Pete Ohs Wants Filmmaking to Be Fun — and for You to Edit His Movies

The director of "Erupcja" tells IndieWire about embracing his inner 15-year-old's love of video-making —and about letting online fans edit the trailer of his latest film.

The use of the term “brat” has become eroded of meaning — and yet Charli XCX’s appearance in the new film “Erupcja,” in which she plays a woman visiting Warsaw in summertime, might be keeping it alive.

That film’s director, Pete Ohs, has been a brat about filmmaking for a long time now. The director, in conversation with IndieWire, embraces the term affectionately. Ohs makes small-cast features deeply grounded in particular places, following misfit characters who may or may not relate to them. The latest, “Erupcja,” is a project that came out of Ohs living in Warsaw. He worked collaboratively with actors Lena Góra, Will Madden, Jeremy O. Harris, and Charli XCX to devise a story about a couple visiting Warsaw in advance of a marriage proposal and the stormy undercurrents that might destroy it.

Even before the movie came out, Ohs put some of the movie’s storytelling in the palms of viewers — he released all the footage from the “Erupcja” trailer online for anyone to take and edit however they choose.

“You’re not supposed to do it,” Ohs told IndieWire. “You’re going to reveal or spoil the movie; you’re going to let something supposedly bad happen, you’re going to lose control. And so much of the spirit of how I make movies is about letting go, following the intuition… Years ago, when I made ‘Jethica,’ I live-streamed the edit because I knew that if I were 16-years-old and if I could sit in on the edit of ‘Boogie Nights’ or something, just how much I would’ve loved that.”  

The deconstructed trailer footage is available for download online now for that precise purpose, and Ohs has seen many different remixed edits come in through Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. That rapid feedback aligns with what Ohs sees as healthy for film in general.

The director could have had a pretty traditional indie film career story. He came up through the music video world, directing for bands like Wavves and Best Coast; then he got a screenplay into a workshop, raised the funds for a low-budget indie, got into a festival… everything that people are still taught is the track for emerging artists, even if that track feels more insubstantial each passing year. Ohs bounced against it so hard that it left him with an existential crisis. 

“It made me consider quitting. I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’” Ohs said. “That sent me down this journey of the last five, six films of making movies like a 15-year-old, of chasing that fun. Not trying to be a ‘real’ movie anymore and just doing things how I like to do them, which is to keep things small, to not be controlling. Greed is not good. Smaller is better. Less is more.” 

The big swing of “Erupcja” is its location — Warsaw, Poland, as hapless would-be fiancé Rob (Will Madden) puts it each time — which meant that Ohs had to use SAG rates for a standard theatrical feature, because there are no SAG contracts for low-budget films shot outside of the United States. His was an edge case, but the different contract class raised the minimums beyond the types of agreements that allowed him to go as low as $10,000 for a film budget, which he was able to pull off on his early feature “Jethica,” and which he stayed pretty close to on his films “Love and Work” and “The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick.”

Ohs still brought the same run-and-gun, video-making, improv ethos to the larger-scale (for him) film, though. And he still made the film quickly; that’s something that gets harder and harder to do within the traditional system and is much more in line with vibrant, inventive video-making styles on Reels and TikTok.

“I was [reading] about the Daniels’ new project, and of course, we can’t wait for whatever their next thing is. But I was thinking that they shot [‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’] before the pandemic. I’m sure they’ve been doing stuff, directing TV and commercials, and who knows what. But the reason Spielberg got so good is because he was directing TV episodes constantly; and then he started making movies; and then he was making ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Schindler’s List’ in the same year,” Ohs said. 

Ohs sees filmmaking as a set of muscles, ones which, if you don’t get to work them out often enough, will never be as strong as they could be. 

“ I was a kid who had this hobby with his friends of getting together to make videos. So this is just like the thing I like to do for fun. But I wasn’t coming from any industry connections or even awareness. I was in Ohio, so I didn’t go to film school. But I always had this desire to create, which I see really mirrored in the two generations below me, the YouTube generation and the TikTok generation. They’re all creators. I very much identify with that,” Ohs said. 

Hence, the “Erupcja” footage, an offering Ohs has put out to see what inventive things other creators can do with it. And if Ohs can give back one thing as he continues to make small movies with the same camera he’s owned since 2012, it’s a sense of confidence in putting scenes together and moving quickly, in keeping the momentum going so that he and his collaborators can keep having fun. 

“Whenever I’m in situations of trying to quickly identify where the actor [should] stand, why would they stand there, how would that influence the infinite variations that come into play, and communicate that to the people who are waiting for [answers], that’s one of those muscles that doing it a lot does hone your ability,” Ohs said. “Even if you’re not necessarily making the absolute best decision ever, you’re making a solid decision that will work and allow things to keep moving forward. 

The ability to keep moving forward is ultimately what helps Ohs keep making movies. “ It’s really some sort of conversation with the universe where I am just kinda like moving forward and trying to stay open to the gifts that the Movie Gods can give and the opportunities that they can present,” Ohs said.

“Erupcja” is now in theaters courtesy of 1-2 Special.