Alex Karpovsky is best known for playing Ray Ploshansky, the curmudgeonly Café Grumpy manager turned city council member on HBO’s "Girls." He also showed up in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and will appear in their forthcoming Hail, Caesar!. But before that, Karpovsky was a prolific director on the ultra indie scene, creating and acting in films including Red Flag and The Whole Story.
After the premiere of "Girls" in 2012, Karpovsky hadn’t been behind the camera again until 2015, when he co-directed three music videos. Teaming with designer and musician Teddy Blanks under the name Spielbergs, the duo have been behind the goofily dark videos for "Palace" by Tanlines, "Back of the Car" by RAC, and "Talk to Me" by Kopecky. In the coming year, along with more video work, Spielbergs have a short film in an episode of "The New Yorker Presents," a new show streaming on Amazon, and are currently writing longer ideas for film and television.
In this interview, the two tell the story of how they started working together, describe their writerly process, and explain how they borrowed from James Turrell before Drake and Director X. Then they reveal five music videos that have been key in developing their approach and aesthetic.
Pitchfork: Did you meet from your work on "Girls" or did your relationship predate that?
Alex Karpovsky: We met while working on Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. I acted in the film, and Teddy wrote the score and designed the opening titles. But our first real collaboration was on my feature Red Flag, which Teddy also scored. During that process we became close friends, but it was another few years before we worked on anything else together.
Pitchfork: What lead to you becoming a directing team?
Teddy Blanks: Tanlines brought us together. CHIPS, the design studio that I co-founded, was working on album artwork and various promotional materials for Highlights, the band’s most recent record. Eric Emm, their singer, had been repeatedly told that he bears a striking resemblance to Ray from "Girls." When the band realized that I was friends with Alex, they asked me if I thought he would be interested in working with them on a music video that explores a doppelgänger or "parallel lives" theme.
AK: The four of us had dinner and really hit it off. The next day, Teddy and I were brainstorming ideas and realized that it would be much more fun to write and direct the video together. We had a great time making it and were happy with how it came out, so we naturally wanted to make more. And we did.
Pitchfork: Alex, since you’ve taken a break from directing these past few years, what motivated you to start making music videos?
AK: Making a film is a herculean endeavor that takes a lot of time. Things often move at a glacial pace as you try to assemble a team and financial backing. Making music videos, along with other short-form content, allows me to stay creatively stimulated during the waiting periods. A few short weeks after you pitch a music video you can be on set shooting away. That’s exciting. Videos are also a more immediate way to experiment with style, test out the latest gadgets, and meet new collaborators. Increasingly, short-form stuff is not just a gap-filler, but something that informs and expands my approach to features.
Pitchfork: Teddy, had you done any directing before these videos?
TB: Through my work at CHIPS, I’ve designed and animated a bunch of opening title sequences for movies and TV (Love & Mercy, Still Alice, HBO’s "Togetherness"), but these videos are my first foray into directing.
Pitchfork: What's your process for coming up with concepts for videos?
TB: The Spielbergs process pretty much looks like the most stereotypical version of a screenwriting team that you could imagine. Usually one of us is pacing around bouncing a tennis ball on the floor while the other one is typing.
AK: For these videos, we would listen to the song together a bunch of times, and at some point, a seed of an idea would occur to one of us. Then it would become a game to see how far we could push that idea into the kind of surreal comedy that we both respond to.
Pitchfork: How would you describe your aesthetic in these videos?
AK: None of these videos are at all performance-based. Each tells a short story, and is pretty jam-packed with plot. So if there is any overall aesthetic, it comes from a desire to get either as much narrative information or as much comedy out of every moment that we possibly can. Because of this, the videos end up looking pretty stylized; the shots are carefully composed and the camera movements are smooth. We’ve been lucky to work with really talented cinematographers right out of the gate.
TB: As far as the actual "look" of the videos goes, we approached each one differently. Going into the Kopecky video, our initial idea was: There’s a cult, and the cult lives inside of a James Turrell exhibit. We got in touch with Jason Peters, an artist who works with light, and found an incredible abandoned church to shoot in. The whole thing took on a life of its own. We wanted the RAC video to look super warm and sun-drenched, almost like a beautiful, serene fashion video. That way, once things get really absurd, it’s that much funnier. The more composed the images seem, the more surprising it is when things get wacky.
Pitchfork: As well as Alex's appearance in two of the three videos, each one features a known actor (Michael Ian Black, Sasheer Zamata, Natasha Lyonne). How and why did you select these performers?
AK: Michael, Sasheer, and Natasha are all incredible comedic actors with a lot of range. They can all turn in subtle and grounded performances, but that’s not really what we wanted them for. Since there’s hardly any dialogue in our mini-movies, we needed actors who could convey a lot just through their movements and facial expressions; it’s almost like silent film acting.
TB: As far as Alex is concerned, his irrepressible narcissism forces him to insist upon being cast in every video we do, which has become a constant source of tension that threatens to end our collaboration at any moment.
Five Videos That Have Inspired Spielbergs
Beck: "'Sexx' Laws" (directed by Beck)
Any video in which a refrigerator fornicates with a stovetop oven until they both catch on fire is bound to be right in our wheelhouse. Plus, there’s a lithe and youthful Beck employing the best dance moves of his career.
Talking Heads: "Nothing But Flowers" (directed by Tibor Kalman)
Teddy’s background is in graphic design, so we’re always trying to find ways to incorporate type in the outskirts of our videos. "Nothing But Flowers" is a good example of an early, innovative use of typography in music videos. It was directed by Tibor Kalman, who designed many of Talking Heads’ album covers.
Beach House: "Wishes" (directed by Eric Wareheim)
"Wishes" exists in our ideal tonal universe. It’s totally absurd, almost surreal, while also being somehow strangely beautiful.
Foster the People: "Houdini" (directed by DANIELS)
We are huge admirers of the DANIELS, and not only because they are also a duo. In "Houdini," the band members die in a freak on-set accident 10 seconds into the video. It’s up to the entire promotional team behind the act to make it seem like their dead bodies are still performing in the video, and then later, live onstage, Weekend at Bernie’s style! It’s a funny idea for a video, but the DANIELS make it great because they consistently raise the stakes, and because they are magical wizards with visual effects.
New Edition: "Cool It Now" (director unknown)
We often revisit this video together during breaks from writing. Everything about it is '80s perfect: the colorful sweatshirts, the strange cutaways to sunset canoodling, the elaborate hand gestures. We particularly respond to the exaggerated displays of emotion—exactly the kind of performance we’re trying to get out of people in our videos.