In the past few years, Alex Lei has made a name for himself on Film Twitter, often as a result of views in opposition to the mainstream. From impassioned rants on modern budget bloat to hyperbolic calls to nuke Noah Baumbach, he has been referred to as a contrarian whose takes are sometimes called “bait.” Often misunderstood, Lei’s views on cinema are complex and call for a more communal approach to the medium.
Believe it or not, Lei is also a filmmaker, writer, programmer, and bartender in Baltimore. His film writing has appeared in places such as the AV Club, Screen Slate, In Review Online, and more. On top of that, Lei is the nonfiction editor at BRUISER and writes a weekly film column for Splice Today. I got the chance to speak with him on a range of topics, including his background, industry versus DIY filmmaking, and living in Baltimore.
Julia Hathaway: What's your background?
Alex Lei: I went to film school at Montana State, which is a land-grant university, so it's a production-focused program. I was doing film production things for most of my undergrad, but got fed up with that by my junior or senior year, and I switched to a written thesis on Soviet cinema during the Khrushchev era. It's an underappreciated part of the Soviet film canon, at least in the Western world, and that got me started doing more film writing.
I worked in politics for a little bit and just had a bullshit e-mail job that forced me to get a Twitter. It wasn't until the pandemic that I got more serious about doing film criticism; then eventually over the years established a repertoire and have been pretty active doing film criticism from there.
JH: You mentioned before the interview there’s a film festival in Baltimore. What does the rest of the scene look like?
AL: It’s been shifting since I moved in 2019. The big reason that I knew that there was a film scene is Eric Allen Hatch, who is a very serious programmer previously at Maryland Film Festival and now runs New/Next. So I vaguely knew that there were a bunch of filmmakers working in Baltimore. Everybody knows John Waters and Barry Levinson. But in the last 20 something years, there's been a lot more DIY filmmakers making their name in town. It all relates back to the music scene: Dan Deacon and Beach House are all people really into film. These things all interrelate because it's a small town artistically.
But there's this good DIY scene emerging. You have people like Albert Birney and Marnie Ellen Hertzler (who also works as a fine artist in town). It's a place where you can still live semi-cheaply, a lot of disused space gets turned into galleries. People don’t have to make a ton of money to live and work here. I work at a bar a few days a week and I can fund my life doing that. I can do freelance writing on other days. A lot of musicians and artists have found it really comfortable to live here that way. It feels like it's Greenwich in the 60s.
JH: What's bartending like?
AL: It's physical. You're on your feet for 12 hours without a break. And the customer service aspect can be tiring. It's a good discipline to get into because, and this might be sacrilegious to some serious mixology people, but the bar for being a really good bartender is not that high. The skill ceiling is not as high as something like cooking. Once you figure out the basics of the five main types of cocktails that exist, the whole world's your oyster from there. There's only so many techniques for bartending. You're going to shake it or you're going to stir it, and you just have to figure out how to balance. Once you get over that threshold, you're basically just plating things and you can make really good money doing it.
JH: Would you say that working at the bar stifles your creativity?
AL: More than anything, it allows me to be creative outside of work. When I was thinking about going to New York, I would have inevitably burnt myself out working on film sets, which I already don't like to do in the first place because there's so much wasted time and energy unnecessarily spent on them. If I had worked on film sets, I would never pick up a camera again. I know so many writers that they do copywriting or something for their day job and it makes it harder to write for themselves or to freelance. Having a job not informed by what I want to do creatively is so freeing. Especially given that I only have to go into work three times a week. It'll be a long day. I'm still working full time, but I have most of the week to work on my own things, and I don't have to take work home with me either.
JH: Who are your favorite filmmakers?
AL: I always struggle with how to pick these favorites because there's lifelong favorites, like David Lynch and Kelly Reichardt, who were so paradigm shifting to my cinephilia and the kind of things I was interested in. But lately, this year I've been watching a lot of Shinji Iwai, Márta Mészáros, Želimir Žilnik, and these filmmakers become everything to how I view cinema just by nature of my current obsession with them. Maybe they'll become my favorite filmmakers ever, but I can only know that 10 years from now.
JH: What are your favorite movies from them?
AL: From Lynch, Twin Peaks is the thing that I stick to the most. It definitely is his great novel that he was constantly revisiting and reworking. For Reichardt, it's Old Joy and it's always going to be Old Joy just because that movie was so different from anything I'd ever seen, and it opened certain things up. I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and the way that it films Portland, there's a good groundedness to it. At the same time, you can tell that Reichardt isn't from there. I grew up around the suburbs of Portland and didn’t feel super connected with the city itself until I was a teenager. How Reichardt films the city feels very similar to how I felt experiencing it. She's definitely documenting it right before a massive change. Portland was almost like the Rust Belt, and then got rapidly gentrified. It’s this document of this place that doesn't really exist anymore as I remember it or as she remembers it.
JH: What was your favorite movie, as a child?
AL: I watched Star Wars VHS's over and over and over again. That was probably my favorite movie as a child. I can't believe we didn't wear those tapes out, those special editions they made in the late 90s. And before every movie, there was a behind the scenes feature about the production of the original films and these digital restorations that Lucasfilm was doing. I was pretty obsessed with this part as well, this peeling back the spectacle of it all and realizing that a movie was a real thing that could be made.
JH: Would you say that's what impacted you and helped turn you into a cinephile?
AL: It's part of it for sure, but film was a big part of my childhood. There's little things like the tradition of watching It's A Wonderful Life every year on Christmas Eve with my family, that just imbues some sort of ritualistic thing in you. And with that movie, I only saw the first half of it for the first eight or nine years of my life. It was a movie I was very familiar with, but I didn't actually know the whole movie. I'd always go to bed before it finished because it would start at 8 and it would go for 3 or 4 hours with all the commercials. But I remember waking up and my parents still watching it, and then the famous sequence, the Twilight Zone sequence where George Bailey is suddenly in a world where he was never born. I was so taken aback by this. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing that there is this other surreal side to this movie I thought I knew. And that definitely did something to me.
JH: So how did you get into Soviet cinema?
AL: When I was a teenager just browsing Criterion and stuff, I got interested in Tarkovsky. Then when you get further into broad film canon, you end up in the 20s and these filmmaker theorists of the montage era are so foundational. There's this big gap in the understanding of Soviet cinema. It goes from these highly political films of the 20s agitprop, then eventually, somehow the Soviet film industry spits out this languid, poetic stuff from Tarkovsky. There's just all this missing information in the middle. And I became obsessed with filling in these gaps because it was so elusive to me. I was working off the assumption that Tarkovsky wasn't just a fluke in the system, but was an evolution of it.
JH: Who's your favorite filmmaker from that forgotten era?
AL: It's tough because there's so many filmmakers that I love one or two of their films, but not the rest of their work. Andrei Konchalovsky is a great example. He was a co-writer with Tarkovsky when they were young, and they had a big falling out during the making of Andrei Rublev. I really love his film, Asya’s Happiness. I think it's one of the great Soviet films. And he invents this whole form of neorealism, where there's three principal actors that play characters who live on a collective farm, but all the rest of the characters are just real people playing themselves, monologuing from their lives. It creates this great synthesis of this dramaturgy and realist documentary filmmaking. It was specifically critical of the politics of the the Soviet Union at that time where, especially in the 60s, you could talk shit on Stalinism but you couldn't get away with criticizing the current government, so that’s one of the few films that got banned. Konchalovsky from there was pretty fine just making adaptations and studio assignments. They could be visually interesting, but they're not exciting. Whereas someone like Marlen Khutsiyev is constantly exciting. His film I Am Twenty is such a revelation from this era. Then he makes July Rain, which is almost what a Soviet Antonioni film would feel like. There are so many of these great filmmakers, and so many of them move between modes of making films that are really stunning and exciting to these boring assignments to stay in good graces with the government.
JH: What's your writing process? How do you decide what to write about?
AL: It's tough because I'm only really capable of writing about things I'm pretty interested in. Otherwise, it's a really painful process to put the words to the page. Even just a small capsule review about a movie that didn't interest me, it's impossible to get 150 or 300 words out. I wish I had a more streamlined process because so much of it is just me sitting around wasting time procrastinating. I do a lot of research before writing. I need to write in a flow state, so it'll be hours of me sitting not getting anything done, then one hour where I crank out 1000 or 1500 words.
JH: Who's your most hated filmmaker and why?
AL: Right now it's Steven Spielberg. I feel insane about the effusiveness people have towards him. I feel none of it. Revisiting a lot of his stuff ahead of Disclosure Day, I just felt so repulsed by his whole thing. His use of reaction shots–the Spielberg face–and how a lot of his cinema is premised on that. You have to show Roy Scheider's reaction to the shark for the audience to really understand the stakes, and you have to show them all getting out of the Jeep to see the dinosaurs to have that moment of awe in Jurassic Park. It's such a dishonest style of filmmaking and really pushy. I feel so magnetically opposite to it, it just pushes me away when it's supposed to pull me in. I'm glad that my friends are happy and that some of them like this stuff, but I don't. I don't like it at all.
JH: I am also an avowed Spielberg hater. So for me, I start to see 1993 as the demarcation point. You have Jaws, you have Jurassic Park, you have all those crowd pleasers, and then in ‘93, you really start to get into his “I want to be taken seriously” phase. Do you like anything of his, pre-Jurassic Park or do you just hate it all?
AL: I thought I liked Jaws and I rewatched it and it felt too long. It felt like the script could have been cut down, which is a ridiculous, sacrilegious thing to say about that movie of all things. But thinking about how many Jaws imitators are out there and they're 90 minutes. I thought Jaws was 90 minutes.
JH: It's 2 hours, 4 minutes.
AL: It doesn't need to be that. I mean it worked because it's one of the biggest movies ever. You mentioned ‘93 is Spielberg’s “I'm getting serious” point, but you have clips of him in ‘76 at the Oscars and he's reacting to not getting the Best Director nomination [for Jaws]. He's really mad that his blockbuster movie is not getting recognition by the Academy, so they're so out of touch. He always wanted that recognition and to be taken seriously in that way, but at the same time, he's become more insular as a filmmaker. Not that he's not a populist filmmaker anymore, he still is. Obviously in The Fablemans, it all comes back to that first moment where he goes to the cinema and it's this huge, beautiful, and terrifying collective experience for him. That's where the whole world is for him, in that four-walled room. Disclosure Day really only works as a movie about the media being some unified thing if everybody is together looking at it, right? When all the people are reacting to the images at the end, it's like they're all in the same subway car, or are all on the street together. These people are still physically together and as cinema becomes more niche and less the preeminent popular art form, but they aren't physically together in the unifying space as they once were. Now a lot of people watch movies at home alone or on their laptops, which just makes the whole unified space just seem a totally out of touch, atavistic idea.
JH: Would you say that his use of reaction shots are kind of telling the audience what to feel?
AL: It's manipulative. There's so much cinema that I like that strives against that form of shorthand. There's this great part in Pedro Costa's documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie?, which is about Straub–Huillet making the movie Sicilia!. They're in the editing room watching this one cut over and over again, and Straub says something to the effect of “We've got to make sure not to cut right there because it's going to look too much like a reaction shot,” and then pontificates for a while about how dishonest reaction shots are. Then Huillet tells him to shut up because she's trying to work.
JH: What was your favorite era of Hollywood?
AL: It's hard not to admire the post-war collapse of the studio system era. When studios are still at the height of their powers and their factory environment, and they just crank out these amazingly produced movies, but something weirder is starting to bubble up from the surface. There's a real darkness coming out of the post-war era. Even just the immediate post-war films, like John Ford's They Were Expendable, where there isn't this feeling of victory. There's this feeling of “something really bad happened to society through all of this” and in retrospect, everyone sees the end of World War II in America as this huge celebration, and there's something so elegiac about these movies at that time. [Raoul] Walsh’s The Man I Love, or [William Wyler’s] The Best Years of Our Lives are probably a really good example of what even the “cinema of quality” films from this era are dealing with. Then you're getting the new voices popping up, like Nicholas Ray. He sees something wrong going on in society at the time. That's the most exciting period of Hollywood. I've grown more ambivalent in my relationship to New Hollywood and its legacy. It just makes me think of what American cinema could have been if it had gone down the Roger Corman, Bob Rafelson, John Cassavetes path, as opposed to just remaking Hollywood studio filmmaking. And of course, it's the best time for the Western.
JH: What's your favorite Western?
AL: It's hard not to say The Searchers. It looms over everything. It's such a cliched answer but it's the one that I can watch 30 or 40 times and it keeps opening itself up. It's something that's great because it's obviously not a perfect film. I used to be obsessed with the idea of there being a perfect film, and that's how you get into stuff like Kubrick, where it's so designed and precise. I've really fallen away from that as something I'm interested in. The Searchers has all these flaws and little technical things, but there's tension to everything within it. It’s a movie to obsess over.
JH: If you were put in charge of everything movie-related tomorrow, what would be the first thing you changed?
AL: We'd arrest Steven Spielberg first thing.
But more seriously I would just try to change the paradigm away from high budget filmmaking. There should be money and resources for things of more modest budgets. You could look at the Soviet film industry, and see it as something that was censored and people had to work around, but Andrei Konchalovsky actually left the Soviet Union in the 80s and worked in Hollywood for most of that decade. He had some mixed success. He was getting money from Golan / Globus to make things that were weirder than Golan / Globus knew what to do with. But in Hollywood, he ran up against this thing that he would call the ‘censorship of money,’ where if money people don't like the idea or the concept of the movie, it doesn't get made. Whereas in the Soviet Union, these films are getting made whether or not the government censors agreed with them. That happens on the back end. These films would get made. They might get banned or they might get shelved for a few years or only show at one theater in Moscow and then go to international festivals to build up acclaim internationally but not actually play at home. These films still got made.
People in America talk about how there's no government grants for low-budget filmmaking and people in Europe have it better. Whereas people in Europe still complain about this too, it's still a struggle to get money anywhere. There should be some sort of model where we are handing money to these modest productions. I'm talking about the ultra low budget to mid low budget scale that ranges from $20,000 to something that costs $500,000. Money should just be more accessible in general. But everything's about gambling on big projects, especially the Hollywood paradigm right now, movies should cost $100 or $200 million and shoot to recoup by making a billion dollars at the box office. All of Hollywood's been moving that way since The Sound of Music.
JH: So just to clarify, you'd give Obsession more money? You'd give Curry Barker money to make Obsession.
AL: I haven't seen Obsession, but that is the kind of movie that should be given free money and free rein to do things. People are talking about, “oh, they're going to learn the wrong lesson from this,” and the debate around that isn’t getting to the point, which is that these movies should have access to funding. Because lower budget range movies are just lower stakes in terms of returns. On a personal scale, if it's people trying to break into this world and they're trying to make movies for $20-50 thousand, that's a lot of money for a person to have. For a normal person to raise that much money is really hard. So there is an expectation that somehow we have to recoup that's just so near impossible right now with the financials of the film industry. There's got to be grants that can do this. In Baltimore, we have the Saul Zaentz Foundation, which gives out grants to local filmmakers and gives them the latitude to make these low budget projects. Even if it's not the entirety of their budget, the grant can supplement it.
There should be more things like this that exist that can subsidize lower budget projects. There's obviously things that come up against the union contracts and working around those pay scales, which is more of a result of the film industry once being a hyper-industrialized thing. A Hollywood studio in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s worked like a factory. You had screenwriters working on multiple things. You had directors working on multiple things. And all the below-the-line people are working on tons of things over and over again. It was more like a production line.
That's why they had industrial style labor unions, and now everything is basically freelance. Nobody's on studio contracts. So now you get this weird tension where unions have fought really hard for good wages, but now the industry that they would interact with is starting to not exist anymore. These low budget projects are the only work that they can get, and the pay scales are weird. We're watching the industrial side of filmmaking come to impossible blows with what's really possible artistically on the low budget end right now. There's more discussions to be had, like the thing with the art director of Obsession. I'm politically very far to the left and think that pretty much any amount of labor should result in ownership. But there's no back end points for people that work below the line on film sets. That's just not something that exists in the film industry. I think it should. Everybody that is physically on set does earn some sort of right of ownership over it. But that's just not how things are being run right now.
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Julia Hathaway (@startofsvmmer) is buried alive in Devin Morgan’s backyard. She enjoys dunking on people and writing about film.