A conversation with Palme d’Or-winning producer Alex Coco
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In Sean Price William’s The Sweet East, we are told “Everything Will Happen,” which may be a warning to never get too caught up in one train of thought. As Lillian, the film’s adolescent protagonist, begins her Labyrinth-like adventure through eastern USA, she finds everyone caught up in their own incredibly complex ideological webs, much like the people we see (or might be) if spending more than five minutes on Twitter.
What do an anarchist and a Nazi have in common? A Muslim and a monk? Fervent artists and dissociative teens? The answer is simple: a complete lack of anything real to say. But that is something real to say. All of these factions, who each feel like embodiments of their own respective, niche corners of the Internet, are nothing more than cultish echo chambers. Strangely, it is a millennial who may have accidentally struck on what might be the best depiction of how Gen Z navigates life: explore it all with numb detachment.
Fancy a Trip to Charm City
The beginning of this “satirical surrealist road film” truly begins after Andy Milonakis’s Pizzagate-inspired character shoots up the bar that Lillian and her high school classmates congregate in, immediately making it clear that the story will interact with our current digital landscape in meta-fashion. The casting of Milonakis – a Twitter legend, MTV star, and personified meme – subtextually contributes to the feeling of strolling through a social media wormhole. Funnily, while they never share screen time, it is difficult to avoid thinking of Milonakis’s comedy hip-hop trio, “Three Loco,” whose second member, Simon Rex (or Dirt Nasty), is soon to be introduced. It would only take rapper Riff Raff, who could have easily been featured in this project, to complete said reunion. We digress. The point is that seeing Milonakis turns on a switch in the brain that is undoubtedly tied to our intangible online world.
After escaping, Lillian runs off to Baltimore with Caleb, a communist and self-described “artivist.” After meeting his punk-rock friends at a gathering – so dirty, it reminded us of the drug-dealing boyfriend’s apartment in JOE (1970) – Caleb shares a potential “statement of theme” moment, as he endlessly blabs on about being obsessed with processing events through digital means. While he shows Lillian the videos that he records and collects, he says to her that he’d like to make the Internet an aesthetic – which might be a dumbed-down foreshadowing of what is yet to come.
Near the end of this chapter, Caleb pulls out his penis and it’s got piercings all over it. Very hard to imagine if you haven’t already seen it. Right now you might be thinking, “How many piercings could you possibly fit onto one penis?” Go find out.
Right on the Delaware
While on the perennial voyage to find something that isn’t boring, Lillian decides to join Caleb on a trip to batter a secret meeting of US fascists. They start their hunt in a local nature preserve, but the inexperienced communists are completely out of their element, almost immediately becoming lost and set on by swarms of mosquitos; particularly Caleb, who at this point has also been ousted as a rich “boy scout.” Someone who overly identifies with the working class that his parents help to oppress, while an easy target, should be ragged on until the very day that class conflict itself ceases to exist. However, it is as if the film is also saying that this rebellious anti-establishmentarianism is a parasite that can only survive off the back of the same society it loves to hate. Lillian separates, leading her right into the Nazi frat party her group had been searching for. While there, she is approached by Lawrence (Simon Rex), a self-declared pedant professor with a love for Edgar Allan Poe and Hitler. With his kind demeanor and large wallet, Lillian sees an opportunity. She takes on the persona of one of the girls she had met earlier, using the woman’s story of abuse to garner emotional sympathy from the man who thought himself too smart to be tricked by world governments and media conglomerates, yet who is gullible enough to be tricked by a teenager playing hooky.
This is where the strongest writing comes into play. It’s a Mark Twain-style satirization that is so effective, with its sympathetic, non-ironic POV, that the unobvious stance on Nazi radicalism is probably going to be mistaken by the film criticism community as being condoning. But of course, they would! Their idea of satirical writing is within the safe boundaries of whatever Ruben Östlund made that year. However, at one point in the canon, Birth of a Nation (1915) was the greatest achievement in film. So who is really correct when our collective idea of “right” is constantly changing? It’s an idea we think is referenced with the identical and purposefully taboo chapter-separators, as well as the fact that Lillian is likely a play on the name of D. W’s main actress, Lillian Gish. This, coupled with the fact that Lawrence’s portion of the story takes place after Lillian crosses the Delaware, which connects to George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware (a painting that was reworked for one of the film’s posters).
People throughout the film obsess over their uniqueness. It’s exactly like Lawrence’s compliment to Lillian about her clothes, “Nothing too contemporary, but I sense that you aren’t either.” Any counterculture ideology, even Lawrence’s coquette Nazism, is a comfort during societal collapse. A blanket to sleep with still comforts Lillian, despite it being covered in swastikas.
Slight tangent: Lawrence’s fatal decision arrives at the point where he lets Lillian come with him to New York, a choice that was motivated by her flirting her way into his bubblingly pedophilic heart. When she is convincing Lawrence to bring her, an electric fan blows a steady wind through her hair like an ’80s beer ad. Then she heads upstairs to a bath, allowing the man to stalk her from the hallway as he quotes Poe’s “Annabelle Lee.” This poem is about a childhood couple whose love is cut short by jealous gods that send down a strong wind, giving the young woman a deadly sickness. This was Poe’s last poem before he died, written in reference to his first wife, who was just thirteen when she married the twenty-seven-year-old poet. From Lawrence’s perspective, there are some obvious similarities in the two situations; a grown man and a young girl’s love story, ending in the girl’s death via a cold and broken world. He thinks their affair would kill her. However, Pinkerton flips the story on its head. The wind of the fan (i.e., the wind of the gods) convinces Lawrence to bring the girl he loves to New York, but he is the only one with passion in the relationship, so he is the only one able to get hurt.
Our “Juliet” lets “Romeo” go to the pearly gates alone, yet another example of Lillian’s unfeeling stoicism saving her from Lawrence’s perceived fate.
I’ve Never Been to Hollywood
After escaping with the money, the next bubble that Lillian pierces features introductions to the film’s biggest stars: Ayo Edibiri and Jacob Elordi. The former expertly plays “Molly,” who, alongside her producer, “Matthew,” is looking to make a film that Lillian will star in. If you’re already familiar with the film criticism of Pinkerton, you might be more excited than usual to see how he chooses to portray the next generation of moviemakers. Spoiler alert: not favorably. As filmmakers of that generation ourselves, we still could not help but laugh. Edibiri’s rapid-fire portrayal of a narcissistic director is captured perfectly, as you’re reminded of the artist you know you hate but somehow might find yourself following around if they came into the room with enough charisma. She and Matthew are undoubtedly passionate, but for all the wrong reasons. They are embodiments of the types of people who talk about their movie for longer than the runtime itself.
The two of them introduce her to Jacob Elordi’s character, Ian: a young, hot, self-important actor who, despite living in rural America for only three weeks, feels that he can accurately comment on American political life. His British accent and serious demeanor spark interest from Lillian, who suddenly ends up on the cover of tabloid magazines with him, which quickly raises her social status. On the one hand, it seems like she’s finally come across something that has hooked her, which, fittingly, is acting like other people. On the other, there is an inner conflict brewing where our seemingly self-assured protagonist grapples with the realities of becoming more well-known. “I just don’t like, like being told things about myself,” she says – which might be today’s “movie talk” equivalent to the much-circulated online phrase “stop perceiving me.” Here is where she transitions from arguably passive to objectively agentic. However, this false power is quickly ripped away by Lawrence’s gang of Nazis, who return in explosive fashion.
First Time in Vermont
A young production assistant is her knight in shining armor, taking her to safety after the chaotic destruction of the big movie set. This metaphor seems particularly apt, due to the princess gown our protagonist happens to be wearing during the whole ordeal. The entire thing seems to be less traumatic to her than expected, and Lillian’s lack of empathy for the destruction she causes comes across as another manifestation of the ennui she’s boldly expressed from the beginning. At this point, the breakneck pace takes a pause. Lillian and her “knight,” who is credited as Mohammed, take a calm walk through the woods together as he exclaims his passion for the US, and for everything natural that “god” has created for them. It is a new type of excitement, an older, healthier type of interest, that seems solidly different from the obsessions we have seen from the rest of the men. However, Lillian isn’t convinced, jeering him after his soliloquy by saying, “You must love shitting in the woods.” His response (and correct reading of her hamartia) was, “Everything is a joke to you.” In this, it seems like Lillian is finally being framed as the one in the wrong for her uncaring position – maybe Mohammed’s philosophy is something finally worth taking to heart. It starts to feel like The Sweet East was made as an argument against big-city ideology and pro the Thoreau-style naturalism that has become so effective with trends like vanlife and even Instagram influencer the Liver King. But very quickly, Mohammed, her knight in shining armor, is shown to be more like the dragon keeping her trapped in a castle. He holds her prisoner for days after the danger from the Nazis seems to be definitively out of sight and pushes the idea of marriage. His nature-loving, religious piety comes with the drawbacks of every other faction – it is trapping and overbearing and she gets bored by it quickly. She escapes and is found by a group of monks, who bring her to a tower in the middle of a fantastical mountain range. It is here that the point of the film is really driven home.
The monk who saves her talks about how people still come from around the world to try and lick some of The Virgin Mary’s breast milk from the floor of a church in Bethlehem called the Chapel of the Milk Grotto. As he discusses this, Lillian laughs at the ridiculousness of his statements. The dialogue and score begin to morph into the same kind of audio soup that our artivist friend created at the very start of the film. To us, this is the period at the end of the sentence; a monk, the most obvious kind of cult figure, discusses his passions as a young girl laughs her way through the situation – hearing the deafening unimportance of what he is trying to say, as his actual words drown out. Everything humans have to think about now, and everything humans have had to think about for forever, is somewhat pointless when confronted with the magnitude of information that exists as a whole. So why not just laugh?
Even where The Sweet East fails, it succeeds – somehow making perfect sense of what Will Sloan (The Important Cinema Club) called “a tapestry of disconnected extremists, eccentrics, and archetypes. A crack-up against a gorgeous backdrop . . . [both] political and anti-political.”
Sean Price William and Nick Pinkerton seem to have a deep understanding of critiquing a very flawed, stereotype-ridden, and grotesquely violent country—while expressing all those strong assertions from a deeply loving and sincere place. Satirizing something that is already so funny is difficult.
The most cinematic experiences are those that are hard to put eloquently. This movie is the Internet, and you are a dazed teen wading through the bullshit.
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Art by Charlie Hane
We sat down with Alex Coco, the producer (alongside Alex Ross Perry and Craig Butta) of The Sweet East, in search of what the movie was about. Our conversation went as follows.
Jai: We’re such big fans of the movie, it’s pretty unbelievable. I believe Charlie was on his way to go see it for the third time in theaters before I dropped all of my plans to join him. The rest was history. Couldn’t be more excited to be speaking with you.
Alex: We really do appreciate the support you guys have given the movie. You know, we’re just trying to make a movie for film people, Sean [Price Williams] has cultivated a new community in a really exciting way, [and] we just hope that there’s kids in film school and even younger filmmakers who are gonna want that too. I’m a millennial and we hear so much about how “these younger generations don’t give a shit about movies,” and that’s scary, you know?
Charlie: Well, you guys succeeded.
Jai: So what was essentially the impetus for the project? Like a lot of other people, I’d heard of Nick Pinkerton for his online film criticism. The director was solely a cinematographer up until this point. . . . For you, as someone who was going to step in as a producer as well as the assistant director, how did it initially come together?
Alex: Nick and Sean have been friends for a long time. Sean’s always sort of pushed Nick to write a script. As I was saying before, cultivating this culture of filmmakers. Nick has a good sense of telling a story very much like the French New Wave filmmakers in a way. They came at it from a different angle than, you know, a kid coming out of film school. They’re trying to deconstruct films, and that’s part of where their brain is – Nick’s brain is just like an encyclopedia. He’s a walking history book, but of like unknown history. Sean, when he was in high school, had a girlfriend and they were doing a road trip to DC . . . you know, like the school trip in the film. And this girl gets lost. Remember, this was pre cell phones and they actually couldn’t find her. So then everyone was trying to find Sean’s girlfriend because they didn’t know where the hell she went. Somehow, randomly, they found her at the train station. They just found her and it was all fine. The Sweet East is almost like: what if nobody ever found her?
Charlie: Gotcha, and what was your approach for getting the production ball rolling?
Alex: It went through the typical bullshit of just trying to get it financed and nobody wanted to do it because of the subject matter, because it’s not commercial, because of all the reasons why most good movies don’t get made. Then Jacob [Elordi] got re-interested in the project because he was trying to do more indies. He was still trying to shake the heartthrob cred that he had earned from . . .
Charlie: The Kissing Booth?
Alex: Yeah. Then it went to the Sundance Labs and they didn’t take it. But this guy, Jimmy Kaltreider . . . he had a small fund through Peter Thiel, and he was a huge fan of Nick’s. He broke up with his girlfriend, who was working at Sundance, and she said to him: we’re gonna break up, but the last thing I’m going to do for you – because I’m going to be nice as we’re breaking up – is I’m going to pass you Nick Pinkerton’s screenplay that just got submitted. And he read it and loved it and then emailed Nick. He goes: I’d love to finance your film . . . I have this money through Peter Thiel and he’s letting me kind of just do whatever I want with it. So, regardless of how you feel about his politics or whatever, nobody questioned us about the script, and as soon as we got the money, it was [like] all right, we want to do this. . . . He started dropping money into the account, we set some dates, and that was it. It was a miracle.
Charlie: The literal definition of an angel investment.
Jai: Peter Thiel funding one of our favorite art house movies of 2023.
Charlie: Certainly not on my bingo card.
Alex: So, Sean started inviting me to come out to KGB [Bar], which is where all these guys hung out. I was like, holy shit, there’s a clubhouse of filmmakers. Everyone just wants to make something fucking cool. Everybody’s free to have their own opinion and write whatever they want. The opinions sparked debate, you know. So I was like, I wanna be a part of this.
Jai: Slight digression: I used to be a big fan of the rap group Three Loco, which was of course a very big part of the MTV-Internet transition.
Alex: Of course.
Jai: Was that a part of the thinking with [Andy] Milonakis and Simon Rex? Did you guys try to get Riff Raff at any point? I remember realizing right after the movie – as soon as the credits started, I was like, oh! Two-thirds of Three Loco!
Alex: Well we do have a Riff Raff song in the movie. . . . But we were trying to figure out who else to cast, and we wanted to have a stunt cast. We actually almost cast the real guy.
Charlie: The actual Pizzagate guy?
Alex: Yeah.
Jai: That . . . would’ve been historic.
Alex: We ended up with Andy, and Andy was fucking great.
Charlie: It put us in the perfect headspace to understand: now we’re in Neverland. By the way, were we on target with any of the references that we pointed out?
Alex: The Birth of a Nation, for sure. That was definitely a big reference – obviously, the title cards had a very Griffith sort of look to them that was very intentional. That was one of the ideas that Nick [Pinkerton] actually had in post. Another big reference was La Bête.
Charlie: Interesting, in what ways?
Alex: An erotic horror movie that has bestiality in it – all of this other crazy shit – yet was from an incredible filmmaker of the era . . . late sixties, seventies . . . making these sort of strange art house projects, which is exactly Sean’s wheelhouse.
Jai: La Bête. I’ll have to check it out.
Alex: The scene where Talia is running through the woods and her dress is being torn off by the sticks – that’s ripped exactly from La Bête. There’s a scene where the beast is chasing [the protagonist] through the woods, ripping her clothes off. We did a much tamer version, but that was a big one. Funnily, we never really thought about Alice in Wonderland while we were shooting. We kept thinking about Forrest Gump, which is a similarly picaresque movie where he’s just sort of going from group to group, sort of drifting. Alice in Wonderland is definitely a better comp, though, which definitely came out more in post.
Charlie: We talked about Lawrence being introduced in Delaware as being related to the poster, which references George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. Was this significance embedded in Lawrence purposefully?
Alex: When they’re floating down the river, that’s the actual Delaware. That’s right where George Washington crossed. There’s a plaque where they’re having that picnic, and it’s a plaque right by the water where he crossed, so [Sean] shot right in the heart of everything.
Charlie: In order of shooting dates, I was really interested in the fact that your guys’ schedule was kind of specific. When did the “First Time in Vermont” section get shot?
Alex: That was first.
Charlie: So from the start of the filmmaking process, did you feel like the crew, specifically the first-time director and first-time screenwriter, grow in any specific ways that you could give us?
Alex: I mean, Sean is a very instinctual person, so he often likes to show up on set, see the location, block the scene, and then it always starts with the hardest scene of the day. He would make a shot list based on the actions of how the scene we just watched played out. Sean was pulling his own focus and shooting the movie himself. He was directing the actors, he was in his element.
Jai: What about [Nick] Pinkerton?
Alex: Nick’s [strictly] a writer. He was more involved in the second half because, as Nick likes to say, he relates most to the Simon Rex character. Everybody always feels like that’s the most fleshed-out section. It feels like it’s the fullest – partly because Simon is amazing, and I think partly because Nick likes it the most. These debates about America, the history, the taboos, the conspiracies, the politics – that’s Nick.
Jai: I couldn’t imagine balancing the energy of Nick and Sean. Speaking of the group that you were touching on earlier . . . what do you think of this “American New Wave” term being applied to you, Sean Price Williams, Sean Baker, Simon, Nick, etc.?
Alex: Honestly, I was so happy and blown away. Thierry Frémaux at Cannes, when he announced that we were in, referred to Anora as a part of the American New Wave. I was like, holy shit, that’s incredible. But while it’s super flattering, we’re not reinventing the wheel or anything. The only thing that we might be reinventing is finding new ways to continue to make movies like this in a different cultural and economic landscape.
Jai: Competing with TikTok, competing with Disney . . .
Alex: Yes, audiences aren’t as interested in movies right now, but it’s because most movies aren’t as interesting. They’re hitting it straight down the middle, hoping that explosions and Ryan Gosling is going to be enough for people. But it’s not. There’s way too much shit for that to be enough. Like way too much shit. Way too many ways for people to entertain themselves for that to be even close to enough.
Charlie: “Everything Will Happen,” right? I was wondering, given the context of what we wrote, the reasons you got involved in the project, the reaction from audiences – is The Sweet East commenting on big-city ideology? Is it more about the culture of the Internet? Or does it span even wider than that? Is it more so up to the audience’s interpretation?
Alex: I’m sure if you’re talking to Nick or Sean, they’d have like a super interesting answer to this, but just from being around it, it’s like . . . the movie is playful. Nobody is safe. I think [it’s about] challenging biases in an interesting way, saying things that people don’t want to hear, and sort of seeing how they react. Sean considers himself a Republican, that’s what he calls himself, and I’m just like, he’s not, you know? When you say that, you think of a very specific thing. Sean’s a New Yorker, a filmmaker with all sorts of ideas – some of them are Republican, some of them are Democratic. Others fall somewhere else. I don’t know, he’s everything. Like you said, “Everything Will Happen,” and I just like hanging out with people who have ideas. Maybe you would say that’s pretentious, but then, at the same time, it’s like, if it’s pretentious to have interesting conversations, then what the fuck is this society?
Charlie: It purposefully being all over the map in terms of ideology is sort of proved by the fact that we, as two Gen Z filmmakers, interpreted it as a representation of the Internet; when really what it is, is just an attempt at reigniting discussions of diverse ideas – which is something that the iIeah, and to me, like, it’s interesting to be a mutt. I was describing Sean, he has a lot of ideas, some of them fall on different sides of the aisle, [but] the culture doesn’t allow that. The culture says if you say something and you say it wrong, then there’s [going to be] consequences. And that’s unfortunate.
Jai: I’d say that’s an extremely adequate answer and 100% reflected in the film.
Charlie: I just gotta say thank you, sincerely, just as fans of the movie to be able to see it through this new lens. . . . This conversation was awesome for me.
Alex: I appreciate it. I mean, like I said we’re just trying to keep this art alive and push back on all the bullshit. We just need people to support it. That’s why it’s like, you guys, the younger generations, are going to be the sort of ones that [are] the deciding factor. This movie wouldn’t have gotten made [without] a dude who worked for Peter Thiel and is a fan of Nick’s. Most financiers would not make this film because they’re worried about the movie’s perception, their perception, commercial viability. But sometimes it’s art for art’s sake.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
