Cracking The Code with Eugene Kotlyarenko

A chat with the director of The Code about how to make a found footage rom-com and why he wanted to set a movie during the COVID lockdowns.

In November of 2021, filmmaker Eugene Kotlyarenko travelled to Toronto present a mini-retrospective of his work to date curated by K-Fab, including a smattering of the highly-improvised, microbudget films with which he established himself, as well as the then-recently released Spree, a found-footage horror-comedy about an influencer-slash-rideshare driver going on a murder, uh, spree. Titled URL:IRL, the retrospective highlighted Kotlyarenko’s authorial obsession with “screen” life and how human interactions are affected by digital connectivity.

That weekend became a fruitful period for the city’s independent filmmaking scene. Kotlyarenko himself collaborated with Nate Wilson and several other Torontonians on the short film The Straight Ball, shot in a single day with no script and virtually no time for preparation, while his lively Q&A sessions, replete with stories about shooting entire feature films in less than week, inspired a wave of no-budget filmmaking in the city, from Nate Wilson’s The All Golden, to Braden Sitter, Sr.’s The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man. To steal and mangle a famous quote about The Velvet Underground, one might say that everyone who went to the Eugene retrospective made their own New Toronto Bizarre movie.

On May 2, Kotlyarenko returns to Toronto to present his latest film, The Code, which plays on the filmmaker’s obsessions with surveillance technology, the omnipresence of cameras, and various aspects of internet culture. Describing the film as a “synthesis” of his earlier DIY films and the “mania” of the more ambitious Spree, The Code is a found footage rom-com about Jay and Celine, two artist-types who rent a house during COVID to rekindle their dwindling, sexless relationship. Celine’s desire to make a documentary about the situation triggers a cat-and-mouse war of surveillance involving various types of spy cameras, screen-record apps, and other technological ways to keep track of each other.

The Code is a crowd-pleasing experiment in using found footage in a non-horror context. Dasha Nekrasova (cohost of Red Scare) and Peter Vack (director of www.RachelOrmont.com) star as the couple, with Anora scene-stealer Ivy Wolk and Kotlyarenko regular Vishwam Velandy in supporting roles. We chatted with the filmmaker about making the film, the challenges of shooting a found footage in this way, and what it was like to lose the star of the film just a few days before production began.

Bleeding Edge: So I remember a few years ago, you were posting on Instagram with your spy glasses. I was curious if that was part of the development of the film, or was that something that you thought was cool and eventually worked into the movie?

Eugene Kotlyarenko: No, I had already written that into the script and I wanted to do tests. I bought a pair off Amazon. Actually, I bought a few different pairs and I tested them out. There were a bunch of things I had written into a script that I had never personally experienced. I didn't actually ever engage in lo-fi anxiety surveillance of my girlfriends or whatever.

Also, I had never been to an escape room when I wrote the escape room sequence, and originally it was in an ancient Egyptian room, with tombs and queens and kings. So after the script was done, I said, I should probably check out an escape room to make sure, and what I found out was that one, I did nail it, that my satirical, imagined escape room was exactly how it is in real life, and two, that I actually love escape rooms, and since then I have become an escape room-aholic.

BE: I've only been to one escape room, and it was over Zoom. It was during the pandemic.

EK: That's extremely odd. Because the entire fun of it is that you're in a physical space, and you're trying to, quote unquote, “escape.”

BE: It was a work thing.

EK: Team-building, I guess they call it. But that is the sickness of COVID. That they could even foist that upon you.

BE: To go back to the spyglasses and all the different sorts of cameras that you ended up using, was there any point where you were struggling to know which camera you would use for a given scene? Or was there any point where you didn't really know what you were gonna do, and you had to go out and look for something?

EK: Once Bart Cortright, the director of photography, came on board, which was a month before we shot the movie, we put together a spreadsheet, like, Here are all the possible kinds of spy cameras, and then I was like, This fits in with this scene, this fits in this scene. Oh, that's interesting! A spy pen. How could we use a spy pen? And Okay, we can't figure it out. So we don't need a pen. Some things I had researched, like the spy glasses or the two-way app. That was all scripted, that there's gonna be an app on the phone that's gonna surreptitiously record you and your screen behaviour. But other things, Bart found them. Then we went through the script, scene by scene, through a spreadsheet, and plotted out all of the cameras that we were going to use per scene.

BE: That leads into my next question. You have Barton Cortright, who also did www.RachelOrmont.com, as director of photography, but what does a DP actually do on a movie like this?

EK: Unfortunately, I have to say that one of our most fertile creative periods was what I was just describing, which is the prepping and analysis of scenes, and the arc of the camera as a character. Because once we got on set, this is a pretty low-budget movie. The entire camera department, including lighting, electric, gaffing, was three people, and initially it was just two. It was Bart and a guy named Jake Garcia, and then we got a guy named Newton Ward after day three, because we realized that this was a very challenging environment to maintain technically, to keep all the cameras running and monitoring them and keeping track of what's going on, and making sure you're getting, not even a pristine image, but any image at all.

Bart's main job, sadly, throughout the shoot itself, once we established the framing that we liked for the surveillance cams, or the directions that we wanted to give, for the actors for their handheld cameras and stuff, was just camera babysitting. Obviously, he controlled all the practical lights, and we put in cinema-friendly bulbs and stuff like that. But because it has a reality TV-surveillance aesthetic, the use of expressionistic lighting would have felt antithetical. But there is camera choreography throughout that I'm proud of, and I think is interesting. For instance, the scene where Jay and Celine go up the hiking trail after their COVID shot, and they swap cameras, and then there's that shot, I guess it's a bit of a spoiler, where Celine vomits off camera. That was very complicated thing to arrange. There's fun stuff that happens, but yeah, Bart's not operating a camera for most of the movie.

BE: In terms of collecting footage, you would have had all these cameras running all the time. So what was the editing process like?

EK: Really hard! We had two great editors because this is a movie that required two beautiful brains on top of my own to make sense of it. During the shoot we had Tucker Bennett [director of Planet Heaven] daily editing what we had shot one or two days before, and we had Sabrina Greco [director of Lockjaw] editing and logging as an assistant editor. It depended on the setup, but sometimes she worked through the night and Tucker would edit through the day, or Tucker would edit at night and Sabrina would wake up and log all this stuff that we shot overnight.

Those were very long days for both of them. It was super time-consuming, and then, luckily, Sabrina was available after the shoot was over, so we asked if she would join us as an editor. They're both editing beasts. They have different styles, and I've always enjoyed synthesizing the styles of different voices in my work because my work is so maximalist, and I have a lot of variety in the type of humour or the type of aesthetic approaches I have. So working with a bunch of different filmmakers on this, from Sabrina to Tucker, to Dasha [Nekrasova], to Peter [Vack], to Nick Corirossi. A lot of different voices on this project were directors with a vision.

BE: You mentioned the COVID vaccine gag, and this movie is obviously set during the pandemic, so I'm wondering how important that was to the conception of the movie?

EK: This is a movie that's been in gestation, kicking around in my mind for a really long time, two decades. This concept of a couple duking it out over user-generated found footage and getting different perspectives on a relationship. I've been mapping it out over the years through blog posts, etc., Maybe I keep it all on social media between all the different platforms and blah blah, and this and that, but I could never quite, quote unquote, “crack” The Code. When COVID came around, that was the final little push. Okay, it has to be within this milieu where they're stuck in the house together. If it wasn't for COVID they probably would have broken up, but can they come out the other side? Could we use all this surveillance stuff that I'm interested in?

In the context of COVID, everyone became an existential, depressed homebody artist and had to embody that for a little while. At a certain point, everyone was living on hope. I hope I don't die. I hope people I love don't die. I hope this ends soon, I hope I can go to a movie theatre or a museum or whatever. I thought that milieu pushed me over the edge, so I really started getting more and more into this as my next project during late COVID. I finished the script a year after COVID, and we filmed it pretty soon after that.

It felt like the right context for a paranoid couple. I am like Celine, in the movie, who says this is literally an Earth-shattering event that is happening to everyone around the world and we're gonna forget about it when it's over. In a way, I think that did happen. I'm in Atlanta, and I walked by an awesome old art deco sign that says “Open 24 Hours” and it's a beautiful diner. And I'm like, Okay, cool. It's 9 o'clock, I'm gonna go have a late dinner after the movie, but it's closed at 6pm. When I go to other cities, I'm like, Oh, yeah, do you have a cool bookstore? They're like, Yeah, we did, but it died during COVID. There are images from COVID that are interesting. Images such as all the masks littered on the ground, and I always thought that was pretty funny and interesting, so when Celine drops her mask in the film, I don't think that was intentional. I said to Dasha Oh, that's awesome, do that every take, please.

BE: One of my favourite stories from that period is that I have a friend who got the COVID shot because he had insomnia, and he thought it would make him fall asleep.

EK: Not that I'm some sort of anti-masker person, but it had an effect on me. COVID had an effect on the world, and the shot had an effect on me. It gave me a lot of energy, and then it made me sick, and I had really weird dreams, so I thought, Okay, better put this in a movie before even I forget that this all happened to me.

BE: So you have said that your biggest inspiration for the movie was the Japanese writer, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. I don't know anything about this guy, so I'm wondering if you could give us the rundown.

EK: He's one of the giants of a 20th Century Japanese literature. A lot of his work deals with the gamesmanship and destabilization of romantic situations, or characters who have hidden motivations when it comes to their intentions towards other characters. Usually, the narrator is always wondering about the reality of the intentions of other characters that they're lusting after. The easiest comparison would be to Nabokov because he has a proto-Lolita book called Naomi about an older man falling for a young girl who is Japanese, but very Westernized.

He also wrote a book called The Key, about a couple that keeps diaries. Each chapter alternates between the husband and wife, and they have different perspectives on what goes down between them in their twisted love life. I always thought that was a really cool form for storytelling. These dueling perspectives via diary, and that's why for two decades I've been trying to figure out how I can use that inspiration from the novel to make a film where a couple could offer different perspectives of their reality.

I really wanted to do something radical. And then ultimately I had to go with the whole, Okay, we're making a documentary, as the backbone structure, and then from Celine's documentary I could build out all of the Eugene-y type things I like with the Phone and the GoPros and the spy cams and all that other stuff. Before, I was like How can I make it all just from social media platforms? Can I just jump between the different apps? Also, during COVID, Zoom came along and that was pretty obvious.

There's one key moment, a “key” moment in The Key, where it becomes clear to the husband and wife that the other person has found their diary and is now reading it. At that point, you start thinking how much of this is being written to manipulate the other person's perspective. Which is not something that really happens in The Code, but I did want to foreground this concept of the edit as the final stage of writing a film, and really interrogate how the edit works, and how the edit is the final voice of narrative authority.

BE: I want to touch on the fact that Shia LaBeouf was supposed to be in the movie, but dropped out just before production began. What were the challenges in terms of replacing him at such short notice, and having Peter Vack take over the role?

EK: That was a really interesting period for me. We got through the hurdles of Will we work together? Are we on the same page? Are you ready for this? because he's a very complicated person and has a complicated backstory. Once came to the same page and accepted each other as collaborators, he was an amazing collaborator. We spent many, many hours filming him and Dasha falling in love and coming up with a backstory for where this movie begins. That, I have to say, is one of the most joyful and interesting filmmaking periods of my life, the pre-Code filmmaking, because there are many, many hours of footage of that. Fifty, sixty, seventy hours of them falling for each other.

Along the way, there were a lot of questions from Shia about the character and about why he was such a cuck and such a beta, and how he could possibly have gotten there and not cut it off, and I think those were some of the red flags to me that I should have taken it more seriously, like, Hey, man, you have to accept this. I think, ultimately, that impasse, amongst a bunch of other things, made it clear that maybe Shia wasn't right. He was the right person to play Jay falling in love, but maybe he wasn't the right person to play Jay at the state we find him in this film.

When he dropped out, we looked far and wide as quickly as we could for other actors, and then it became super duper, obvious that the only person who could really fill the shoes of this role was Peter, because, not only is he a great actor, but he also has a relationship with Dasha. They're very close friends, and I'm very close with Peter, and they wouldn't struggle to get into a backstory that involved intimacy, or knowing each other, or knowing each other's little quirks.

Obviously, putting Dasha and Peter in the same movie creates an impression, like, This is the fucking New York shitpost movie, this is the Dime Square movie! That wasn't necessarily my original intention with the film, in terms of the extra-textual meaning behind it or context for it, but it is what it is, and I think it's important to capture cultural moments. I was just with some friends of mine that I hadn't seen in a long time, and one of them had rewatched A Wonderful Cloud, and they were saying to me Oh, I'm so happy you made that because that was our lives in LA in the early 2010s. I forgot all that stuff and half of that stuff isn't there anymore.

For better or worse, with Peter and Dasha being the stars of the film, it captures a certain part of the New York zeitgeist and the larger, extremely online, cultural zeitgeist that happened at the end of the 2010s and into the 2020s. Very COVID. Actually, Dime Square is a very COVID type of product and project. Ultimately, everything in a movie happens the way it's supposed to, and Peter was slotted right in. In the course of four days, Peter had to memorize and learn all the lines, and there were a lot of lines. A lot of things didn't make the cut, and he had to adapt himself to the idea. Peter and I had talked about working together for a long time, and he was really into the idea of doing a Eugene improv movie. But from the jump, I wanted this to be very faithful to the script for a lot of different reasons, including the fact that there's a schematic, logistical puzzle embedded within the film. There was a little bit of friction in that Peter was like, Yeah, the Eugene Improv movie I'm in, and he was going off script a lot, but we ultimately found the sweet spot between the improvisatory instincts that he had and the script.

BE: Is there a distinction in your head between this movie and Spree, which are a bit more scripted than the micro-budget, improvised movies that you've done?

EK: Yeah, this is the synthesis of all my work in a way. Something I realized was that probably most people who had seen Spree had and would not see any of my other films, and most of the people who are into Wobble Palace or my earlier work actually didn't see Spree. There's very little overlap between those. Why? Because one is very much a genre film with known actors, and the other ones are more underground, personal films. I wanted to combine those two interests and make something that had the approach and mania of Spree, and then place it in the romantic underground context of my earlier films, and try to make a new form. Because found footage in the context of horror, people understand what that is, but extremely online found footage in the context of a rom-com, no one knows what that is. I was excited to synthesize things I've done before into something new

BE: A lot of your films have these recurring themes around found footage or social media, or surveillance stuff, and I'm wondering if you have it in your mind to make something that's a little more traditional? Or is this your mode going forward?

EK: No, no, my next movie will be way more traditional. Whatever the stories require. I am, of course, interested in innovating cinematically and exploring different grammar, and reflecting the approach that contemporary viewers have towards “content,” and toward screens, and finding new forms of voyeurism through formal ideas that seem relevant.

But I love cinema and the history of cinema. I am interested in doing something more traditional and “conventionally” cinematic. My next film will be like that with a few little elements of live streaming and an internet detective sleuth thing. But I want to get in, like everybody, my Scorsese Dolly track push-in shots. I look forward to that and figuring out ways to innovate within the more traditional frameworks of cinema.

BE: Any last words to people who might be coming out?

EK: Yeah, come on out! Let's fill the theater. It's a comedy and I've seen it with packed, sold-out crowds, and it plays really well, and a lot of people are laughing!

BE: Oh, I did want to ask about the IMAX screening. Was it Tallahassee?

EK: That was a really strange screening. The context of it was funny, because it was at a planetarium-style kids centre where kids watch videos about how the comet killed the dinosaurs and stuff like that. And that's why the screen is huge, because it's supposed to be immersive with these educational videos. And there's even a bench there that looks like a film slate, and on it said, “Director: Edu-tainment.”

Unfortunately, the screening was immediately after a very American thing, which is a school shooting. There was a shooting on the campus in Tallahassee at FSU and what I didn't realize was that the theatre is on campus. So what would have normally been a very lively and thriving uh environment was really dour. It was understandably dour, but the screening itself had a contradictory vibe. It is definitely going to be the biggest screen that the movie ever plays on, and it looked and sounded amazing. I watched the first ten minutes and was like Holy shit! This is incredible! But the crowd was not as lively or packed as it would have been in other circumstances.

As with all film buffs. I have definitely been in a largely empty theater, watching a movie that deeply affected me, so that was the tack I took towards it, not to be disappointed and understand the context of something really tragic that happened here. If these people are out here, maybe the movie could deeply affect them, and I don't know if it did, but I've sat in empty movie theaters with 15 other people been rocked by a movie.

BE: Sometimes I prefer it.

EK: Yeah, sometimes I prefer it, and it makes total sense when it's something esoteric or experimental or whatever. But The Code is a goddamn fun ass movie! It's really a lot of fun with the crowd. So Ihope people fill up The Paradise, and we have a nice night.