“Shut Up, Shut Up, Listen”: Julia Loktev on My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow

For a certain kind of cinephile (e.g. me) more than a decade’s been spent wondering about Julia Loktev. The brilliant director behind Day Night Day Night and The Loneliest Planet has been largely off-the-grid since the latter’s release in 2011, despite occasional interviews revealing work on a new film; it eventually seemed best to make peace with her career living a short, fascinating life.

Imagine the surprise and delight, then, of My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, the five-and-a-half-hour first half document of Russian journalists contending with their country’s suppressive politics and freshly started war in Ukraine. On the occasion of its debut at this year’s New York Film Festival––and as the film continues screening while seeking distribution––I spoke to Loktev about her attempts to mount a new feature, the formal ideology of this sprawling project, and where it’ll go in a second part.

The Film Stage: It’s nice seeing you again. We had that brief conversation at NYFF’s Opening Night.

Julia Loktev: We did!

About seeing you at a screening of Phantom Thread and fighting the desire to ask if you were making a new movie.

Oh, my God! Yes. I love that anecdote.

And I didn’t from the assumption you were tired of people asking, “Where have you been? What have you been working on?” So just to get it on the record: were you tired of people asking, “Where have you been? What have you been working on?”

I mean, it’s funny––you ask it very politely. [Laughs] You actually do. For the first years after The Loneliest Planet, I have to say, I got really lost. I wasn’t sure what was important to make. And at that point, during this period where it was very hard to know what I should be doing, that was an incredibly painful question, actually. I actually would try to avoid certain industry situations where people are like [High-pitched voice] “So what are you working on?” and it’s just like, “Kill me now.” Or people ask writers or filmmakers, “Why haven’t you made something in so long” and you don’t realize you’re walking into a giant room of pain.

At first it was genuinely that I didn’t know what I was doing and things that I started didn’t seem to make sense to me as something that I should keep pursuing. And then I had a fiction film that I co-wrote and loved, and really it seemed to be getting great responses. Then COVID happened, and it was a film that took place in three different countries. Right as we were getting traction, just as soon as we were getting going. It was an impossible-to-film film during COVID and it never quite recovered from that. And of course this film took three years––so far.

Do you still harbor hopes of making it?

Oh, boy. That’s a hard question. Some version of it, maybe, in some other version. But yes. But I definitely want to make another fiction which will be transformed by the experience of making this, which was thrilling and liberating and especially having experienced writer’s block for a while, to me this was incredible. It reminds me how much richer reality is than… well, at least my imagination, but I think most people’s imaginations. When I see scenes, you see how much of writing is on-the-nose. And people in reality, the way they shift from the most serious subjects to inappropriate humor; the level of detail in every single thing, like walking into somebody’s apartment and seeing these cat chairs––like, the face of a cat with sunglasses on them. If I had a production designer do that I might say, “Too much! Too much!”

I don’t know why I’m focusing on material details, because that’s a part of every conversation, but we go over to the house of this young woman––she’s a journalist and her fiancé is in prison on charges of treason––and she greets us at the door in this black-and-white, striped sweater that says “Paris” in bright letters. She’s offering us muffins and she’s describing how, when they came to search her apartment, the cops were asking, “Where’s the safe? In the bathroom?” and she’s like, “Well, it’s not in my Maxi Pads, obviously.” And how they asked her to turn on the AC and she’s like, “I’m not going to turn on the AC for you while you’re searching my apartment and rifling through my stuff and you’ve just arrested my fiancé for treason.” And that level of detail and personality and character and contradiction… if I can ever write like that––if I can ever write a fiction that has that level of just depth and humor––I’ll be very happy. So it’s been the most incredible filmmaking experience for me, going back-and-forth between fiction and documentary.

Because obviously this film, it’s not filmed like a conventional documentary. Most documentaries that people are used to, they’re very informative: somebody sitting in a room they’ve never been to giving you a formal interview explaining something, then their voice detaches from their face and there’s some B-roll, some voiceover. I really tried to film this like you’d film a fiction––following characters, hanging out with them where they would otherwise be hanging out in their kitchens and taxis––and just really focusing on them on people. Even when we were editing, my co-editor Michael Taylor said at some point, “I’m gonna treat them like I’m editing a fiction. Where do I feel them?” So I’m hoping to go back, but I think anything I do now will be so informed by the experience of filming this, which was just incredibly… I mean, I’m looking for the right word. I know it sounds strange to say “liberating,” but it was, because it makes you focus on what’s important and just have to pay attention.

Anna Nemzer,Julia Loktev, Ksenia Mironova, and Olga Churakova at NYFF62. Photo by Colleen Sturtevant.

I think one of the first things I keyed into was how you and Taylor were cutting around dead air and interstitials… like, if this were a documentary, my pauses as I try to form this question would be cut to emphasize every word of the sentence. It told me you weren’t looking for rehearsed, performed dialogue, while still playing fleet and cinematic.

We just tried to focus on what was interesting. There’s more dialogue, probably, in the first half-hour of this film than there is in all the other three films I’ve made combined; it’s non-stop. One of the things that we got early on when we screened it was, “I just need a breath! I need silence!” And I’m like, “These people never shut up. They have a lot to say.” It was actually really hard to find a breath. It was really hard to find a moment because they’re so intense, they’re so full of life, they’re so animated, and they’ve got so much to say that they really are just in these incredibly engaged, dense, super-dense conversations that swing from history and broader political concepts that, on a second, whip-turns into something funny. I think we just leaned into what it was. There’s no cutaways. There’s no scenes––what you’re used to in a documentary––where someone meditatively stares out the window. There really aren’t silences. There’s no b-roll. There’s no cutaways. We’re with the characters in close-up all the time, just living through it and focusing on them. It feels like you’re thrown into the midst of a conversation.

Now, of course, that’s all very intense editing. People ask me if I had a lot––I had a ton of footage––but actually I didn’t have many more scenes than what you see in the film. I mean, there are characters that I cut out, but it’s really about a process of very slow, very thoughtful distillation where you’re starting out with a scene. Like I said, it’s all taking place where you’re usually hanging out with people. Like, people have mentioned to me they eat a lot. I was talking to a friend recently––he’s Iranian––and isn’t that where people usually talk? Unless you’re giving a formal interview where we’re talking now. Most of the time, when you’re talking to your friends, there’s some food, some drinks involved; you don’t just sit down across from each other at a table and talk. So I tried to film it in a very, “We’re hanging out anyways!” This is where you have those conversations if you’re living through the moment.

But then it would be distilling a four-hour scene to ten minutes. There’s a scene where we wait for someone––one of the reporters has been arrested and we’re waiting for him outside of a police station. So that’s, like, six hours we’re out there. And I film most of it; I’m extremely patient. Then you’re trying to distill that and whittling away at it. I’m mixing my metaphors, but basically, “How do you get this down to a kind of condensed way?” But the silences were real hard to find.

Four hours whittled down to ten minutes implies room to find compositional intent and a visual structure as you’d have on a fiction film when setting up a shot with the DP. In this case you’re also the DP––you shot it on an iPhone.

Yes.

But there was at least one shot of someone staring out a window, I think in part four––they’re sitting by a windowsill––and that in particular made me think about compositional intent.

Usually if people are sitting in the window that’s because they opened a window and they’re smoking; they smoke a lot. No, no: I never told people where to sit; I never told people what to do. I compose instinctively as I shoot. Really it’s catch-as-catch-can, but really inherently I have––how do I phrase this––instinctively I have a compositional eye that’s mine and kind of a way that I’m attracted to filming people. So it is quite visual, I think, but I’m responding to the light in a place, and 99% of what I’m responding to is a person’s face, I think. That’s something that’s been said to me throughout my work. But I just get interested in people’s faces and their lives, and I really do have to film people that I love; I realized that. It’s the same with these women as it would be with actors: there has to be something really magnetic about that person that draws me in and makes me want to film them, and draws the viewer in. And then I just want to film them; I can’t stop filming them. So it is visual just because I’m composing on-the-fly, but it’s something that you’re really improvising in the moment. That’s amazing training in the filmic craft.

And I think that’s what I’m gonna circle back to, what I said in terms of… there is one parallel; I’m gonna interrupt myself. I tend to be very visually formal. The Loneliest Planet is a film where every shot is very precisely composed. I had rules that the sky couldn’t go all across the entire top of the frame; you could never see the sky go across. I had a little corner of sky. I had all these different, very precise visual instructions and rules of how it was supposed to look. Every shot was very choreographed––like a dance. And parts of Day Night Day Night. Although half of Day Night Day Night was filmed in the middle of Times Square, so that’s the parallel, I would say. So it’s not my first time working in chaos, and I realized I actually really love chaos. [Laughs] And that’s why it was so liberating: all these things that you think you need to make a movie; all those things that I think kept me from making a movie, including the enormous amounts of money you need to shoot. But having this story and having people you just want to watch and be with and be able to shoot. They’re running down the street and I’m running with them.

I have to say: the adrenaline aspect of it? I don’t know. It’ll be hard to go back to fiction in that way. But I think it’ll inform how I film actors; it’ll inform how I approach it and the amount of freedom. I don’t think I could do, after this, very tightly… I mean, maybe I’ll find myself thinking otherwise on the next fiction, because I think you have to find the approach for every film. But it just kind of… it’s hard for me to think of going back to very precisely choreographed shots and giving actors those kinds of restrictions. Actually, I loved the fact that I had absolutely no idea how someone was going to move; I wasn’t going to tell them how. And I think I appreciated it, actually. I think at one point one of the characters, Ira, it’s one of the bonding things we had very early on in the documentary. Because it’s about these women, and some of them had been declared foreign agents by the time we started shooting, by the Putin regime. But when we started filming, they’d been interviewed a lot because this foreign-agents thing had just happened and they’d been getting interviewed all the time by European media. People would show up and they’d do these standard journalistic stories about these girls being foreign agents.

And I think they were a little exhausted, a couple of them, from that. Especially the ones that were foreign agents. Ira at one point said she’d had this German team follow her and be like, “Can you walk into that subway again? Can you do that again?” And she was like, “I’m a journalist! I am not your actor.” And she did it, but she really resented that someone had asked her how to pose or be. And she’s like, “I like hanging out with you because you’re not telling me. We’re just here with you. You’re different.” And that was one of the ways that we bonded: they sensed that the way I filmed wasn’t… I once saw Bob Woodward speak at a gala and he said, “The most important thing you need to do is shut up.” [Laughs] Really, that was one of the most influential things I’ve heard in my life, even though I’m talking non-stop now.

[Pause] Oh, and then you stopped talking. I could just see the thought going to your head.

A reminder that maybe I should shut up. But when you’re filming just: shut up, shut up, listen. And it’s not as much like you’re watching, but you have to listen. Because also when you’re filming vérité, you have to anticipate, in a way; you don’t know when somebody’s going to say something, but you have to have this instinctive… and of course I spoke native Russian, which is what made it possible. I keep thinking; I have these fantasies. It would be really interesting to make a film in Iran now, but I don’t speak Farsi and it would be really difficult to respond without speaking the language, and you have to have that instinctual understanding.

The last two hours are interesting––the general tone feels much more coiled, intense, foreboding. And I wonder the extent to which that’s the film imposing a certain editorial danger––us knowing something the characters don’t, certain elements thus emphasized––and what was simply in the air. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

It’s interesting watching it with the retrospective knowledge.

No, absolutely. And this ties into what we were talking about before. You know, when we meet them, there’s a crackdown on the press; it’s intensified. People have a sense things are getting worse. And they have a sense the monster is going to eat them. They’re terrified and they’re almost hysterical. There’s a lot of hysterical laughter because they’re all trying to figure out, “How long can I stay in this country? How long can I keep fighting?” They’re all opposed to the regime. They all want to stay there and work. And they all have so much to say, but they’re the focus. And they have so, so much to say, and they’re so intense in speaking them. And then this thing that seems, in retrospect, inevitable––that people should’ve known––and yet completely impossible.

Then the “inevitable impossible” happens, as I call it: Russia starts a full-scale war in Ukraine. There had been a war for eight years in Ukraine, which Russia had started, and yet everyone––including the rest of the world, who allowed Russia to host a World Cup, continued to have regular relations with Russia––seemed to think this was weirdly okay and it was definitely not okay. But the idea of a war that Russia started on February 24, 2022 and now continues for almost three years was utterly unimaginable. Bombing Kiev? Bombing cities and civilians? Utterly, utterly unimaginable. Until it actually happens.

Once this happens, everyone is transformed; they’re speechless. That’s actually that silence that we couldn’t find at the beginning of the film, where they’re speaking non-stop––they have no idea what the hell to say. And they are silent because they are literally at a complete… it’s especially startling with the first character we start out with, and my co-director, Anya Nemzer. Anya, who is so brilliant and can explain everything and we see her on the morning of the war and she’s out of words; she’s struggling to find words. That is just what really happened. I have never seen them so silent as on that first day. So it’s not an editorial decision; it’s really what the reality of that moment felt like. And I think that’s true with everything. The process of editing was one of finding the essence of what the footage is telling us and not imposing something on it, not using it to structure a story.

I just want to talk about editing a little bit more. There’s a lot of things… again, this film, people talk about it in [Laughs] all these different ways. It’s kind of interesting now, reading the reviews; we’re getting a lot of genre-bending. Some people say it’s a thriller and then they’re like “with elements of dark comedy” and a reality show, and I’ve heard, like, a Russian novel. Really, it’s a whatsit. It has all these different elements, and on the one hand you can kind of just hang out with these people, but it’s actually so dense that it probably… I think it goes down easy. It’s not hard to watch. But probably there’s a lot of things that can be gained on a second viewing, I have to say. It’s actually incredibly densely packed, in the sense that there’s a lot of things that seem kind of surface. Most of the threads. There’s all these little things that seem like diversions and they actually do come together.

Like, if you watch it a second time, you realize there’s these threads––like the way that violence against women keeps coming up. Where we start out in the first episode, somebody speaks about a society where we talk about power and we say either people who are allowed are allowed everything or we say, you know, violence is bad. And this is a society that has no law that prohibits domestic violence, that has no shelters, and declares a woman who is advocating for a law against beating your wife and trying to create shelters and advocating for laws against domestic violence––this society declares her a foreign agent. It’s a society that criminalizes being gay. It’s a society that institutionalizes people with disabilities. And people kind of talk about these, and if you’re watching it the first time you might be like, “Why are they talking about disabilities? Why are they talking about violence against women?” But if you see it and keep following these threads and think about it, you realize: it’s not a film about the war; it’s a film about the society that made this war. And all of those things are the things that make the war crimes Russia commits in Ukraine possible.

So there’s all these little threads. It seems like there’s random things they’re talking about, but they’re all about power. They’re about a level of brutality that permeates Russian society. That is what makes this ongoing war so possible and acceptable to Russian society. So there’s a lot of stuff that may seem like you’re going off on some other tangent, but it’s all part and parcel of what makes a fascist, totalitarian society.

I’d be remiss not to ask where you’re at with the second half, Exile.

So I picked up shooting with the characters literally two days later in Istanbul, as they were moving hostels, and we were moving across. The first half takes place all in Russia at the end of the first week of the full-scale war, by the end of which they all have to leave the country. The second half I’ve filmed, now, in 14 countries, following from the immediate, “What do we do now? We have no idea where we’re going, what country” to a much larger question of, “How do you get used to exile?” Most of it has been shot. I mean, I still shoot sometimes. Like, I was shooting when Navalny was killed, at TV Rain, and when important things happen I shoot a little bit, but it’s the long game because Exile is a very different kind of sense of time. Most of it’s been shot, so I think we’re editing it now.

I’ll either shoot if something wonderful––like Putin dies––happens. [Laughs] Or something terrible happens. Otherwise I’ll probably shoot a little bit just so we leave off as close to where it’s finished with our characters as possible. But yeah: it follows, kind of, over the last two years, exile. A lot of the characters have faced threats so it becomes a different kind of situation in Exile. So I’m actually excited to get back to it. We actually had planned to keep editing the whole thing––and I really do think of it as “the whole thing”––and we had these test screenings at my house just to make sure it was making sense to people, because I want to be able to tell this to people who can name Putin and Navalny the end, and when we screened the fifth episode people were like, “You have to get this out now.” Exile is season two, part two, a sequel. Then we switched and, you know, got into the New York Film Festival and paused editing the second half. Now I’m excited to get back to it. And now I’ll shut up, like Bob Woodward told me to.

No, I’m the one who’s asking. I hope this is the kind of substantive piece the film deserves and gets it some larger attention.

Thank you so much. And if you see me in a movie, say hi. Next time you see me [Laughs] in a good movie sitting in front of you, just say hi.

My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow plays this Thursday and Saturday at the New York Film Festival and is currently seeking distribution.