Three days before Charli XCX’s music video for “360” came out in the spring of 2024, setting the stage for the Brat Summer to come, the pop star found herself in a dive bar in downtown Manhattan, agreeing to do a movie with a director she had just met.

“I don’t know that she knew what her future was going to be,” says Pete Ohs, the director in question, who met Charli through their common friend Jeremy O. Harris, the playwright behind Slave Play, on that fateful night at the Dimes Square haunt Clandestino.

“There’s a thing that, when you’re a gay guy who introduces a cis straight woman to a cis straight man, you immediately have to do,” Harris says, “which is de-weaponize the situation, or make sure that they can lower their defenses, by articulating all the ways in which this person is not going to cause them harm or distress. So I immediately was like, ‘Pete is great. Pete does this. You guys should talk about this.’”

Harris stood up to get drinks, expecting he would come back to a tentative, awkward conversation between his friends. Instead, in the five minutes it took him to top up their refreshments, they were already deep in conversation about film and Charli’s recent coming out as a cinephile on Letterboxd.

“When I came back, they were alive and lit up,” Harris says. “She’s telling him the way he makes movies sounds like how she makes albums. And I’m sitting there, still holding my drink, being like, ‘When’s anyone going to ask me a question?’”

Half an hour later, Charli posed a dare to Ohs: “Well, if you ever need an actress, I’m down.”

The director parried: “If you’re around in August, there’s a role for you.”

Soon enough, they were brainstorming over Instagram DMs about a film that would begin shooting three months later in Warsaw. “Instantly, I just started talking to her about making a movie, about what the character might be,” Ohs says. “And instantly, she just started riffing with me right back. It was through those initial back-and-forth conversations that we started to arrive at this idea of a relationship that’s so powerful that volcanoes would erupt and what does that mean that a love could also destroy worlds. Both of us were like, ‘That sounds cool.’”

Over the last few years, Ohs has increasingly become known in American indie circles for works like 2022’s Jethica and 2017’s Julia Garner-starrer Everything Beautiful Is Far Away, projects he calls “table of bubbles” films. (“Imagine a table made of bubbles—it’s beautiful and magical, but it can’t support anything,” he said in an interview. “Don’t put your plates or forks on it, and don’t put your hopes, dreams, or expectations on it either.”) Ohs makes films that often live in the liminal space, slight by design, but with a clarity of vision and breathtakingly casual, economical storytelling.

Ohs typically starts shooting with just an outline. Throughout the production process, his collaborators contribute to the script, writing lines over dinner, giving voice to their own characters, and then shooting the next day. It’s a lot of serious play—a process that feels casual but has been finely honed over the years. On Erupcja, Ohs shares writing credit with Harris, Charli XCX as well as the actors Lena Góra and Will Madden.

That fizzy table of bubbles certainly can’t support the hopes and dreams of millions of pop stans, eager to know what Charli XCX was planning to do with her big moment (for that, they would have to wait for The Moment). But as she suddenly transformed from cult hero to zeitgeist-defining superstar over the course of a few heady weeks, the project seemed like exactly the kind of swerve she needed to make.