ALEXANDRA WARRICK

Alexandra Warrick is a Manhattan-based filmmaker. Her first love and primary focus remains “anti-comedy”, a controversial moniker for a strain of humor that meddles with genre expectations to bracing (and abrasive) effect. Whether by introducing Eldritch horror to a Bushwick block, making death traps out of teenybopper T.V. dramas or granting Canadian electro-dance bangers cursed abilities, Warrick’s screenplays refuse conventionality, categorization or…cleanliness.

Warrick’s debut as a writer-director, Questions (Or: Peanut Butter), stirred controversy during its two-day front-page streak on Reddit’s “r/Videos” subforum. Inspiring comparisons to Norm MacDonald, her portrait of a “peanut butter fetishist” was hailed as “sharp-witted” by NoBudge’s Kentucker Audley; in New York Magazine, CollegeHumor Originals producer Luke Kelly-Clyne claimed it “boast[ed] the best comedic crescendo [he] had the pleasure of covering this year.” Warrick’s impending releases include “Trust is a Flower” (a farce following an Off-Broadway show’s devolution into a hostage situation) and “Clémont” (a French New Wave-tinged, sour romance between a man and the clementine tree in his living room).

What’s your favorite tea? If you don’t drink tea, what kind of coffee or drink do you enjoy the most?

I'm glad we're getting the hard questions out of the way! There’s a little tea shop in my neighborhood named Alice's Tea Cup. They have a house blend: Indian black tea, Japanese green tea, vanilla and rose petals. Chef’s kiss, baby! I also have this terrible habit of drinking my tea like an actual baby...with way too much milk and sugar.

Could you tell me about your background and your practice?

My practice is filmmaking - well, a couple things under the broader umbrella of filmmaking. Screenwriting’s kind of my main dish, but I also direct and act as side dishes - the Brussels sprouts to the turkey, here.

I'm an Upper West Side native, where I went from kindergarten to senior year at an all-girls school - one of those Gossip Girl schools, plaid skirts, the whole thing - then to Columbia, where I primarily focused on academically analyzing comedy. Comedy’s no longer funny when you explain the joke, right? So, for four years, I just... endeavored to explain the joke! A couple years of my post-grad life were dedicated to downtown clubland, which kind of wound up melding into my point of view as a filmmaker.

Now, I spend the majority of my time on the 1 train, just doing my, like... honestly, so much of my day-to-day requires me to jet all ‘round town. Most of my life has become just, uh, maladaptive daydreaming while staring at the wall of a subway car. Like, just spacing out in a little tin can in the ground. You know?

What projects are you working on right now?

I'm a bit of a glutton for both projects and punishment. I've got, like, over a dozen distinct units of work on the stove. I've got some projects just completed as of a couple days ago; some work is still nascent and nebulous. It's like having fourteen children: some have just been born, some are heading off to college, you know, they’re all in their own stages. I’ve most recently completed two short films, “Clemont” and “Trust is a Flower.” One’s about a young man having marital strife in his glamorous Tribeca apartment with his husband - who is a clementine tree. “Trust is a Flower” is about an Off-Broadway theater critic who reviews a one-man show commandeered by a psychiatric patient. So it basically descends into... it just becomes a hostage situation.

I’m the most familiar with your short comedy sketches. How do your ideas come to you?

I always pull, honest to God, directly from my own life, which isn't to say, obviously, that I'm dealing with mythological monsters and women with ham hocks for heads on the regular. I am yanking from my actual lived life, though. I pull directly from my feelings, and if I did a pie chart of the feelings I rely on, I think, like, ninety-two percent of them would be rage. I pretty much always write from a place of extreme rage. But then also... love? Like, maybe a skinny, fractional pie-chart slice would be love.

What is your screenwriting process like? How does it evolve into your films?

My bedrock is the GDoc! I first open a Google Drive document where I toss anything, everything. It's just a chaotic string of bullet points, details varying in relevance or utility or proportion. Like, one bullet point will concern basic plot structure, the next one’ll detail a little throwaway one-liner, then some costuming concepts… like, there's no rhyme or reason. I categorize and sort everything later, but I always start by expunging and zig-zagging between moments of inspiration. I just vomit everything out, then… freeze the vomit, then get a chisel. Then I make an ice sculpture out of it.

A big part of my directorial approach is my structure addiction. I'm obsessed with devising innovative connective tissue between scenes. That just gets my brain’s happy chemicals going, all that Edgar Wright transition goofiness. That said, because I'm so structured with my storyboarding, and because I approach pre-production so dogmatically, the actual shoots themselves wind up being easy-breezy.

How do you know when you are done filming or writing a sketch? Do you ever rewrite or change any elements after you begin shooting?

I’m done when I feel like there's no frippery, no frills, no flab - the work’s just a streamlined machine. Like, every component has a clear function and purpose. When it feels like the pacing just glides, just flies. The writing is truly never done because, in a weird way, a draft I write in 2019 might not be my 2020 take, or my 2021 take. I’d probably completely revise it today with the new reference points or directions I've gained within the years. A piece is truly never “done,” which is very much existentially terrifying. Like, if there are words in the screenplay that don’t feel specific enough, on-target enough, I’m always going to find sharper, keener vocabulary later. Taking a step back really does equip you with the hedge clippers, so to speak.

How do you think comedy has changed over the years? How has this influenced you?

I wrote my senior thesis on Andy Kaufman, Tim and Eric, Eric Andre - a litany of others as well, mostly from Adult Swim programming. They served as kind of case studies for a larger sea change in comedy that I think indicates something really specific about our values today. This is gonna sound real heady and pretentious - Gilles Lipovetsky is a French philosopher who believes we’re no longer in postmodern times, we’re in a stage he calls “hypermodernity,” where we’re past the point of history serving as a reference point for what’s coming down the pike. I used his theories of hypermodernity as my framework for examining how, in these fraught times, we’re reaching for the Dada, for the surreal, you know? If nothing makes sense on a macro scale, that's going to seep into everything, comedy included. We always seem to embrace the absurd in times of unrest. To that point, I'd suggest reading Ken Jennings’ book Planet Funny, which basically addresses how weird comedy is seeping into everything these days: our advertisements, our political coverage, even our food. The emphasis on everything being “amusing,” he says, is starting to literally degrade culture.

How this influences me as a creator? Well, I think it's a strange time to be alive, where rules are flying out the window. How the cultural climate has influenced my own work has mostly been my own remove from genre, from being faithful to genre and its rules and conventions. I don't even know if I'm a “comedian” anymore, per se, or like even interested in comedy as it stands - well, definitely not traditional comedy. That's honestly my favorite thing in the world, the genre bait and switch. The moment when you're watching a “comedic” sketch - something that, on its face, is meant to be comedy - then it gradients into horror. Like boiling a lobster, slowly? And then you're like - how did we get here? I'm uncomfortable! I didn’t see this coming! That's the dynamic I find the most compelling right now.

Tell me about anything that inspires you.

A lot of my process kicks off with moodboarding, so - aesthetics! Well, firstly, “Dark Academia” speaks to me, partially because, like, I love the idea of just carrying around a book, some thick-ass leather-bound Homer that you totally haven’t read - just carrying it around like a prop. That's... so goddamn stupid! So dumb, so literally ironic! I love it! But I'm also there for the sweater vests. Those kids... I don't know how much they even read, to be honest. I just know that they really love, like, the “vibes” of reading.

Second one is honestly underrated: “Liminal Space!” Liminal Space is basically, like, abandoned malls, or you're in like a children's play-space after dark and it's all decrepit - or an empty parking lot! If you Google “liminal space,” you’ll feel both extremely nostalgic, like, “I've been here before,” but also so grossed out and nervous and all full of jibblies. It’s very... heightened. See, that's what I'm talking about! Feeling something!

The last one, my tippity-toppity favorite aesthetic of all time, is “Zizmorcore.” Writer Stella Bugbee recently coined the term after this iconic New York City subway ad character Dr. Zizmor. It’s basically, like, “Manhattan kitsch.” It's an old man wearing a Citarella baseball cap. It's my little Rizzoli Bookstore tote bag. It’s New York City in 1994, which, I was born in New York City in 1994. Now everyone's dressing like it's 1994 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My own childhood has literally become a kitschy aesthetic. Life imitating art imitating life imitating memes imitating my literal childhood… trippy! So, where can I get a Gray’s Papaya crop top?

Your interest in fashion is obvious. What’s your favorite piece of outfit in your closet?

There’s this iconic blazer, an iconic vintage Moschino blazer from 1991 that has this crazy Roy Lichtenstein print on it. I remember I used to maladaptively fantasize about wearing that exact blazer to the...Golden Globes, or something like that. It featured heavily in my daydreams. I was obsessed with it in college. It was even on display at the Museum at FIT - it was honestly presented as a piece of art, of fashion history! So needless to say, whenever I saw that exact Moschino blazer turned around on Etsy or wherever, it’d be for thousands of dollars. So thank God someone on Poshmark didn’t quite realize what they had and sold their own for a pittance! When I saw that, my brain exploded. It was like finding the Mona Lisa at a garage sale.

What is the space where you do most of your work?

I used to just be a little coffee-shop gremlin, but my new spot blows that out of the water! I've recently become a member of the oldest theatrical club in the nation, called the Lambs Club. Charlie Chaplin was a member, I’m pretty sure? They've got a really storied, interesting series of comedian alums - all of whom would die on the spot if they saw my movies about peanut butter fetishists or whatever. They'd be miserable to know their legacy would be tainted by the likes of me. So I go to their building in Midtown, this beautiful old historical building that basically feels like a Scooby Doo haunted house. I’m always taking Zoom meetings there to trick people into thinking that I live straight-up in some kind of Scooby Doo house. Oil portraits everywhere, glossy dark wood, burgundy walls. Dude, I’m just vibing, feeling the ghosts of old comedians past pump through my veins.

I know that you are born and raised in NYC, so how do you think the city influenced your practice?

Well, New York is stranger than fiction. I used to go to the Box, right, the crazy nightclub? If I depicted any of the stuff I saw at the Box in my work, people would be like, “Wow, what creative screenwriting, there are no places in the world like that!” Meanwhile, I’m just completely cribbing from horrible, wonderful experience. It’s all so outlandish, so it does a lot of the heavy lifting. Additionally, I like to - where someone might make up a name for a venue in their script - I slyly kind of pepper in actual places. The wider audience won't necessarily get the joke of those Easter eggs, but it’s worth it for the one person who gasps, “she just made a one-liner about Sardi's!” Why make a joke that’ll hit for like three people? Eh, I don’t know. It just feels more specific, dearer to my heart. There’s a sense of place and terroir there.

My other New York-y approach is that a lot of these screenwriter-chroniclers of New York, like… Whit Stillman, they’ll give you characters that are just…chatty, chatty, wordy, wordy, blah, blah, blah. Like everyone just neurotically just rapid-fire yaps! Jargony, name-droppy, blah, blah, blah! Listen, that’s basically me! That’s what New York made me: neurotic, hypomanic, perma-chatty. I'm then able to make all my characters sound just as obnoxious as I do! Then, I get something of a built-in sense of voice as a writer. It might be an abrasive voice, sure, but a voice is better than none. I’d like to thank New York for that.

Finally, my reference points are all over the place, probably from my childhood where I could like, go to Lincoln Center and watch a ballet, then go to the 68th Street Loews to take in, like, Kick-Ass. Like it's just, the highbrow-lowbrow divide doesn't even exist. The boundaries are completely degraded. Everything's just a mix of shit, here - and that's really that's really where I'm living, as an artist, in that place where everything is melting together.

Do you have any ritual that helps you get into the zone?

I am a victim of a lot of “analysis paralysis,” a lot of fake productivity. I'm very into making lists that don't help me or anyone. It's just to fake the feeling that I'm working to myself - a complete ruse. And then brain fog can just come out of nowhere and bite me in the ass.  Plus, I can get so workaholic that I’ll start to actively hate the process of watching film altogether, even watching a four-minute YouTube video. It'll make me want to write... but then, the minute I'm writing, I'm like “gotta get on YouTube and look at some stupid shit!” I’m like a soccer player who can't watch soccer because it makes them want to jump on the field, but then, once they're there, they’re like, “I'm tired.” I’m just going through the cat flap, inside and outside, back and forth. Those are my major Achilles heels.

What I do to get past them is mostly freewriting. I just spit out a bunch of herky-jerky shit in a Word doc, almost to get in the sense-memory action of it, to just feel the feeling of my fingers moving. Then, I can segue right into making a move on something that matters. I’m also very big into dancing alone in my room to jackhammering techno music. I know that’s extremely embarrassing, but it takes me to this wonderfully disoriented, shaken-out place. Staying on top of your health, I think, is the is the pinnacle of advice, like, drink water, take whatever meds you take, eat something. I’ll think that my brain is quitting for some lack-of-discipline reason - when really, it's like, “you didn’t drink water for two days, you dummy!”

How do you stay connected to your community?

I think the community that I most identify with would be offbeat city artists, like the dyed-in-the-wool eccentrics here, the kind I’d find out and about when we could socialize freely. I started connecting to that energy through parties. I was very into throwing parties and attending parties, just meeting new people. I’ve transplanted this tendency to our current pandemic situation with a foray into online socializing. Through online film festivals, I've made some of my tightest friends right now - we started as intense pen pals and then began to meet up. All my artist pen pals online, we just have these chaotic chats all the time. They’ll be living in contexts that are completely different from me; they’ll be in, like, Sweden or New Jersey or something, so we can compare notes from the field from our very different contexts.

What’s your favorite tool?

Vocabulary! Being a hoarder of vocabulary has been my most useful habit. It’s Lemony Snicket’s fault. I become genuinely fixated on, if there's a word I come across that I like the sound of but that I don't know, I’ll look it up and then cram it inorganically into my conversation for a week. It's both caused me to sound like a nutjob and helped me out in moments where only the most specific word will do. You can try to describe something for three bloated sentences, or you can distill it into just one perfect word. That’s why it’s the most satisfying tool to use, like a concentrated, powerful machine. Why try to find your way through the maze, if you could just take a bulldozer and plow directly through it? That's what the perfect word feels like, or the perfect metaphor, for that matter.

Who are your favorite practicing artists?

Here are two I like seeing on my feed: I really like Margot Ferrick as an illustrator. Her work is whimsical on its face, but there's this delicate melancholy there, and this sense of play. They’re like these sweet little idiosyncratic Valentines. She’ll draw, like, a little swan person hugging a squishy little plane…hers is just a snug, vibesy, cozy work.

I also love Luke Strickler - I just had the pleasure of collaborating with him on “Clemont.” Beyond being this great, screwball comedian, he does these bananas 3D graphics that meld with footage in these unexpected ways. He has his own aesthetic already that’s so specific - that’s rare. After I saw a film of his on NoBudge, “2064,” I basically beelined for him, just aggressively DM-petitioned him to be a part of my short. I’m lucky he chose to be a part, you know, citrus chaos notwithstanding.

What gives you the feeling of butterflies in your stomach?

One of the things that I really get off on would be the perfect music choice in a film or a film trailer - the kind that gives you chills. Zack Snyder gets his gets his fair share of guff, but his use of “Unforgettable” - the old standard - during the opening fight scene of Watchmen... I went apeshit over that in ninth grade! Watching someone hurl a meat cleaver to the sounds of Nat King Cole? A more recent experience I've had of this would be use of the Frank Sinatra Jr. song “Black Night” in the trailer for Rick Alverson’s “Entertainment.” I was like, shut it down! It was so affecting that...like, none of my friends were free to go see it in theaters with me the evening I wanted to when it first came out, but I just marched on over to go watch it alone. It was that transcendent. I was that hooked.

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