Alex Karpovsky on Returning to Filmmaking (and Maybe ‘Girls’) After More Than a Decade Away

Even if Alex Karpovsky was no more familiar to Girls viewers than the rest of its breakout cast, the Massachusetts native was already relatively established by the time of the HBO show’s premiere — only, behind the camera. He’d directed three micro-budgeted features from 2006 to 2009, and another two that released in 2012, the same year as Girls’ first-season run. The work showcased an idiosyncratic filmmaker freely following his heady, sometimes absurdist instincts. Then Girls became what it became, and Karpovsky suddenly had an acting career coming off of his deadpan turn as Ray Ploshansky: Now 51, he’s gone on to star in Homecoming, Nobody Wants This, Angelyne and multiple Coen brothers movies. He’d tried to get other projects off the ground over the last decade-plus, including several TV ideas that got stuck in limbo, but he also acknowledges that time was an issue — he simply didn’t have the “mojo” to get another movie going. It feels fitting, then, that Karpovsky returned with his first film in 14 years less than two weeks before Lena Dunham’s announcement that Girls would be coming back as a five-episode limited-series revival. Karpovsky hasn’t been announced to be part of it — he won’t confirm or deny in our interview, but he’s open about imagining Ray’s future and his experience making the show — but there’s a full-circle quality to this arc nonetheless. The world, and the industry, have changed quite a bit, but Girls is back, and Karpovsky is back making movies. The film in question is Riptides, and it is again very low-budget, playful with its humor and dense with ideas. Set in Sayulita, Mexico, where Karpovsky visits regularly, the movie imagines the collision between Toby (Steve Little), an American beach bum who oversees hotel properties in the idyllic town; Paul (Dylan Baker), a renowned self-help author sneaking in a quick vacation before his next big book tour; and Paul’s daughter, Michelle (Bojana Novakovic), an even-keeled manager who spends most of her time keeping her famous father out of trouble. Tragedy strikes, and an opportunity arises for Toby to make something of himself and find some meaning, inspired by Paul’s writings. He winds up entangled with Michelle in this scheme, going down a “demented” path as Karpovsky puts it in our conversation. Riptides next screens at the Indie Memphis Festival on Saturday evening. So far, its path is not dissimilar from the low-fi projects that Karpovsky helmed back in the late aughts and early 2010s, despite drastic changes in the surrounding independent landscape. We get into all of that and more. Steve Little in Riptides. Matt Clegg You premiered about a month ago at New/Next Film Festival. How did it go? It went really well. I mean, for me and my disposition, it’s terrifying to show this. The theater had 300 people in it. I know six people in the theater. It’s mostly strangers and you just never know how it’s going to go. Perhaps this is obvious, but the thing about a comedy is that everyone knows in real time whether or not the movie is working or not working — a binary thumbs up, thumbs down feeling — at least for me. You’re in the room and then you have to go up there and do a Q&A. But luckily everything played as I wanted it to…. One little test you can have of how a movie plays at film festivals: Do people stay for the Q&A, quite simply? And they did, and they asked good questions. So I was very happy — perhaps, more than happy, relieved that the movie didn’t fall apart. It’s been 14 years since your last feature came out, the same year that Girls premiered — so the timing there is interesting. What do you attribute the gap to? I made five movies before this one and they were all really ultra, ultra low-budget affairs. Two of them came out in the same year — 2012, I guess, Rubberneck and Red Flag — and we were in the middle of shooting Girls. It was fun and exhilarating, but really exhausting. Making any movie is exhausting. But making ultra low-budget movies, because you’re wearing so many hats, it exhausts you in a very specific way. I felt very depleted and I didn’t really have the desire to make another movie, at least a low-budget movie, for a while. I also then got caught up in TV projects. I sold or was adjacent to sales for six TV shows; some of them got close, one of them aired, but it didn’t open a new chapter of my life as much as I wanted it to. But it took a decade of my life developing these six TV shows and shooting some of them and writing scripts for other ones. I thought about, “Well, I have four months here, maybe I can write a script and then shoot it in my next break.” But I just quite honestly didn’t really have the mojo. I didn’t have the drive to make another movie. And yes, I also started acting more after Girls than I’d ever acted before. But about two years ago, I had more free time and, more importantly, a resurrected enthusiasm to make another movie. The industry has gone through so much since 2012. What felt different about making this scale of movie now versus then? I expected to feel more of a change than I actually did, to be honest with you. The biggest changes that I experienced were technical. The cameras are a lot better and cheaper. The lights are a lot better and cheaper. The editing software’s a lot better and cheaper. So it’s easier in a sense, financially and technically, to make an ultra low-budget movie that looks decent. When I shot my last movies, we were using these Canon DSLR cameras, which were all the rage back then, but you can’t really do handheld stuff — there were a lot of limitations to it. Now for almost the same price, you can have a camera make an image that I think most civilians couldn’t tell whether it’s Hollywood or the camera you got at Best Buy for $3,000. On the set of Riptides Jorge Pineda Did you consider scaling up, budget-wise, in your return to filmmaking? I couldn’t get the money to scale up, so I did it this way — very affordably. My approach over the past few years has been to write something that would require funds and resources and patience. While that is hopefully incubating somewhere and getting slow momentum somewhere behind the Hollywood curtain, you’re not waiting for the phone to ring. You’re keeping busy making smaller projects that you can actually control and have agency over. It’s also the approach a lot of my friends and I’m still waiting for some of these other projects to maybe have an opening, but I can’t just hope that that’ll happen. I have to stay busy. I want to go back to what you asked a moment ago. About what’s changed? Go for it. Now that I think about it, although I don’t know how conscious of it I was when I was shooting it: The world has become more spicy. I don’t know if that’s the adjective, but there’s a lot more anger, it seems like, in the world than there was 14 years ago. A lot more people seem to take a thrill in criticizing you. There’s a lot of haters, you can say. There were haters around back in the day, but they didn’t seem to be in these numbers or have this type of volatility to them. So back in the day, I think it required less courage to make movies. Now, in addition to everything else it requires to make a movie, you also just have to have the fortitude to endure the arrows that will invariably come your way. I feel like there are more arrows than there used to be. Even with something as simple as the advent of Letterboxd, the feedback is also more immediate in a way that I imagine is probably terrifying. Yeah, it’s absolutely terrifying. There’s so much fear involved in making a movie to begin with, and then you add this other very powerful and visceral layer on top, it stops a lot of people from expressing themselves, I think. Your film is in conversation with this topic to some degree — you play around with the Instagram interface as a way of introducing characters, and the power of an influencer’s support makes for a key plot point. It’s not the most obvious theme for this story, so how did you find your way in there? Social media and social media influencers are now woven into our new economy. The way that people share and present and market ideas and products in the world — social media influencers now are a huge factor in that process. I wanted the movie to feel relevant in certain ways. Since COVID, there’s been a real surge in self-help interests. They’ve spiked upwards and I don’t know all the answers, but I’m curious why that’s going on. And a lot of people are now making their money through social media influence. I read somewhere that they asked 8-year-old kids, “What do you want to be when they grow up?” — the question they’ve asked for generations — and now it’s like 40 percent? What else inspired the film? It’s set in Sayulita, Mexico, for starters. We shot in Sayulita, which is a small town. It’s an hour north of Puerto Vallarta. I’ve been going there for about 10 or 15 years because it’s easy to get to and it’s so beautiful. I started to meet people down there. There’s a lot of stoners and burnouts and yoga people and surf people and local people. When I was talking to the expats and gringos that are down there, they’d spend their days surfing and smoking weed and drinking with their pals. In moments of stress, which is often when I visited, I was filled with a sense of envy for these people because they seemed to be really enjoying their life and they seemed genuinely happy. It wasn’t a front for most people. And then there were other times where I would talk to some of these people and I felt judgy, like I pitied them. I thought, “Well, these people feel like they’ve abandoned something. They’ve surrendered a dream, they’ve surrendered their ambition, and there’s something sad in that too.” I kept oscillating, and that became an interesting subject for me: Happiness versus meaning is ultimately what it could be crystallized down to. And I wanted to Trojan horse this idea into an absurd, silly jungle comedy. Can you talk about finding the tone in terms of the casting? Steve is very broadly funny, while Bojana is a grounding force. How did you develop that so it’d feel complementary? I really wanted to make sure we nailed the tone, and I wanted to make sure everyone was acting in the same movie… When you’re mixing absurd comedy with something kind of grounded, and there’s death involved, and there’s darkness involved, I just wanted to make sure those things can blend together — and if they do blend together, make sure that everyone knows how they blend together and know how to plug into the same movie together. That really starts with the actors, and I feel like, exactly as you said it, Steve really captured the comedy of it, but also the heart of it and the tenderness of it and the innocence of it. Bojana really captured the drama and the tragedy of it. I didn’t really know if it would work until they started having scenes together. When we shot the movie, I wanted to make sure we shot some of their pivotal interaction scenes early on to establish the movie, so everyone could see the movie we were making tonally. Going forward, do you hope to work at a more accelerated pace behind the camera now? Does it feel sustainable to you to keep making movies at this scale, given the current mechanisms for distribution and indie financing? I would like to keep making movies in an accelerated way. What’s really nice about making low-budget movies, to say the obvious, is that you have a lot of control. I don’t have to answer to anyone, for better or for worse. If I want to cast this person, I can cast them. If I want to shoot in this location, I can do so. If I want to make these choices in the editing room, I can do so. You also don’t need to wait very long, relatively speaking, to make these low-budget movies. You don’t need to wait four years to package and then hope that no one drops out at the last minute. I’m still hoping one of my bigger projects might catch momentum out there in Hollywoodland. It’d be a fun and new adventure to embark upon, but I can’t just wait and do positive visualization exercises all day and hope that that’ll happen. I have to take control of my own life. Also, I should say it’s fun. I had a tremendous amount of fun making this movie, and to me, that’s one of, if not the main goal, to be creative with friends, doing something that you are hopefully proud of in places that hopefully are fun to shoot in. Let’s talk about the Girls revival. All very exciting. Are you in? What are you hearing? I hear they’re making it. I hear it’s happening. Will I be in it? Who knows! Do you have hopes for Ray if you are? I’m very curious what he’s been up to. It’s been 10 or 15 years, so I’m very curious what he’s been up to as the world has changed so much since we last saw all these people. I love Ray and I care for him deeply, and sometimes I’m concerned about him, and I hope he’s doing well. I hope he’s found meaning in his life. He seemed a little bit existentially adrift at times to me, or existentially disoriented. That allowed for him to view things maybe a little bit more clearly than other people, but it also has created an inner turmoil. I hope he’s less tormented than he has been, but maybe he won’t be as interesting if he’s less tormented. Mixed feelings! You were talking earlier about the explosion in haters online, which made me wonder: Did you read Lena Dunham’s memoir? I didn’t, no. And I don’t know if I have a good reason for it. All of my friends read it, and they all gave me their own synopses and also their own descriptions of when I was mentioned — which, from what I understand, was very sparing, contained. So I haven’t read it. One day I will. She’s very open about what she went through on that show, including all that negative feedback. I can tell you this, David. When we made the show, they were very happy years in my life, those six or seven years. I loved playing Ray, and I loved being in a show that people were talking about. The vibe on set, from my very limited point of view, was really positive and fun. I’ve been on some sets before and afterwards; invariably, there’s tension that brews. It just happens, especially the longer you spend time with people. I just didn’t see too much of it from my very limited perspective, but I’m an actor on the show. I’m not privy to a lot of these conversations. Lena was just incredibly open and receptive. The vibe on set almost always trickles down from the leader. Lena was definitely our leader, and so the vibe that she at least presented when I was there was just very positive, enthused, and receptive. That shaped a lot of people’s feelings on set. It shaped my feelings on set. I’m getting around to saying that my time during those six years was very positive — and maybe the reason why I haven’t read the book yet is because I don’t want anything to change that. I heard there are things that might change that, so I kind of want to stay in my happy place.