“The first shot of the entire film is Charli – should I say this? Do I want this in print? – hawking up some phlegm and it landing on the glass,” says director and co-writer Aidan Zamiri, speaking with co-writer Bertie Brandes ahead of the London premiere of The Moment.

From the offset, it’s clear that the film is not the glossy tour doc that usually follows a pop breakthrough. Centered on the aftermath of Charli xcx’s Brat album cycle, the mockumentary casts Charli as a heightened version of herself, navigating the absurdities of pop stardom and the vertiginous consequences when a cultural moment spirals out of control.

Zamiri and Brandes first met in a cafeteria at Central Saint Martins, when Brandes was running the of-the-moment indie zine Mushpit, and Zamiri, then a first-year graphic design student, had engineered the encounter. “I think that was the first time I charmed you,” he recalls now, laughing from his busy-wallpapered hotel room. Brandes laughs. “Aidan became our muse…a lot of people didn’t like what we were doing, but Aidan actually just got it. That’s why our friendship and creative partnership has lasted so long – he loved the silliness, but we could also talk about the deeper meanings.”

That balance underpins The Moment, where absurd touches like metaphorical cocaine, a beaded-necklace-wearing Alexander Skarsgård, a credit card for gays all appear alongside real-world brand and media mentions, including a Dazed shoutout. These signposts point to a larger rumination on fame and culture. “It was like reflecting on these surreal events happening in real time, which also felt like a reflection of where we are culturally,” Zamiri explains. “Things like NATO doing a Brat post – it’s truly surreal. What’s interesting is taking something that feels deeply personal and watching it warp, get absorbed, and sometimes lose its meaning… when the shell of something is engaged with rather than the whole, stripping away nuance and weight.”

It’s a confessional side that isn’t new for pop auteur Charli xcx – from the therapy-lifted voice notes of 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now to the self-described “sell-out” persona of 2022’s Crash, Charli has long interrogated fame from within. While The Moment warps that idea into something darkly-humorous with the help of Brandes and Zamiri, the film is still as much about Charli’s personal experience of this whirlwind. “She’d been working for half her life toward one thing, and rather than feeling like she’d arrived, she felt like it was slipping through her hands,” Zamiri says. “It’s this mix of dread and excitement and exhaustion… that sense of being fully seen and completely unmoored at the same time.”

Below, we talk to the pair ahead of the London premiere about the making of The Moment.

How did Charli xcx bring this idea to you?

Aidan Zamiri: Charli had been getting interest from various places to take a somewhat conventional route, making a tour documentary or a concert film to capitalise on the success of her album. But that didn’t feel exciting, interesting, or fresh. She had this thought to make something that might pose itself within that format but disrupt it, or do something that hopefully felt more truthful – something that got to the core of what it feels like not just to be an artist, but to exist in the world today.

I know that sounds broad, but really, she was thinking about existing in a way where the goalposts are often set toward profit, being liked, or being consumed by as many people as possible, which isn’t a very human way to exist. Charli wrote this really eloquent piece outlining the idea of making a mockumentary in the lead-up to her headline tour. She also wrote a more emotional, diary-like piece. From there, Bertie and I started forming the story together.

How did you then build from Charli’s initial ideas to The Moment?

Bertie Brandes: We wanted to relate to the feelings Charli had written down without needing to be a pop star to understand them, which I think she had already achieved. It was a kind of character study of this person, and then bringing in my own experiences to create something that I think is really three-dimensional, and speaks to people on a lot of different levels.

Aidan Zamiri: It was like reflecting on these very surreal events that were happening in real time, which also felt like a reflection of where we are in culture. There’s something relatable in the fact that often we live in a world where entities, brands, media, or whatever, want to engage with something because it seems popular or cool, but in many ways, they only engage with the shell of it rather than the whole thing. That sterilises it, reduces its meaning, and takes away its weight. Obviously, that happens to albums, artists, or pop culture, but it gets more sinister when it starts to happen to subcultures, groups of people, or other communities. So it felt like an interesting kind of synecdoche, a small, specific moment standing in for something much larger.

Where did you write this?

Aidan Zamiri: A lot of time was spent in the Barbican kitchen and Cafe Kick. The fun part was that it never felt lonely because we were doing it all together.

Bertie Brandes: It was a very intense period that was fueled by so many different types of tea we drank around town. The most important thing was just finding places open past 7pm that would allow us to just sit there and make a lot of noise and spread out in a really sort of obnoxious way with scripts on both of our laptop screens – absolute hell. We even wrote in cinemas quite a lot which felt like we were a parody of ourselves.

How did you find working together?

Bertie Brandes: I think what was so amazing is that we’re both insanely obsessed with tiny details, so every little thing became open to discussion. You don’t often get the chance to be that specific as a writer. For me, especially having never written collaboratively like this before, it was such a rewarding experience. It was an opportunity to be totally insane, to be really emotional, cry, have an argument and make up.

Aidan Zamiri: We’re really good at disagreeing, which helps us figure things out together. I think that’s also why our friendship and collaboration have lasted so long. We wrote the first draft in a really condensed period over December 2024 – I even spent Christmas with Bertie’s family.

I love the opening spit scene.

Aidan Zamiri: Thank you! That’s one thing that sort presented itself to us in the edit and became one of those visual motifs that bookend the film. One of the final shots features Celeste spitting after hearing Charli’s monologue. There’s a lot of feelings of this horseshoeing throughout the project.

There’s a lot of brands featured and mentioned throughout. How did you decide which to include?

Aidan Zamiri: We wanted to capture what it feels like to be in the culture right now. I love how the film in general feels – hopefully a bit like a real, holistic time capsule, without trying. I think the thing we wanted to avoid was ever doing anything that felt like an obvious, modern-day reference. Instead, we just used it in the general language. I think Bertie and I are interested in making stuff that feels like it’s in conversation with the world around it.

I have to mention the Dazed shoutout…

Aidan Zamiri: [laughs] I actually do wonder if that is the first Dazed magazine shout out in a movie. Obviously, Bertie and I are very much friends of Dazed. That was a real shout out.

I think Bertie and I found it so funny that anything we might have decided on a whim in the Barbican kitchen eventually had to become something physical. Or something that we saw, you know. Like one random day we decided to write the word ‘16-foot-cigarettes’ and then before we know it, it is being wheeled in. 

Bertie Brandes: The other thing is that me and Aiden have both worked at like every place imaginable: magazines, platforms, brands, or whatever. So we have a very specific shared language an understanding of the nuances of those various industries. I think it will age amazingly since it will become a time capsule of these media platforms that we were all kind of enthralled to at that time.

I’ve seen a lot of discourse online about The Moment – some almost feel like they could be cutscenes from the film.

Aidan Zamiri: I think a lot of those reactions have been super intentional. When we first started teasing the project, it was actually very unclear whether it was a documentary or a fictional movie – and we made it sort of intentionally confusing. Bertie and I love and enjoy and welcome the various interpretations, or even the confusion.

Bertie Brandes: I agree. There’s a very small subset of, like, Gen Xers who seem to ask, ‘Why make a film like Spice World or Spinal Tap?’ And it’s like, those films came out decades ago, and the culture we live in now is completely different. Yes, we still exist under capitalism, but the way we exist under it has changed enormously, and the idea of consumerism has shifted dramatically. It’s not just pop stars who are products anymore – anyone can get a brand deal. You might not get paid, but you can post about it and they’ll send you something. That concept of valueless exchange is fascinating, more prominent than ever, and the idea that we shouldn’t comment on it just because someone did in 2002 is, to me, really interesting.

Bertie Brandes: Aidan, I want to know if the film is still the thing that you think about as you’re falling asleep every night?

Aidan Zamiri: [laughs] For a year, especially during the edit, I was one of the least social I've ever been. Anytime I could have hung out with someone else, I was completely consumed by The Moment. I was probably the most boring person in the world because I couldn’t think about anything else.

That’s kind of what we touch on in the film: once you share something, it’s no longer entirely yours. That letting go is something I have to do with everything I work on, everything has a life cycle, and I get to hang on to it in secret, hoarding it, until I’m not allowed to anymore. And then throwing it off the cliff into the void has its own strange, disorienting nature. But the joy comes in seeing how it transforms when other people get their teeth into it. Now, I even find myself wondering what I’ll be thinking about when I fall asleep.

What’s next for you both?

Aidan Zamiri: I think our plan is to jump into writing a new thing. We’ve already sort of started planning a few bits and bobs. We finish this premiere tonight and then get bloody back on it, don’t we?

Bertie Brandes: Yeah, you can’t dread the end, when it’s over, only in terms of the moment.

The Moment is out now.