Aidan Zamiri on Directing Charli xcx’s Alternate Brat Universe in The Moment

On “360,” the opening track of Charli xcx’s 2024 pop juggernaut Brat, the Essex-born star sings, “If you love it, if you hate it, I don’t fucking care what you think,” hitting each staccato syllable with defiant precision. It could’ve been the album’s sole thesis, but Brat’s genius lies in its contradictions. Charli presents as a braless, wild-haired, cigarette-smoking club kid stomping around in micro-miniskirts and boots, a true artist. She’s also a 33-year-old woman cataloging her insecurities about fame, her place in pop culture, and the impossible calculus between motherhood and career.

Charli pushes those vulnerabilities further in The Moment, A24’s hyper-meta project that’s already become the production company’s fastest-selling limited release. The autofictional film, which premiered at Sundance and arrives in theaters January 30, follows Charli as she vacillates between the artistic integrity that made Brat so great and a desperate need for public approval, taking the consumerist excess that swallowed up Brat Summer to its logical extreme. Not quite a concert doc, nor a mockumentary, The Moment is a funhouse-mirror reflection of Charli’s post-Brat life. As she prepares for tour (with her record company looming large), the pressures and absurdities of stardom are laid bare. Cameos from her real-life friends—including Rachel Sennott and Kylie Jenner—and caricatured performances by Rosanna Arquette and Alexander Skarsgård as a cutthroat record exec and a creepy director dial the ridiculousness up to eleven.

Directed by Aidan Zamiri in his feature debut (he cowrote the script with Bertie Brandes), the film skewers Charli, the music industry, and her fans with equal irreverence. At 29, the Scottish director has become something of a pop-star whisperer, collaborating with Billie Eilish, FKA twigs, Yung Lean, Caroline Polachek, and Timothée Chalamet to create what’s emerging as the defining pop aesthetic of the 2020s. The Moment captures that style, both in its look and its content: self-referential, anxiety-inducing, tongue-in-cheek. It also understands how our physical and digital realities spiral together in feedback loops, each informing and distorting the other.

Zamiri and Charli worked together several times before The Moment, including on the music videos for “Guess” and “360,” but The Moment brought them closer than ever. “Charli and I, luckily, are really similar,” he tells W ahead of the film’s release. “We have similar tastes and points of view.”

When did you, Charli, and Bertie come up with The Moment?

It was September 2024, at the tail end of Brat Summer, when Charli and I first started discussing this idea. It felt bizarre to compute the real-life events and emotional fallout of Charli’s experience. But most people can understand tying your sense of self to something external, and then slowly not seeing yourself reflected in it.

Charli’s a very driven person, which is helpful when it comes to setting your own deadlines. That’s why she’s such a good music and film producer. Bertie and I have been friends for a decade, but we’d never worked on something of this scale. Neither of us had ever written a script or a screenplay before, apart from small bits and bobs.

What did you want to capture about Charli and her experience that you felt a conventional film format wouldn’t do justice?

Charli and I have had this discussion: while the purpose of a documentary or concert film is to present a pop star in the most vulnerable way, it often feels contrived. With this format, we had a direct way of understanding what it felt like for someone to get everything they’d ever wanted, to reach the peak of their career they’d worked for their whole life, and then have it slip away. Often when we’d write, I’d have a Charli voice in my head.

The casting is so fun. You have Rachel Sennott and Kylie Jenner totally making fun of their public images.

It was Kylie’s first acting role ever. She told me afterwards that she was really, really nervous, because it was something she’d never done before. But she chose to take this risk, which I thought was cool. It’s quite a brave thing, also on Charli’s part, because we live in a time where, when an actor plays a fictional character that the public doesn’t like, they react to that. The fact that these girls were willing to play versions of themselves—it was so cool and confident of them.

An overarching theme of The Moment is the tension between being a faithful artist and being someone who, like most of us, exists under capitalism.

That was the core of the story. We thought a lot about what it feels like to make art in a world that’s driven towards profit. Thinking back to that year, Charli made a record that was so personal to her. I remember her speaking about it to me early on, and saying that if her previous album, Crash, had been a swing at doing the pop star thing, then Brat was her looking into herself, like, “This is the thing that I like.” I remember her thinking, “Maybe no one will like this. Maybe no one will care about it, but at least I’ve made a record I care about.”

At the end of the film, Charli sells out. Why?

We didn’t want to take the easy way out. It felt like she’d gone too far down a spiral and betrayed too many people for it to be a clean break. We had to engage with some of the venom that Charli had let into her system. The biggest antagonist throughout the film was Charli herself, and her biggest conflict was not being able to let go. We know nothing can last forever. Although you might think you can hold onto something, the trade-off is that it warps and twists, and you stop recognizing it.

Were you thinking of any other films when you made this?

Definitely. I watched a lot of documentaries and mockumentaries. And Charli’s a film buff. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of movies. Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here is a really interesting and weird film. We also thought about Black Swan—another story where a young woman loses her mind in the run-up to a big performance.

You have your artistic style, and Charli has hers. How do you meld the two when working together?

All the people I work with, even brands, don’t look the exact same, but they have a similar worldview or aesthetic sensibility. There’s a similarity at the core of our relationship with visual language. The most important point of view to collaborate on is the philosophical one. The aesthetic part of it is almost like my accent, you know what I mean? I’m interested in working alongside someone in an in-depth way, to build something together.