Charli XCX lives in Los Angeles, where, as the old joke has it, you only run into people on the freeway.
In New York, the pop star learned, serendipity is everything.
Charli was in town to promote her new album and play a sold-out show at the Brooklyn Paramount on Tuesday. While she was out one night, she met Dillon Friend, a projectionist for Roxy Cinema, the arthouse theater in the basement of Tribeca’s Roxy Hotel.
“They were hanging out and talking about film and he found out what a cinephile she was,” said the Roxy’s cinema director Illyse Singer. “He asked if she would come do a series with us and it kind of just pulled together.”
Illyse Singer interviewed Charli XCX at Roxy Cinema.
Charli’s idea was to showcase films that inspired her new album “Brat,” which was released last Friday and has turned the internet green with memes riffing on her lime-colored album cover. Some hardcore fans have gone so far as to redub Pride Month “brat month.”
Singer had mere days to hammer out Charli’s vision for the series, obtain the screening rights, and fly in 35mm prints from around the country. In the end, they obtained seven of the singer’s 13 picks to make up the Roxy’s new series, “Charli XCX presents: the brat collection.”
Two weeks after that chance encounter, Charli XCX stepped into the Roxy’s auditorium to introduce the first screening, which sold out less than a minute after the series was announced the previous day.
“I’m not really a big music listener,” Charli said during a pre-film Q&A. “The palette of movies inspires me a lot more than listening to other people’s music, which I can find distracting.”
The already iconic and incessantly memed album cover was inspired by the end credits of “Smiley Face,” the 2007 comedy by the celebrated New Queer Cinema director Gregg Araki, she said.
“I was texting Imogene Strauss, my creative director, like ‘Oh this is so brat-coded, you have to watch it,’” Charli said. “The credits are really just different versions of the Brat cover.”
“It wasn’t a rip-off,” she added. “I need to just say that.”
Two of the singer’s selections are set in the 1990s New York club kid scene, including “Party Girl,” the 1995 Parker Posey film stacked with a cast of downtown nightlife queens, and “Party Monster,” the cult 2003 adaptation of James St. James’ memoir about the party-to-prison arc of one of the era’s central figures.
“Michael Alig and that whole scene was such an influence on me when I was younger,” Charli said. “I was watching these club kids and was so interested in that New York, DIY, art-kid, Leigh Bowery-esque partying.”
“The fantastical outfits, the themes … fashion and music then was inspired by people who had this level of commitment to making a party a space for art,” she said.
A couple months before making the video for the Brat single “360,” Charli watched “Daisies” for the first time – the pioneering 1966 Czech satire of female stereotypes, which follows two women, Marie I and Marie II, as they engage in various rebellions and misadventures.
Her “360” video is an explicit send-up of the internet’s “It girls,” with a cast including Chloe Sevigny, Chloe Cherry, Julia Fox, Rachel Sennott and Hari Nef, among others.
“‘Daisies’ was a big influence on that video,” Charli said. “Their version of being bratty is throwing a plate of food in a waiter’s face; our version was Emma Chamberlain parking a car on top of another car.”
“Each film in the series is kind of brat-coded,” Charli said. “Or part of the bratosphere, as we say in our group chat.”
The full lineup of films, with links to showtimes and tickets for $18, is at the bottom of the page here.
