At this year’s SXSW the pandemic has been a prominent presence in films, either through direct plot lines or simply the conversation surrounding how the movie, in particular, was shot. However, one of the better films to explore the time we’re living in was, somewhat unexpectedly, the documentary following pop singer Charli XCX in the early stages of quarantine as she set forth to create an album in five weeks with reliance on sharing the process with her fans. It resulted in the album “How I’m Feeling Now” which garnered some of the strongest reviews of her career and played with tongue-in-cheek lyrics about the state of mind she found herself in which ranged from boredom to depression.
While fans of the artist bore witness to some of this process in her multiple live streams and posts to Instagram to help get ideas on elements such as music videos and album art, the documentary “Alone Together” further details the work that went into the project as well as the connection between her and her fans.
With major popularity in the LGBTQIA community, the documentary explores the depths in which Charli XCX’s fans – often in self-recorded style diary entries – relate to the singer and how her music has given them a means of escape and avenue for self-expression. Our critic wrote of the balance between Charli and her fans in the film, saying, “But for as much as Charli is the star of this documentary, her fans are, too, and ‘Alone Together’ manifests as both a wild ride and a soothing balm—as long as you don’t think too hard about the labor ethics at the center of it.”
We spoke to director duo Bradley Bell and Pablo Jones-Soler who have worked with the star on music videos in the past. “Alone Together” marks their first step into long-form storytelling, and we spoke about the challenges they faced and the decision to highlight the fans as well as use animation to represent the fans’ presence online.
How early in the recording process of the album did you decide to collaborate?
Pablo Jones-Soler: We reached out to her after seeing her post about it on her Instagram as we’d found out about this project the same way everyone else had. We were immediately taken by the story – or the potential of the story. We quickly wrote down a proposal and texted it to her and she agreed. When we first started shooting we were catching up a lot because we sent cameras to her and they arrived a week into the process and it was all very much a spur-of-the-moment idea.
Do you think that filming this type of documentary is something that would’ve come to you naturally regardless or do you think it was a product specifically of quarantine?
Bradley Bell: We knew that we wanted to document the time that we were in for some reason. Before she’d announced the album we had noticed and been to some of these virtual club nights called “Club Quarantine” and she’d actually performed a surprise set there which I think is what caught our attention first. What we were really struck by was that it was the very beginning of the pandemic and very scary outside and none of us really knew what the hell was going on, and here we were in this virtual Zoom and there were thousands of Queer people and just amazing people, in general, all meeting in this place and dancing and having fun. Just being in this space was reassuring and that immediately connected something and we thought ‘this is really interesting, there must be a story in this somewhere that we can document.’
Another observation was that work was going online and everything was becoming virtual and it all kind of felt like a sci-fi movie as if we were finally entering this stage of virtual reality that we’d been talking about for ages. So that was another hook that we were interested in exploring. Then a big part of it was the interactive element with the fans and how it was going to be made seemed like a really good encapsulation of the things we’d been struck by in that club quarantine party.
Did the Club Quarantine aspect help in knowing that the fans were always going to be a big part of the documentary from the start?
Jones-Soler: Definitely. That was a big part of what we were interested in from the beginning. From when we started the project we were spending a lot of time on Zoom with fans across the world. We weren’t totally sure how they were going to feature in the film in a practical way but we knew that their stories would be a part of this one because that’s what was so interesting about Charli’s album project. It was always going to be a part of it somehow it just took us a while to figure out how all the stories weaved together.
Was there a point in the process where everything started to click into place in what you wanted the final product to look like or was it always just a want to collect as much footage as you can and then go from there?
Bell: I think there was definitely a moment where it clicked in place. Up until that moment the instinct, from the start of the project, was to collect as much as possible, and then we spent up to three to four weeks creating the whole thing and then roughly assembling it. Then we did a screening in August and it was a humbling experience and the film at that point was an hour and forty long. We still had great components and three stories; there was the story of the fans, the story of Charli and her mental health during the pandemic, and the story of her and her boyfriend Huck sort of rekindling her relationship. What we hadn’t figured out yet was how to unite those stories in a really compelling narrative. It came off of the back of that screening where it became a quite technical process. Now we knew what we had and we used that knowledge to basically write a story down on paper. We had a central theme and that was human connection, which we see on a macro level as Charli overcomes her self-esteem problems with her relationship with Huck in a way and she’s giving herself more time to be more open and time for herself. Then on another level there’s the story of the connection with the fans where they literally have this amazing network and are helping each other and then also on a music level for Charli. The whole project is enabled by her connection to the internet. Basically, once we figured it out, I think we were able to write down a story on how all the pieces interacted with that central theme in mind.
As you mentioned there’s a whole portion of the film that deals with her mental health which is very indicative of the pandemic. Did that influence how much of that side of her you wanted to show or was it a collaborative decision?
Jones-Soler: It came out naturally for her. Charli has always been very open and transparent online with her fans. I think that’s one of the reasons why they have this rather special connection and why the community is strong. She understands the importance of being open about this type of stuff. But as you said the pandemic, especially the first couple months, was kind of this time where everyone was stuck at home with time and space and having to confront themselves. It’s naturally what’s on your mind. Plus, Charli had just recently started going to therapy a couple of weeks before the pandemic hit so she was already working through a lot of personal issues at the time. It naturally was what she was thinking about and talking about on camera when she wasn’t making music. That floated to the surface of the footage we were seeing.
On a technical level what challenges presented themselves and how much of a learning curve did you face especially with how many moving parts there were?
Jones-Soler: One of the big things was figuring out how all the stories worked together. We had Charli’s story which was captured in this active, narrative way and as we went on we’d do more Zoom interviews in a talking head style. Then we had to figure out how to bring the fans into it. Partly because we were playing catch up with the process, we weren’t with the fans since day one, so we had to talk to them in interviews and then ask them if they could film themselves from now on. Their role in the story was quite tricky to figure out. A big part of that was the various fans’ own capacity of filming themselves. Charli’s trained and has been in front of the camera since she was 15/16-years-old and is more used to putting herself out there. A lot of these kids on the other hand are often enough struggling with mental health issues, self-esteem issues and it’s hard for them to find value in their own stories and turn the camera on themselves. That shaped the way the fans’ stories fit themselves into the film and it is also one of the reasons we used animation and things like that to sort of be able to hit some emotional story beats that we weren’t able to capture on camera.
Jones-Soler: A big part of the process was that while we were still trying to figure out what to put on screen we did do more formal talking heads interviews with Charli – we have like ten hours of footage of interviews with her. And though that didn’t make it into the film in that way it did heavily influence the narrative and we used that more as research so that was a really important part of it.
“Alone Together” played at this year’s SXSW. A formal release for the doc has yet to be revealed. You can follow along with the rest of our 2021 SXSW coverage here.