We are sitting between the “Miscellaneous Horror” and “Juvenile Delinquents” sections at CineFile Video, a compact, densely stocked curated video store on the westside of Los Angeles.
Surrounded by physical media, I wonder how “Lurker,” the first feature by writer-director Alex Russell, will eventually be classified here. The shelf across from him holds the DVDs and Blu-rays labeled “Gay.” The realization prompts him to chuckle. “That’s me,” he says.
Arms crossed, Russell, 34, at first seems guarded and resistant to conversation. He admits doing press about his work is still a novel experience for him. Later, as he digs into the making and meaning of his movie, he’ll relax and the words will spontaneously flow.
Out this Friday, “Lurker” examines the insidious entanglement between rising British music star Oliver (Archie Madekwe) and the seemingly docile Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), a clothing store employee turned self-styled tour videographer. As Matthew joins Oliver’s inner circle, their parasocial bond evolves into a real friendship, until Matthew’s desire to belong becomes dangerous. And while at first Oliver rules over a pack of sycophants, the power shifts.
“Everyone has been in a situation where they want a group of people to like them,” Russell says. “And then sometimes you’re on the other side of it, where you’re already in and you see someone else wanting to be liked by you.”
As someone who went to several different schools growing up, Russell became observant of male relationships and the implicit rules by which they operate. “I could see how groups of boys, whether it’s in high school, a fraternity or a basketball team, start to assemble themselves and create sort of unspoken hierarchies,” Russell says. The music world presented an ideal setting as well.
“Lurker’s” mean-boys drama mostly takes place in Los Angeles, where individuals seeking a career in entertainment by any means necessary abound. Russell lived here for the larger part of the last decade, writing the screenplay at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I felt gross about being in L.A. but also hopeful,” Russell says candidly on the realization that he was one of countless others here trying to make it. “What I like about this place — and I think this is represented in the movie — is that it’s full of people who are trying to put themselves out there in some type of way.”
Russell knows firsthand what it means to feel exposed in pursuit of a dream. His career writing for TV for award-winning shows like “Beef” and “The Bear” only took off after he became vocal and open about his goals.
“There was something liberating about being like, ‘I want to be a working screenwriter,’ which, of course, there’s no greater cliché in L.A.,” he says. “That felt like the more courageous thing. I was used to this self-doubting, cynical philosophy of: I should keep it to myself if I have dreams that could embarrass me if I don’t make them a reality.”
Born in Chicago to an immigrant mother and an American father, Russell initially studied engineering, but quietly taught himself screenwriting. He would dissect the scripts of comfort movies like “Legally Blonde” and “The Devil Wears Prada” in order to learn structure.
“When you teach yourself something, in a way it’s more organic because you’re just like: OK, what are the movies I actually know? I’ll reverse engineer those,” he says.
But as someone with no direct connection to Hollywood, his dream required tryout stints in New York and Atlanta, as well as a lot of crashing with patient friends. “There are so many couches I have to thank for getting to do the work I do now,” Russell says, laughing but sincere.
During those rougher early years, Russell created a pilot for the now defunct Viceland cable network and a short series for Comedy Central’s YouTube channel. “At the time I was looking for anything to grasp onto,” he remembers.
It was in L.A. that he landed his first writers’ room job on the FX comedy “Dave,” a meta series centered around rapper Lil Dicky. Russell believes his proximity to the music industry set him apart when the opportunity emerged, outweighing his inexperience.
Most of his close friends work in music, including Kenny Beats, who composed Oliver’s songs for “Lurker,” and Zack Fox, who plays a hanger-on in the film and is a DJ in real life. The scenes that show Oliver performing were shot with real crowds during parties at which Fox DJed.
“It was just a huge stroke of luck,” he says. “I had a bunch of half-hour spec scripts that were set in the music world. It was just good timing that they were looking for someone like that, because on a craft level, I really hadn’t found it yet.”
“Lurker” would be an experiment — to discover his own storytelling voice.
“The skill of being in a TV room is: How well can you service the voice of someone else? How can you find the most overlap between yourself and whoever’s running the show?” Russell explains. “That can start to feel like: I would like to know if I have my own tone, if I have my own way of doing things.”
To find his way into the story, particularly its darker edges of obsession, Russell looked to Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash” and Dan Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler” as references. Additionally, “Almost Famous,” Cameron Crowe’s mostly autobiographical film about a teenager interviewing a rock band, seemed the closest to his sensibility.
“This kid gets to do this big Rolling Stone article on one of his favorite bands and there are these moments where it feels like he’s in the band and that’s really his dream,” Russell says. “At the end of the movie it’s like: Was that all just for the story he was writing? Or will they talk to him again? And then they do. It’s a wholesome version of the movie that mine isn’t.”
In “Lurker,” conversely, the worst label someone in Oliver’s orbit can receive is that of being a “fanboy.” The term carries an intensely pejorative connotation in the group and speaks to the imbalance of power between the singer and his fawning entourage.
“A fan is fundamentally an outsider,” Russell says. “What does it mean to admit that you’re a fan? It’s to acknowledge that there’s them and us. You are the watcher of whatever you’re a fan of and they have your attention. Matthew is trying to bridge that gap. He wants to appear as a peer.”
The fact that “other directors weren’t exactly dying to direct” his screenplay, Russell says, coupled with his producers’ encouragement, convinced him to get behind the camera.
“I didn’t really know what that entailed,” he admits. “I really didn’t think I had certain leadership qualities to rally a bunch of people. I didn’t see myself that way.”
But knowing the motivations of his characters armed him. Russell could determine which potential collaborators interpreted his writing as he envisioned it. For example, he agreed with cinematographer Patrick Scola that shooting on 16mm film would add realism to a story taking place in a realm of artificiality.
In casting Pellerin, a Quebecois actor seen in “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the filmmaker found a performer with the ability to exhibit ambiguous intentions, not a one-note villain. Though he’s always plotting to stay in Oliver’s good graces, Matthew has a deep need for validation. When he gets a taste of the status being around Oliver grants him, he refuses to let it go.
“You could see him living and dying on each of these social interactions,” Russell says. “You could tell he wants to say and do the right thing. There’s a sweetness to him. We didn’t want this to be so icy that you automatically disliked this guy and you’re shaking your head the whole time. You want to feel like there’s someone in there who just wants to belong.”
Russell finds the proliferation of a social media mindset unsettling, especially the darker side of attention-seeking trolls. “Part of why this movie exists is to instill a little bit of shame,” he says with a dark laugh. “That’s not something we should be bragging about.”
On top of those digital-age preoccupations, Russell sought to indict the petty jealousies that exist among men — a subject, he thinks, that remains taboo. “There are a lot of movies about women being jealous of each other, but there aren’t a lot about men,” he says.
Near the end of “Lurker,” a surprising encounter between Oliver and Matthew illustrates the complexity of their misconnection, a delicate balance that showcases Russell’s talent for mining originality from situations that could have played out more conventionally.
“In that moment, the tension is built up so that either it’s going to turn sexual finally or turn violent finally,” the filmmaker says. “That’s what the audience is thinking, but then it’s this mystery third thing. And I just love it because it genuinely surprises people.”
But regardless of where a viewer is coming from, “Lurker” taps into something utterly relatable.
“So many people look to movies because they feel like outsiders,” Russell says. “Everyone has some relationship to being an outsider and being an insider. It’s not black and white. That’s what this movie wants to get into. Those things can shift, the gravitational pull is not anchored.”
Much less of an outsider now (he’s even won an Emmy for “Beef”), Russell has found his peers. He and James Sweeney, another queer director, have become close. Sweeney’s film “Twinless,” out Sept. 5, follows the brotherly friendship between two young men that’s threatened by a secret. Both “Lurker” and “Twinless” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Russell is amused at the similarities between their films.
“In a city like this, everyone is thirsty for community or feeling like a part of some group,” Russell says. “And the truth of L.A. is that people make up groups. And if you make up your own group, then you get to choose the members.”
The post Director Alex Russell made ‘Lurker’ about obsessive fandom. He’d rather not talk about himself appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
