of any of my films so far, which is very exciting.
I was just looking at the website where it starts to list the theaters it’s going to. It’s coming to Columbus, Ohio. It’s coming to Oklahoma City and Tulsa and Minneapolis and all these places. Somehow it got into a bunch of AMC theaters, which is cool.
So I was just considering it’s like, yes, it has Charli in it, but it’s also a movie shot on a hacked 5D Mark III. Something about that is really funny to me, but also cool and exciting.
Vanessa: Excellent and cool and exciting. Thank you so much. And we all can’t wait for this movie to come out and share it with everyone. Thanks for talking.
PETE OHS | DIRECTOR, WRITER, PRODUCER
Hailed by Indiewire as “a rising filmmaker well worth the attention,” Pete works as a director, producer, writer, editor and cinematographer. He has produced and directed five feature films in the past five years. In 2025, he was at Sundance with OBEX, a fantasy adventure feature he produced, cowrote and shot. This was followed by THE TRUE BEAUTY OF BEING BITTEN BY A TICK, a genre-bending horror satire he directed, co-wrote and shot premiering at SXSW.
A Film By Pete Ohs
Starring Charli xcx, Lena Góra, Will Madden and Jeremy O. Harris
Opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 17th
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In this vHopeful Conversation, filmmaker Vanessa Hope sits down with Brazilian writer-director Gabriel Mascaro to dive into the dystopian yet deeply life-affirming world of The Blue Trail, his genre-blending new film about 77-year-old Tereza, an elderly heroine who refuses to quietly disappear from a society that literally ships its seniors away in “wrinkle wagons.” Mascaro traces how the film grew from the late-life creativity of his own grandmother into a playful, visionary journey through the Amazon, where blue-snail visions, road-movie textures, and speculative politics collide to imagine aging as an awakening rather than an ending. Along the way, he and Vanessa explore how Brazilian cinema is reimagining the future, why centering older women on screen is a radical narrative choice, and how atmosphere, sound, and performance (including Denise Weinberg and Rodrigo Santoro) become tools for empathy, resistance, and dreaming new futures together.
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Fiercely independent journalist Amy Goodman has spent three decades holding the powerful to account, from war zones to the Democracy Now! newsroom, and in Steal This Story, Please! Oscar-nominated filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal turn their lens on her radical experiment in truly independent media. We talk about how their new film captures journalism’s power and peril in an era of media consolidation and authoritarian politics, what it means to make art as a form of resistance, and why Amy’s Jewish family newspaper, 9/11 reporting, and “trickle-up journalism” philosophy still model a different way of doing news. Along the way, Tia and Carl reflect on their own path from Bowling for Columbine and Trouble the Water to The Janes and now Steal This Story, Please!, and how they’re teaming with the Fall of Freedom campaign and independent outlets nationwide to defend the First Amendment and keep critical reporting alive.
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In this intimate vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope talks with actor, painter, and now bestselling memoirist Ione Skye about her book Say Everything, tracing how a life lived “inside a story” has shifted into real‑time presence and self‑forgiveness. They explore Ione’s evolving relationship with her first husband Adam Horovitz and how recurring dreams of him changed as she wrote, the lifelong imprint of her absent father Donovan and the bittersweet reconciliation that recast them as “two wounded poets,” and why so many of her great loves have been musicians. Ione reflects on early fame in River’s Edge, Say Anything, and Gas Food Lodging, why her career didn’t follow the expected Winona‑style trajectory, and how she now sees herself as much a writer and director as an actor. The conversation also dives into rock‑and‑roll patriarchy, her honest reckoning with “serial cheating,” and the pressures our culture places on marriage versus the sustaining power of creative community, from her mother’s legendary Wilton Place to the Weirder Together universe she now builds with Ben Lee.
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In this vHopeful Conversation for International Women’s Day, Vanessa Hope speaks with authors Anna Malaika Tubbs (The Three Mothers, Erased) and Soraya Chemaly (Rage Becomes Her, The Resilience Myth, All We Want Is Everything) about why authoritarians fear and target women and democracy, and how American patriarchy is rooted in the country’s founding. They trace how Black women and mothers have long been cast as “foils” to the system even as they drive the deepest democratic change, unpack the intimate link between unequal family dynamics and strongman politics, and connect petromasculinity, militarism, and today’s wars for resources to the policing of women’s bodies and reproduction. The conversation also explores the radicalizing role of technology for young men versus the leadership of young women across social movements, considers what it means to dismantle male supremacy in practice, and ends with a hopeful vision: recognizing that we are already part of a multi‑generational struggle to build real democracy, learning from global feminist gains, and imagining institutions and constitutions that finally vest power in all the people.
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In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with director Craig Renaud and producer–photojournalist Juan Arredondo about their Oscar‑nominated short Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud, exploring how Craig’s journey to bring his brother’s body home from Ukraine becomes the present‑tense spine for a film that interweaves two decades of verité reporting from Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Honduras, and beyond. They discuss the promise Craig and Brent made to keep filming even if one of them was killed, the emotional and ethical difficulty of turning the camera onto their own family story, and the painstaking editorial work of digging through vast archives and Brent’s journals to find moments that reveal his compassion and method. Juan reflects on bringing a frontline photojournalist’s eye to the film, their shared commitment to showing the humanity and relationships behind “clinical” news images, and how partnerships with the Committee to Protect Journalists and the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation shaped the film as a tribute to all war reporters while also supporting the next generation with safety and training resources. Together they talk about why the story belongs in a short, how sound and silence convey the true weight of war, how the Brent Renaud Foundation aims to mentor young filmmakers, and how powerful audience reactions—from veterans to families of killed journalists—have transformed their own grief and underscored the urgency of journalism at a time when truth is under attack.
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In this vHopeful Conversation, Vanessa Hope speaks with director Ryan White and producer Jessica Hargrave about their Oscar‑nominated documentary Come See Me in the Light, which follows poet Andrea Gibson and partner Megan Falley as they navigate a terminal cancer diagnosis, queer love, and creative collaboration. They trace the film’s origin to Tig Notaro’s unlikely pitch for a “funny” poetry‑and‑cancer documentary, describe arriving at Andrea’s Colorado home with no prior meeting, and unpack the deep ethical considerations of filming through such an intimate end‑of‑life period. Ryan and Jessica explain how they turned the house—and occasional hospital visits—into a visually rich, mostly verité cinematic space, why they built the emotional arc around Andrea’s live performance and extensive poetry archive rather than interviews, and how editor Bernice Chavez and their team used specific poems to carry biography, humor, and grief in surprising ways. They also reflect on Andrea and Megan’s own ability to alchemize devastating news into philosophical insight and jokes, how that rhythm shaped the film’s balance of heartbreak and levity, and how making this independently—before Apple acquired it out of Sundance—felt like a “life‑changing” experience that transformed their understanding of intimacy, grief, and what it means to live fully in the face of loss.
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