5 Questions with Alexandra Warrick
The long form sketch slash body horror short, “questions (or peanut butter)” presents a first date at its grossest. We asked director Alexandra Warrick where the idea came from, how the peanut butter-y shoot went, and what’s next for her…
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in film/video making?
I’m a native New Yorker, which means I stumble into grosser experiences than that of “Questions (Or: Peanut Butter)” in my morning train commute alone! City living certainly offers a lot of sticky, stanky grist for the mill, to put it gently. I’ve been a cinema dweeb forever, but my early tendency towards messier subgenres (comedy, horror) was definitely a reaction to my K-12 experience at a staid all-girls school. The emphasis in my early life on poise certainly incubated a secret desire in me to indulge in shock tactics. A screening I attended in my senior year of Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie solidified my aspirations to shoot, well, yucky stuff! I took this goal to Columbia University, where I studied avant-garde comedy intimately - even writing a senior thesis centering on the topic.
2) What’s the backstory here - how did you come up with this idea, and how did it evolve in the writing process?
As with all truly valuable concepts, “Peanut Butter” was conceived over half-assed cooking in a college dorm room at an ungodly hour at night. I owe the original loose concept entirely to Nathaniel Jameson, one of the most daring, renegade comedians I’ve had the pleasure of knowing (and the amateur cook in question - I think he made limp pierogis that night). Inspired, I wrote a draft in an infatuated flurry. We originally planned on sweet-talking the team at Tom’s Restaurant into letting us shoot it there, but it was 2017, life was busy, and the project got shelved.
Smash cut to a breezy evening a year later, somewhere in the Greek Peloponnese. I had elected to wreck my family vacation by parking it on the terrace with my janky computer to pound out a new draft of “Peanut Butter”, because...priorities. I’m not sure what possessed me to take it out of its digital shoebox, but I broke it down, built it up, remixed it and ultimately stitched a pun on its end as something of a demented cherry on top. It kind of felt like textual fidgeting - something about the concept was unshakable, as if it was stuck to the roof of my mouth. Besides, I hate the beach and also fun, so staying behind to conceive vile ways to describe condiments was my only option.
I met Jack Doyle (our leading man) the following winter at a goth club (IDK), showed him the script, and the rest was history. To be honest, I just couldn’t leave the piece alone - I was editing it up to the very last second, locking in my final adjustments literally as we were setting up the lights.
3) I’d love to hear a bit about the filming of this. Was it as fun as it seems like it would be? Also, was there a memorable line or bit, that for whatever reason, you didn’t end up using? Or any other last minute changes that improved the overall film but you were sad to see go?
The shoot was downright unforgettable. We took over a coffee shop down the street from us at midnight (Caffeine Underground in Bushwick) and promptly launched into a marathon overnight battle against the sunrise. It felt like a cute slumber party, and luckily no one had allergies. While cinematographer John P. Fitzpatrick and lighting whiz Ryan Wolf transformed the space into a seductive neon paradise, my intrepid production assistant Alice Izzo had the enviable job of slathering a half-dozen faces with chunky Skippy. A lot of concerning, borderline body-horror behind-the-scenes content was Instagrammed. Many followers were no doubt lost that night. Fun!
We cut a lot of script flab on the day of the shoot that I don’t really miss. A vestigial version of “PB” concluded in one of those “it was a commercial all along!”-style endings, but I’ve used that bush-league cop-out in literally two other scripts I’ve written so I kind of can’t resort to that anymore. I think the best super-last-minute-improv-addition had to be Jack giving a hearty lick to the face of one Avery Whitted (who you can currently catch sans-butter in Netflix’s In The Tall Grass). Avery was also responsible for the stunningly well-aimed jelly slap!
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
This is a toughie! I’ve been revisiting Whit Stillman lately, but I feel like repeat watches don’t count for this question. It’s been a minute since I’ve freshly watched something, but I’m gonna go with the hard-duh zeitgeisty answer and share that I bumbled into a matinee screening of Joker yesterday. It was the right kind of tense. Like, cringingly tense, but also oh-so-creative and sumptuously shot. Flawed, yes, but compellingly so. A ‘70s-era Scorsese-esque Joker origin tale is deeply zesty, but I walked out wanting - hear me out - a ‘80s-era Cronenberg-esque Scarecrow saga with all kinds of gory hallucinogenic action! I feel like that’s a good idea? Someone back me up!
5) What’s next for you?
I have a Google Docs dumping ground for all my tidbits and scribbles, kind of an Island of Misfit Scripts. I have almost twenty finalized bitsy sketches in the wings that I wrote in a months-long furious haze, but the one I’m really jonesing to tackle is “The Gang”, a collab that’s basically Gossip Girl meets Too Many Cooks. Electrocution and gummy vitamin poisoning play a part, as do argyle socks! I’m also fine-tuning a collaboration with our ravishing ingenue Rapper Girlfriend. Finally, I’m keeping my ear to the ground as always for collaborators of all stripes who are as committed to my mission as I am: to gross out the world, one filmic nightmare at a time.
