A bag of antique jeans becomes a dangerous passport to Japan in Vintage Violence, a romantic action comedy about the uneasy meeting of internet celebrity, personal desire and criminal ambition.
Cole Sprouse plays Carter, an American livestreamer who discovers rare nineteenth-century denim in an abandoned Colorado mine. Encouraged by Izumi (Kiko Mizuhara), a Japanese subscriber who recognizes its value to collectors, he travels to Tokyo expecting a lucrative sale and perhaps something more. Instead, he becomes entangled with her indebted boyfriend and rival yakuza whose interests in the jeans quickly turn violent.
Vintage Violence is written and directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko, a Ukrainian-American filmmaker born in Odesa whose work repeatedly examines how technology shapes relationships and people’s ideas about themselves. His independent features include Wobble Palace (2018), a comedy about a disintegrating relationship, and Spree (2020), which follows a rideshare driver pursuing online notoriety through murder, presenting his escalating crimes as a livestream. In Vintage Violence, Kotlyarenko combines conventional filmmaking with split screens, phone footage and live-chat commentary, bringing his experiments with digital storytelling into a genre adventure influenced by Japanese cinema and American action comedies of the 1980s.
Talking to ScreenAnarchy, Kotlyarenko explains how the film’s apparently disparate elements connect through characters seeking familiar rewards, love, money, family and honour, in a world that has destabilized their meaning. He also discusses his provocative approach to borrowing Japanese film conventions, the real romantic encounter that inspired an elaborate Bluetooth chase, and the demands of working with a Japanese crew whose meticulous planning challenged his usual appetite for improvisation.
ScreenAnarchy: Why didn't you make the whole movie as a livestream, like found footage?
Eugene Kotlyarenko: I made a few movies like that already.
So were you just tired of it?
I felt like there's a different type of story to tell. My last two movies are what I call diegetic cinema, where the characters in the films are the ones actually shooting the films, editing them and making them. Obviously they're not, in real life, but that's the presentational element of those films. It's what some people call found footage, but I call it diegetic cinema because it's almost happening in real time. My movie Spree is a livestream, and the movie after that, The Code, is basically an edited documentary, but you're seeing them make the documentary in real time.
Vintage Violence has a different goal: the possibility of connection and romance in an age where every other value is being destroyed. Older values are being destroyed. Something that's happened to me in the last ten years is that I meet a lot of people on the internet, on social media or a dating app or whatever, and you build a relationship with someone just texting and FaceTiming. Then what happens when you finally meet up in real life?
One thing that happened to me was I got married, and then unmarried. Another thing that happens is you meet a collaborator you could work with for the rest of your life. Another is you meet someone who's trying to scam you. You know what I mean? There are all sorts of potential places for that to go.
I thought I'm going to use that concept, that beginning idea, to create a cross-cultural story and something that can incorporate these new formal ideas into traditional cinema. In every romcom, people bump into each other on the street or they're in the same place physically. In this film, one character is in America and the other is in Japan. For me, that's a perfect chance to use a split screen.
One character is a livestreamer, so one part of the movie is going to be the livestream. The other is going to be shot in a traditional style. Then the person in the traditional film is going to interact with the livestream, and that is completely logical to my story. It has an experimental attempt, but the thing itself is very easy to understand because it's coming from the story.
I couldn't do it all as a livestream because you need these people who are outside the stream, and the people themselves are not making the film. It just lent itself more to a traditional mode of storytelling.
Are you a fan of livestreaming?
I find it fascinating. I'm most interested in it when I'm thinking about movies and stuff, but for a long time I was waiting for someone to come along who was a 24-hour entertainment machine. When we were doing Spree, there was a guy named Ice Poseidon who was doing a kind of 24/7 project, but he wasn't so compelling.
When we were doing this movie, there was a kind of livestreaming villain created named Clavicular. Clavicular is a very provocative villain, but he is entertaining. Like most villains, he's entertaining. I was able to watch a Clavicular stream for hours, and he was sometimes doing 24 hours.
He's always in conflict with people, making them feel bad, making everyone feel bad. It creates a natural sense of conflict and suspense in his villainy. In that way, I'm interested. I'm also interested in the participation of the chat, the participation of the viewers in the narrative. That's another thing I've injected into this movie and into Spree.
The chat in my film serves almost as a Greek chorus, to represent the position of the viewers and also to make a second layer of narrative commentary. I'm interested in those elements of livestreaming.
Was the US–Japanese combination part of the story from the beginning, or did it come from the production?
It's from the beginning of the story. Like I told you, I wanted to do something about people meeting online first and then in real life. One is going to be American because I live in America and that's my experience. But the other one: what other country?
My friends were vintage clothing dealers, and one of them specializes in denim. He told me all his best customers come from Japan because they really value American vintage denim. There's a huge market for it there. I thought that's a good entry point. I also happen to love Japanese cinema. Japanese cinema is the most inspiring to me, historically and even now. I wanted to do something in that tradition, so I started writing with that in mind.
Then we had a fully Japanese production. Most of the people on set did not speak English. I felt so privileged. It was one of the great privileges to be able to work in Japan with a Japanese crew, and also make sure what we're doing is good for a Japanese audience. I didn't want them to think this is some kind of foreigner bullshit.
This is my interpretation, but the most Japanese thing I did, aesthetically and spiritually, was that I didn't do any real homage, any "This is this shot from this movie" or "I'm trying to be like this director." My observation about 20th-century Japanese culture is that it's a reaction to a kind of soft colonization that happened after the war. They took subcultures and details from American culture, fetishized them, brought them to Japan and said, "We're doing the real version. This is the real thing."
But it wasn't the real thing. It was completely transformed into something different. It's a kind of misappropriation of American culture. I thought it would be very Japanese of me, very much in the spirit of this thing, if I misappropriated Japanese film tropes and conventions. Instead of doing it in a really accurate and honorable way, I'm just going to misappropriate stuff.
I kept thinking about Takashi Miike, so please tell me there's something of him in the film.
I love his movies. I was showing people the first 15 minutes of Dead or Alive because it's very chaotic and energetic, and that's what I wanted from the movie. The Miike movie this probably resembles most is Gozu, because it's so all over the place and has that journey from the city into the country. I think he and I are on the same wavelength. When I finished, or was almost finished, with this movie, I watched First Love. That movie is really similar to this movie in a few ways. I think we're just on the same wavelength, and I admire him. He's a master.
But I'm influenced by Shohei Imamura and Juzo Itami. There's a guy named Takashi Ishii who's amazing, and Takeshi Kitano and Kinji Fukasaku, and on and on. I played Mermaid Legend for Kiko because I think that's a really strong, provocative movie with a strong female character, and The Insect Woman, the Shohei Imamura movie. It's an amazing film culture that really prides itself on many different styles and voices.
There are moments of Japanese-style gore in the film. What's your relationship to ultraviolence and theatrical cruelty?
My goal is satire and comedy. Extremes, whether it's extremes of body horror or bodily grossness, "lower-body humor", as they might call it, are a great opportunity to reflect on human mortality and the fragility of human life. The absurdity of people who engage in immoral behavior is one of the opportunities of movies, to let people see that stuff, because it's very rare for us to engage directly with highly violent, highly immoral behavior. It's scary in real life, but in a movie it's interesting.
My relationship with it is an interest in the body as a place of extremes and humor, and the ability to explore absurd and violent things that, luckily, we don't have to explore. Really, everything is an opportunity for cinematic set pieces, and those set pieces are an opportunity to analyze and critique how we relate to each other. There are two bloody scenes in this movie. One is a misapprehension of who the boyfriend is. For her, it's a tragedy, but for us it's a comedy because we know it's not. It's that perspectival thing.
The other is the theme of the movie, when the yakuza character is trying to chop off his finger. The yakuza boss is filming it on his phone as a piece of spectacle, but he's doing it out of a sense of honor and tradition. Basically, everyone else doesn't care about the traditions anymore.
That's the theme of the film. All the characters are trying to take the values of the old world and get rewarded for them in the new world. Izumi wants a family, a house. Carter wants to make money off these 19th-century physical objects. The yakuza guy, Ko, wants to get rewarded in his clan for being ritualistic and traditionally moral inside the yakuza. All of them fail. These opportunities for traditional rewards are not available in the contemporary, destabilized culture. They're not there. The movie is called Vintage Violence because there's this crisis between the old values and the world we're in now.
Is the streaming hotel an actual thing, or did you make it up?
I made it up. There isn't one.
That's what I mean by my attempt at misappropriating stuff the way Japanese people might misappropriate American ideas. There are different types of hotels. The sex hotel that's intercut with the streaming hotel, that's real.
But you can totally imagine a situation where this type of thing is set up. I remember writing a scene a long, long time ago about someone livestreaming a funeral. Then that happened during COVID: people had to livestream funerals. You invent something and then it becomes real. Or the bathhouse with tattoos only: that's fake. In Japan, you can only go into a bathhouse if you don't have tattoos. You can cover up and stuff, but they're anti-tattoo. I said, for the yakuza guys, maybe they need their own bathhouse. That's also made up, but it makes sense to me somehow.
Can you walk me through the genesis of the earbuds scene? How did it come about, and was it hell to shoot?
No, it was totally fun. We shot in the arcade. We only had six hours in the arcade, so that was challenging, but it was really fun. For me, the opportunity of cinema is to create set pieces and sequences that are fun, tense or funny or voyeuristic, or whatever, based on observations I have in real life. Something that happened to me that was pretty romantic was listening to a song with someone on AirPods. One was in my ear and one was in her ear. It felt really romantic.
I wrote that in at the beginning of their date, that they could listen to the same song. Then I thought I should probably use that later as a payoff. Let me see if I can come up with a Hitchcock, Brian De Palma-type suspense sequence from that. That's where I came up with the idea of a chase scene based around the connection of the Bluetooth headphones and the proximity of the two characters to each other. How can we turn that into something suspenseful and eventually, hopefully, romantic again? Connection, disconnection. You know what I'm saying, bro?
Absolutely. How long did it take to shoot?
The outside chase was half a day. The stuff in the arcade, we had six or maybe seven hours, overnight. You know when he's running inside and you can see outside that it's daytime? That was the last thing we shot, at 7:30 in the morning.
Everything else we were shooting in the middle of the night, but you don't think about it because we blocked out some windows. Then you don't see windows because it's all interiors. I guess it was a day inside the arcade and half a day for the chase.
How did you get Sean Price Williams, the cinematographer, on board?
This is my third movie with Sean, and he's a close friend of mine. We always talk about movies. The first time I worked with him, I also had some split screens I was going to do. I would ask him to frame stuff for a third of the screen, like a phone, not a traditional split screen, just this phone screen. He was like, "What the fuck are you talking about? That's so stupid."
Now he's used to all my ideas. He's experimental, but he's a traditionalist. He loves to shoot on film, and he comes from a documentary tradition too. He's creative, but he has a vérité visual approach. My style is not the most natural fit for him, but we're so close and such good friends that it's always really fun working together. Our creativity can synthesize to do something new.
Were there ideas that didn't make it into the final cut? Did you have to kill your darlings?
You always do. I wanted them, when they're covered in blood, to bathe in an outdoor, natural bath. There are all sorts of little things. There was a lot of dialogue at the beginning of the date where she talks about "Don't film on the train" and "Don't cross the street when it's a red light, because I know you do that in America, but here you can't do that." He's like, "Okay, I won't do that."
Later, when they have the chase, he does cross the street on a red light. But I felt that dialogue was slowing everything down for the date, which was supposed to be smooth and romantic and vibey. I cut all that dialogue, even though we filmed it. I generally don't cut too much out. Maybe I should have cut a little more out, because it's so chaotic and there's so much going on. But I was very intentional with everything we filmed.
It was really hard to get the arcade, which is huge, or a denim factory in the movie. All this stuff is challenging in Japan because everything is very institutional and formal. In America, I'm very comfortable stealing things, improvising, figuring stuff out and dealing with it later or in the moment. There, it's very meticulous, very planned, very proper.
It's a good system, an amazing system, and the crew I worked with is the best crew. Everything had to be really planned out, so there weren't many things I didn't use. Compared to my other films, there wasn't too much extra to discover. The actors, of course, are surprising, but I wasn't improvising too much on set.
Did you hold a regular casting process, or did you already have people in mind?
We had a great casting director, and almost all the Japanese cast besides Kiko were cast through her. It was a very fun process. The Japanese actors are amazing. I love Pierre Taki, the guy who plays Ko. He's basically the Daft Punk of Japan. He's a musician, a techno musician. He's such a fun, funny and creative actor. He's awesome. I loved him.
Kiko, I met more socially. Then we connected over the character I had written. The character is basically her life story, kind of, but I didn't even know her. The character was born in Texas, has an American dad, and in the movie she's a failed model. In real life, Kiko was born in Texas, has an American dad and is a successful model. There are so many parallels to stuff from her real life. It was amazing.
Cole, I also didn't know. I met him on the street, socially. Then I realized he would be good in the movie. The guys at the embassy, the American ambassador and the security guard, are my friends who are in a lot of my movies. I said, "Come to Japan. We're going to have fun." And they did.
Actually, one thing we cut from the movie was that Vish, the guy who plays the ambassador, had a day off. We were shooting in the small town of Toyohashi, and at the hotel were these seven-foot-tall American basketball players who play for a Japanese basketball team. Without asking me, he told them, "You guys should be in the movie we're shooting tomorrow."
Everyone, all the Japanese, is freaking out, and I'm kind of freaking out. Now we have a scene with these basketball players. It's a funny scene where, before Carter comes into the embassy to get interrogated, he was taking selfies with the basketball players. They look at Carter like he's a jerk or something. It was very funny, but ultimately it slowed the flow of the movie, so I had to cut it.
That's a perfect example of how, normally, in one of my American movies, I would meet people and the next day they're in the movie, and it's fun. But because this movie is longer than my other films, I was trying to keep the flow going really fast.
So you're very open to improvisation in that way?
Very, very. Some of my movies are even 100 per cent improvised, like SkyDiver and We Are, and this other movie I haven't edited yet, called On the Road Two. Those are fully improvised movies.
I have two movies, A Wonderful Cloud and Wobble Palace, based on a ten-page blueprint with some dialogue written, but also largely improvised. I act in most of them, so it allows me to control the rhythm, flow and meaning of the scenes, because I'm acting in them with other people. I can direct through acting.
Since you're also a producer, doesn't making an improvised film complicate things?
No, because I make a direct connection between the production logistics and my creativity. If I know I have limitations, I'm going to respect them. In terms of time, money, location, you know what you're up against, so you just be creative within those limits.
A lot of creativity comes out of having limits. There's a phrase: necessity is the mother of invention. You can look through film history, because film is the art form most dependent on money, and see all sorts of amazing innovations made when people run out of money.
The great thing about the greatest directors is that, no matter how big their budget is, they're always up against its limits because they're always trying to be creative. Some of the most successful directors are like that. Their limits are their imagination. Steven Spielberg or Christopher Nolan are constantly having to be inventive because no budget can actually contain their ideas.
How meticulously were the action scenes choreographed?
They were. Actually, that's a Miike connection: our action choreographers were the same ones who work with Miike. We didn't have a lot of time, but all the motorcycle stunts, chases and fights were choreographed, for sure.
We tried to get a kind of naturalistic approach. Fukasaku was our main reference point for that: weird camera angles, but handheld, making it feel really fast and dynamic and violent. It wasn't like Coen brothers or Tarantino-style action where it's very storyboarded. It was more like you're in the middle of it. That's the effect we were going for. Except the final scene on the bridge, where they're hanging there. Of course, that was very storyboarded, and it involved visual effects, special effects, wires, all that.
I was watching that last scene, I shouted “Terminator 2!"
Definitely, of course, when he's going into the water. I wanted him to do one where he shows the middle finger, but it was very cold, and he was in there without a wetsuit. I just felt bad. We had to film that another day, because when they were really hanging there, there's no water there, obviously. We had to film in a pool another day. But Terminator 2, James Cameron is a perfect example. Talk about an imagination that cannot be contained by any resources.
How do you combine the comedy and action? It reminded me of American movies of the 1980s.
Definitely. One movie I talk about a lot is Shakedown, which is also called Blue Jean Cop, with Sam Elliott and Peter Weller. It's an awesome, crazy action-adventure movie. Cole has a Harrison Ford, American '80s man vibe. That's a good reference, because I was thinking about movies like Midnight Run that have comedy and action. Die Hard, whatever.
Those movies have a good sensibility that I think is missing. Marvel displaced a lot of those movies, and they try to do the same thing, but it doesn't have the same values or perspective as those movies. I think it's good to bring that stuff back.
What are your next projects?
Just a lot of things. No, I want to try to make a movie about teenagers, maybe in high school or college, that's all diegetic, like the previous ones. It's all built into an app where you're scrolling. The whole movie is just scrolling through an app, and there are all sorts of narrative things happening in real time.
I'd like to do something that confronts AI without using any AI in the movie, that really confronts it and makes fun of it, because it's such an existential threat to a lot of things going on. It's something everyone has naturally already integrated into their lives. I'd like to make something making fun of AI. I have some other little things going on already.
Is everything US-based?
Everything is mostly US-based. I go anywhere where the story is.