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
