I first heard about PVT Chat during its long post-production period in 2019. The film struck me as too good to be true: an erotic drama, directed by Ben Hozie of Bodega, about a man (Peter Vack) obsessed with an internet cam girl (Julia Fox), along with supporting turns by Buddy Duress, Dasha and Anna from Red Scare, and Keith Poulson––not to mention a score by Parquet Courts’ Austin Brown.
With the film now in theaters and on digital, I asked Hozie to take part in a conversation, promising I “wouldn’t ask any boring or stupid questions.” He graciously agreed.
The Film Stage: One of the things I appreciate about PVT Chat is how you handled the sex scenes—they’re super unstylized and raw, with an intimate, unpredictable quality. What was the process like? What were some of the conversations you had with the cast and crew to set the tone?
Ben Hozie: It started as soon as we started casting Peter and Julia—”Hey, if you’re gonna do this movie, you have to be down with those kinds of scenes.” Because to me, it’s like—they aren’t, like, extra scenes. They’re the core of the movie in a lot of ways. Julia and Peter are both super cool, so they said, “Yeah, we’re down for whatever’s for the movie.” And on a logistic level, it’s pretty common on most movies: you draft up a nudity rider, you check it off with everybody on their team. It’s very specific: “On scene 17 in the script, you can show this,” that kind of thing. And on the actual day of shooting, in order to create a comfortable environment, you have everyone leave the set. The production designer would set up their stuff, the gaffer sets up the lights, and then you have everyone who’s not absolutely necessary go wait out in the hall. I was operating the camera myself for the whole movie, so a lot of the time it would just be me and Peter in the room. The sound guy would set up a microphone on a stand and leave as well. For some of the scenes, if I was moving the camera around a lot, I’d have to have a focus-puller there with me, but it was never more than a few people in the room. We did a lot of long-ish takes so people could kinda get into it.
One of the things about the movie is that I don’t want it to be pornographic. It’s not meant to titillate. I mean, if someone’s titillated by it, great—it’s not for me to say what people can and can’t be titillated by—but it’s not the goal. The goal was to almost study masturbation—not in a scientific way but in a documentarian kind of way. And to show it in this kind of poetic way. I wanted to show it in a way I’ve never seen it shown before.
The air of the movie is pretty unpredictable and it lends this material, which could be shocking, a moral ambiguity that I really appreciated. Did you have any anxiety about the reception, or any trepidation over the material?
No. One thing that I find particularly annoying is… early on, when I was trying to sell the movie, I got a lot of pushback from distributors over the penis, and even now certain online outlets that I won’t mention are pushing back over having the penis on their website. I’ve heard this direct quote from them: “Ben, female nudity is art, but male nudity… that’s just disgusting.” And I don’t feel that way. I think Peter’s penis is just as worth looking at as any female form is. I think it’s actually kind of a moral problem that people are so afraid of sex, whereas they’ll have whatever torture or serial killer movie, and I have nothing against those, but, why is that okay, and a dramatic movie that shows a penis is not okay? I understand that no one under 16 or 17 should watch the movie, but if you’re over the age of 18 why should you not be able to see a penis? Seems like a bad message to send out to the world.
I’ve been on the Free the Penis grind for awhile, aesthetically. I’ve been hoping that more movies would have male frontal nudity. It’s oddly rare, still.
And for good reason—I think people are afraid of the phallus, because it symbolizes power in some ways. But also, I think in some ways it’s sexism, where we still think of women as something that should be looked at and the male as not something that should in any way be looked at.
And it’s wielded in such a horrifying way in porn, where it does very explicitly symbolize power, the way that it’s framed. I think in a movie like this where you see Jack hunched over himself, edging at the computer—it’s cool to depict it that way. It feels pointed, no pun intended.
[Laughs] Yeah.
Do you see the film as in line with or a reaction against any recent trends in art?
Yeah. Here’s one movie that showed a lot of penis that I was sorta inspired by, loved some aspects of it and didn’t like some aspects of it at all: Gaspar Noé’s Love. I thought that was a really cool movie because it has his psychedelic, visionary style, but there’s no violence in it. It’s kind of a sweet movie. The character’s an asshole, but it’s really about what it’s like to fall in love and fall out of love. It’s kind of a down to earth movie for him. I remember a quote where a character says “I’m trying to make the 2001: A Space Odyssey of sex.” And I thought, “That’s a great goal.” Unfortunately I thought a lot of the sex scenes in Love were Playboy-esque—everybody’s clearly airbrushed, everybody hit the gym before the shoot, everybody’s 21-to-24 and looking their best, perfect three-point lighting. It is in no way representative of any sex that I’ve ever had. And I’m sure the actors would say the same. That movie’s on Netflix. But because it’s so stylized and it’s airbrushed, and in no way real-feeling, it gets a pass. I wanted to show erections in a way that’s not the perfect three-point lighting, airbrushed kind of thing. It’s just there. It’s how it looks in day-to-day life.
Maybe Noé’s from a different generation. He’s super influential, but he’s kind of old-fashioned in what he attempts to do with his movies. They don’t feel as digital-raw as something like PVT Chat.
Yeah, yeah. Someone pointed out to me yesterday that I might be the exact age of someone who’s the first generation to grow up with broadband available, where porn is just a click away. You’re probably a similar age to me. We experienced explicit sexual images [at a young age]—our relationship to them is very different than generations before us. So that may be why I’m one of the first American filmmakers that like, isn’t really… I don’t put sex on a pedestal. People say, “Oh, you tried to make the edgiest film.” I don’t think of PVT Chat as edgy at all. It just shows sex how most people do it. Sex and porn is such a part of our lives; why not just show it?
It’s a little bit unspoken, which is odd, because Pornhub is, what, the 6th-most-viewed website on the Internet? As much as we’ve pushed forward a political conversation around sex and sex work… maybe it’s more of a political and philosophical perspective around the right to do it, but not as much in terms of depicting our relationship to online sex in a fictional sense. For me, PVT Chat had that spark—”Someone had to do it!“
I think the only good moral argument I’ve heard against showing explicit sex in a movie is if it in any way encourages an exploitation of actors. You hear stories about Last Tango in Paris—the actress [Maria Schneider] came out and said, “The director and Marlon Brando were both sexually assaulting me while we were filming.” But I think our generation can do it in a better way by having much more frank dialogues, having people know exactly what’s being asked of them in the role. Now there’s such things as intimacy coordinators—almost like a stunt coordinator in an action movie, people that say, “Your hand’s gonna go here, you’re gonna moan here,” really choreograph the whole thing so there’s no ambiguity, everyone knows what’s gonna happen. As long as everyone’s an adult and everyone knows what’s expected of them, there’s no reason why there can’t be sex in fictional movies in a more progressive way.
I saw Tango fairly recently, and it’s definitely of a different era. Even in terms of its goals in using explicit sex, versus PVT Chat which is so pointedly about our disconnect from our physical bodies and surroundings because of our use of the internet. It’s a different political goal to show nudity and intimacy in a movie like this.
That movie was supposedly riding the coattails of a free-love movement, where sex should be more open, but it’s still a very exploitative, patriarchal view of that. So it’s very different from the world we’re in now.
I noticed that the heroes/antiheroes of the movie—Jack, Scarlett, the housepainter Will and his friend Larry—are all non-professional artists. The dopes in the movie are the professional artists: Duke, all the gallery layabouts. To what extent was this purposeful?
To me that’s New York. Everyone’s an artist in one way or another. There’s a lot of more hobbyists, I guess I would say. Everyone in New York at least does art for a hobby. Not many are able to make a financial living out of it. You got me thinking about Kevin Moccia, who plays the house painter. He actually is a house painter—he was kind of playing a version of himself. He used to tell me this story all the time which I loved, where he said, “Sometimes when I’m painting somebody’s wall, I pretend like I’m painting the Sistine Chapel, and I even sign my name all in one color so it’ll never be seen, but I do it anyway. So it’s like my signature’s on the wall.” And I was like, “Wow. So do you consider yourself an artist?” And he said, “Fuck no, I don’t consider myself an artist!” [Laughs] I actually had him tell that in the movie but it didn’t really fit, so I cut it.
But yeah. I definitely was playing around with this idea of: the fine line of what makes somebody an artist. I think that Jack himself is like an artist, in that when he makes up these lies, he’s almost narrating the plot of a script. He comes up with this idea of himself as an app developer, and when she asks more questions about it—like anyone who’s writing, you have to improvise with your initial idea. And furthermore, anyone who’s a cam girl is an artist as well: you’re performing, you’re acting. You’re roleplaying and you can’t break character. And you’re kind of being directed by the client and you’re producing your own brand, I guess is the word they’d say. I found so many interesting parallels between the cam world and movies. There’s the money aspect of it—how expensive it is, and the directing aspect of it. So much of the roleplaying. I wanted to emphasize in that one scene, where [Jack] says, “Repeat after me,” and they’re playing this kind of kinky game…. that’s a technique often used in directing, where if an actor’s having a hard time saying a literary kind of line, you can feed them the line like that. That’s a classic directing technique. I found that kind of amusing.
And unlike in directing a film, they’re both on camera. You see Jack in the small window the whole time. They’re both performing for each other.
That’s what’s cool when you go onto a cam site. You become the director and the audience simultaneously.
He gets his ideology from his roommate—”everything is transactional.” I just read The Brothers Karamazov, where everyone’s freaking out over Ivan’s theory that “if God does not exist, everything is permitted.” And all the Paul Schrader movies are about these insular guys who hear one idea and it sends them into chaos. What do you think is the appeal of that kind of character?
I think why all of us like using those kinds of tropes is because it allows your work to be explicitly philosophical. That’s clearly why Dostoevsky used it—he’s like, “I have this issue on my mind, so I’m gonna siphon it to a character, and I’m gonna let that character deal with that.” It’s almost like my way of dealing with it. There’s been times of my life where I had that exact thought that Jack had. It really troubled me. A lot of our band’s songs are about that very idea. And my way of dealing with it is to make art about it, and to assign it to Jack. The thing about Jack that me and Peter realized—this may not have been in the script—but when we started filming and I saw him interacting with the other characters, I said, “It’s clear to me that Jack doesn’t even believe in this.” He might, on a cerebral level. In the same way where you can say, “I don’t believe in free will,” but you act, obviously, as if you do. So what I noticed about Jack that he’s a people person; he’s really sweet to people when they’re around. I noticed the way he hangs out with the painters,. The way I wanted him to act, my gut was telling me what direction the scene goes to—”He’s got to be nice to people.” He’s a lonely guy but he’s an extrovert; he really gets off on having people around him. And I think his relationship with Scarlett is totally genuine. It made me realize that, on some levels, Jack doesn’t even believe his own theory, and I wanted the audience to have to ask themselves that theory. It’s a tough question to ask yourself. And when Jack says to Scarlett “imagine all the people in your life,” I want the audience to do the same. It’s an unpleasant thing to do, but I wanted to take people to this very cynical, dark mentality.
And then, near the end of the movie, it’s almost why I really oversold this happy, Cinderella, Frank Capra kind of ending, where, like, yes—it’s not like boy-gets-girl-and-they-live-happily-ever-after, but it is an almost in-your-face happy ending. I knew people wouldn’t expect that, so it’s partly just me wanting to give the exact opposite of what you’d expect. And despite everything they went through, completely exploiting each other, they did form a really close bond. I’ve found that throughout my whole life, I guess what I’d call ‘dysfunctional family hijinx”—I noticed that the more people exploit each other, the more close they get to each other. And there’s something really sweet about that. Some people have criticized the ending as kind of a male wish-fulfillment thing, but I don’t see that at all. I’m putting myself in Scarlett’s shoes: if I really rip someone off, but they’re someone who was important to me, I would try to make amends in some way. But to go back to your question, the idea of the [protagonist] who’s struggling with a worldview… I love those kinds of narratives and I think they are useful, because one of the goals for me is, “How I can I make philosophical work that doesn’t feel like it’s philosophical.” Y’know? I’ve always wanted to make work that’s about ideas, but you don’t want it to feel like people are being lectured to. It’s a tough balance. Dostoevsky absolutely got it right.
I love what you say about the ending. I like that the movie has this earnest, exploratory sense—it’s like what you’re saying with Jack, how he doesn’t necessarily believe in his own ideology. Or any, really. He’s kind of winging it, as is Scarlett. They’re both kind of battling their self-images and their self-loathing, carrying on this relationship that is exploitative and uncomfortable on both sides. But it brings them together, and it’s their movie, you know? Where else would you want them to end up but on a hotel bed mutually masturbating for each other?
Yeah. Well a lot of people said, “He should have had Jack go to jail or get killed,” or something.
Castrated.
Or castrate him or something. I find it very Old Testament morality. Regardless of whatever your ethics are in your day to day life, why do you need to punish fictional characters? It’s kinda bizarre. But, I get it. A lot of people think, “Oh, this movie’s a threat.” I had someone say to me, “This movie’s a threat to sex workers.” But you have to be stupid to rent this movie and think, “Oh yeah, stalking sex workers—that’s what I’m gonna do.” Anyone old enough to rent this movie or even be interested in independent movies is not that stupid. People need to give audiences more benefit of the doubt. People are pretty smart, you know what I mean? This idea that art needs to teach people black-and-white moral lessons I find kinda disturbing.
It feels like a fairly recent thing. I have my own moral debates—not in terms of art’s validity, but in making space in my brain for patience with that idea. It’s weird to me, because we all grew up with this art world where I was supposed to see Gaspar Noé movies when I was 14, 15, and after a certain point that kind of free-for-all artistic nihilism or any sort of shock effect became very passé very quickly. But what I like about PVT Chat is that it doesn’t do anything nasty. It’s pretty whimsical, but at the same time it is harkening back to an era of independent movies where you put a film on and you really don’t know where it can go.
Yeah. Well, one of the big rules for me was that there would be no violence in this movie. There were earlier drafts of the script where guns came out, maybe Duke had a gun, I thought, “What if Duke and Scarlett don’t know what to do, so they kidnap Jack.” You could imagine some more thriller-esque versions of the movie. And then I quickly realized that I don’t want to make that kind of movie. I’m not the Safdie brothers. I don’t enjoy plots that are just for balls-to-the-wall thrills and chills. I’m maybe a more sentimental filmmaker, or just more interested in how people are connecting. So it became like: I set up this thriller world, but it morphs into more of a perverted romantic comedy. But I still see some people describing it as a dark thriller. I dunno why—I would have to say you’re not a very self-aware viewer if you see it and think that. It definitely starts out like that. I wanted to trick people in their first 20 minutes into thinking it could go there. So maybe that colors people’s perceptions. But there’s no violence whatsoever, not even the threat of violence anywhere in the movie. It sorta hints at it when he’s first stalking her, like “this could get really scary,” but it soon becomes apparent that Jack’s not the kind of guy who’s gonna do that. He’s not aggressive in any way.
Yeah. A dark thriller where the main guy gets caught because he breaks in and checks his email.
Yeah. It’s just silly, y’know?
What do you think are the responsibilities of an artist looking to push things forward in the 2020s?
I think we do have a big responsibility. I have some friends who are now in their 30s and they’re kinda asking this question, like, “Oh, maybe being an artist isn’t for me, because I don’t see what positive effect I’m having on society. Maybe I should get into social work. Maybe I should get my law degree,” or whatever. I’ve never once felt like that. Maybe this is incredibly naive, but I always thought the role of the artist in society is important: to put out new and challenging ideas. And those ideas aren’t necessarily didactic—they’re the world organized in tone. So yeah, I believe that art does change the world, in the way that it changes one person’s consciousness and consciousness-changing will lead toward action. Even if it’s just one person, it can spark the seed, and you can imagine a really poetic movie planting a seed in a young person’s brain: “Oh wow, the world’s much bigger than my cul-de-sac.” Even that can lead them to getting interested in things that eventually have a huge impact. So yeah, of course art matters. What exact [direction] it needs isn’t entirely up for me to say. I just hope that independent movies find an arena and aren’t censored, y’know.
For one thing, I think Hollywood needs to move on, whoever its A&R people are. We need to stop remaking so many things. We need to get some new blood out there. That is happening to a certain extent. One of the great things that’s happening is people other than just white, male directors are making a high number of good movies. Now there’s a much better chance that the palette of stories being told can be wide, and that’s a great thing. It’ll be really interesting to see what happens. I think people just need to be honest. There’s nothing worse than seeing a movie, no matter how artfully done, that feels like the filmmaker’s lying to you a little bit. Not that they’re telling you a straight-up lie, but that they’re holding back out of politeness.
Which I think is kind of the malaise that independent art has found itself in. I think people are pretty sheepish about any misinterpretations. One of the reasons I like this movie is because it is political and sharp but it also has a whimsical edge to it, where it’s not inviting you to interpret it any one way too quickly.
I was talking to a friend of mine recently, there’s a phenomenon at art schools and film schools — I didn’t go to film school, but I taught at a film school — one of the things now is that it’s not enough when you come up with an idea, even if you’re an abstract painter, when you’re pitching your idea and workshopping your idea and having your critique session, you also have to say what its political role is in the community. So you’re like “this is creating new multiple voices for blah blah blah,” but really it’s, like, a red square, you know what I mean? So artists have gotten really good at marketing themselves as political agents through this institution of the university. And that spilled out. So now it’s like “here’s my superhero beating the shit out of robots, but it’s actually about,” whatever. And that’s how people write about it too. And it’s like, hmm… something’s not quite fitting in that picture.
And it seems obvious to me that the more the inherent politics or worldview of a piece of art is explicitly stated, the less it could possibly be about that. I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday and so many ads and the in-between-game segments were politically charged. But it’s the NFL, you know? Their claim to being an agent of good is fairly dubious at best. Let alone Jeep—Bruce Springsteen’s “Reunited States.”
I’ve had that debate. I remember watching the NBA finals and seeing that the whole court had Black Lives Matter on it. I was watching it with two friends, and one of them said, “That’s so completely corny and negates anything real about the movement.” Another one who was a little less cynical said, “Imagine if you’re an eight-year-old white boy in Arkansas who likes basketball.” You can see if even if it’s totally corporate and dubious, that could actually in some ways have a better chance of reaching more conservative people. But yeah, the form is really where the message is. That’s what I would say about war movies—Saving Private Ryan or something. The message of the movie can say, “War is bad,” but if you show me a 30 minute setpiece of soldiers that feels like I’m watching an Xbox cutscene or something like that—it’s an action movie! You’re showing how awesome war is, and how tough these guys are for going through this. It’s in no way anti-war. They can say, “On page 97 of the script, they say ‘war is bad.'” Image counts a lot more than dialogue. That’s another thing of a culture brainwash—now not even just TV, but prestige TV, plotting is just two people talking to each other. So if someone doesn’t hear something in the dialogue, they think it isn’t there. But movies are all about subtext.
Do you feel boxed-in or inspired by digitized reality?
It’s tough to say. The biggest thing for me as a person is that I find it hard to write or work when my phone is right there. I think just on a very practical level. The reason Jack doesn’t have a smart phone in PVT Chat is because at the time I had a flip phone too. I was one of those holdouts. And I didn’t want the movie to be full of Facebook feeds and Instagram stories and all that. It didn’t feel right for Jack. It was my way of making it stylized, where Jack is this old soul. He’s very online but he’s not on social media. That felt more appropriate for me.
It made him a little more ragtag. He’s a little more laidback than similar characters from the past couple years—Uncut Gems’ Howard Ratner, Spree’s Kurt Kunkle. He’s a little more underground.
Yeah… there’s something about the movies that have, like, non-stop Facebook, Instagram feeds—I like them to a certain extent for their novelty, but I also find them hideous. At the end of the day I’m still trying to make something that’s beautiful. Maybe not in a conventional sense, but I don’t want to have Facebook feeds cluttering up my frame. Maybe that’s old-fashioned or something.
I think this movie finds a pretty novel balance. I was expecting something more “online,” given its plot. But the movie depicts it as just one facet of this guy’s life when he’s not getting rub-and-tugs.
I think that a lot of people that get catfished are probably people who aren’t that big on social media. It kinda preys on really isolated people, I think.
I remember reading about the movie a couple years ago, around the time of Uncut Gems’ premiere. I thought there was no way this movie could functionally exist. Can you talk about the years-long process toward its release? How do you feel now?
For me, movies always take too long to come out. It has something to do with my life—when you do something by yourself and have a day job, you work on it at night and on the weekends—and with my shooting style, I’m very process-oriented where I don’t go out and make a replica of the script. There’s a lot of improvisation, even in terms of plotting. Tone is often improvised. So I didn’t figure out the tone of PVT Chat until we started making it. It took so long to edit because my band was touring a lot off our last record [Endless Scroll]—we were gone for 7 months off-and-on. And then I realized we were missing some key beats, so I got everyone together a year after the initial shoot for four days.
It’s been done for almost a year, because I finished right before the pandemic. So I spent a lot of time figuring out, “What am I gonna do with it now.” For a while I thought I’d self-release it, rent out a theater in New York, but then the pandemic hit. Luckily, Julia blew up, so there was renewed interest in the movie. So I was able to get it into some virtual film festivals and find a distributor. In order to be a filmmaker, you have to have an incredible amount of patience. Because when you first have an idea for a scene, at least on my level, it’s gonna be probably six years before another person watches that scene. My advice to other people that make movies on this level is: don’t put all of your mental marbles into this one project. Do a bunch of things. And be okay with playing the really, really long game.
I have a bunch of friends who are all mini-Brian Wilsons, where they have these huge ideas and they think that the heft of the idea is going to get them somewhere. I encourage them to just take 19 tiny ideas and actually produce them.
It doesn’t make sense that Pet Sounds is gonna be your first record. You know what I mean?
I’m always telling everyone to fuck up all the time. Just make the worst shit ever.
When I made my first movie I thought, “Wow, we made something great here. We’re only 6 months away from Cannes and the Criterion Collection.” I literally thought this! I was 22, so I was very naive. It was quite shocking when I couldn’t even convince my roommates to watch the movie. [Laughs.] I had to get my comeuppance. You really do have to pay your dues. The artists’ life isn’t easy. Buckle up!
PVT Chat is now streaming.