BLOG #27: THE LUKMANN EPISODE

“Let’t sit by the basketball courts. It makes me feel more confident,” says actor and filmmaker Alex Lukmann in this silly little matter of fact voice he does to take the piss out of himself. He is the butt of his own favorite jokes, an act apparent to anyone who’s spent more than 10 minutes talking to the dude. All that, and yet he’s one of the more serious people I’ve met, a severity taken in stride with glittering humor, like in his debut film It’s Never Been More Over. 

Co-produced with co-star Ruby Rodgers, the film “is simple,” Alex insists: it’s about a failing relationship between Jake (Lukmann) and Ava (Rodgers) in the digital age and the drama of living for validation through OnlyFans, powered through a tumultuous core: the coinciding paralysis of fear and catharsis of honesty. The subject matter widens Jake and Ava’s dynamic to the point where there’s even enough room for a third (not a threesome), though not in the way you would expect. 

Like many stories told by people our age, It’s Never Been More Over answers its own central question with another question, following an “Are you okay?” up with a resounding “Are we okay?”, the “we” doing a double-shift as Jake-and-Ava, and a living, breathing stand in for the collective viewer. People doomscroll, they watch too much porn, they lose their minds to the point where something as simple as saying how you feel becomes an all-defeating task. This is Lukmann’s inner world, and it is rich.

Of his outer world, you can find him doing what young people do to make their own work: working *GASP*. Not gonna namedrop his employers cus we don’t need to blow up the spot. You’ll have to read on to hear about what he thinks of fear, failure, and females (he doesn’t call women that I just thought it would be funny to include also for the alliteration). The interview was a journey, as well as Alex’s first—of many to come of course. 

So, to set the scene…

So, it’s a couple Saturdays ago. Alex and I are weaving through Tompkins amid concurrent Saturday salsa and crust punk jam seshes to see that the basketball court benches are full. We gossip a bit about girls and the mutual energy exchange-suck of young relationships, take a walk to grab tall boys, and sit in the Gen X Cultural Garden. Our blood is the bev for, like, one million mosquitoes that left me looking like I had leprosy. I feel like he was untouched by them, lucky bastard.

Maya Kotomori: We'll start five Ws with the script in the movie. What made you write this particular script at this time? What was your life looking like before it? 

Alex Lukmann: Okay, so can't really tell the story of how I made this without going back like four years prior to writing [It’s Never Been More Over]. I’m 22. I'm in the middle of a four-month-long psychotic break slash manic episode, and I tried to make my first film basically about what I was going through. I had no film school experience. I never picked up a camera and tried to make something. I just was going off of pure, blind delusion. I got like 20 of my actor friends-slash-other-friends, and I shot the whole thing on a phone. There was no script, and it was fully improvised. I had no crew. It was just me doing everything, and I tried to make a feature. [Laughs] 

As you might imagine, over half of the footage was completely unusable. I then spent four years trying to cut it into a short film, but because it was so personal, and so abstract due to not having a script. I just couldn't do it. I spent four years trying to edit it, and probably two of those years were spent just trying to get myself to sit down and work on it. I was so so terrified of just finishing it—of the finality of it—that I just spent the entire [four years] in a state of deep fear, anxiety, panic and self loathing. I felt like such a pussy, and I thought that I would never be able to put anything out. 

Maya: Wait, was this first film an initial attempt of what would become It’s Never Been More Over? 

Alex: No, this was different.

Maya: What was this movie about?

Alex: It was a hyper stylized autofiction of my manic episode as it was occurring. There's some interesting ideas in it, and there's actually a section that I might put out at some point. 

Maya: So you felt yourself slipping a bit and thought "Oh, let me let me capture this now.”

Alex: Yeah, I was aware of what I was going through. Well, I wouldn't say very aware; I was aware that I was cracking up and I was also aware that so many other people I knew were also cracking up and posting through it.I thought that I would get something valuable out of recording the experience, or just mining it emotionally. I was very public about the whole thing, posting on average at least 50 stories on Instagram a day. I was talking about the film a lot, and I was talking my shit about how good it was going to be, and I even went so far as to post flyers for screenings that were gonna happen. 

I think that that definitely motivated the creation of this project, the embarrassment that I felt and the need to not be seen as a complete failure. I needed to follow through on something.

Maya: And so then you wrote this short with Ruby [Rodgers] as a collaborator. When you first wrote this, were you like, ‘Oh, I'm just going to start this,’ and Ruby came along later? Or was it like, ‘Oh, look, I've made this new friend at this restaurant I work at, and she's really talented and awesome, let's do something together’?

Alex: Off the back of  the failed film, I realized that my only chance of finishing something and putting something out was I needed other people to hold me accountable. One of the reasons that that film didn't work is because I was such a control freak, and I wouldn't let anybody look at any of the footage or help me with the edit. Like, it all had to be me, I had to be doing the whole thing, and it had to be all of my ideas in the thing. I started working at this restaurant with Ruby, and she, on top of being a great actress who I really admired, has this really advanced aesthetic sensibility that I admired a lot. I knew that my work would probably be a lot cooler and better working with someone like her.

Maya: That’s actually huge. Like, a big step to let someone in.

Alex: I should say that, like,  every actor has gone up to another actor and been like, ‘We should make something together because we're both actors,’ and then it never happens. Or if it does, the film ends up solely as a vehicle for the actors to show off. 

Maya: Yeah, to add something to the reel. A moment to have an awesome cry, Even though  you both have moments of awesome near-cries in the movie.

Alex: [Laughs] Thank you.

Maya: Hearing that this project was the product of this ego being like, ‘I'm gonna make my movie so fucking awesome, and it's gonna shit on all your movies,’ and then all the intense shame from not following through and feeling all this intense shame…That is Jake's arc in the movie, but told through a relationship. I see all that inspiration, and I’m wondering: What is your metric of success? And as the person who wrote Jake, how does that idea filter through him as a character?

Alex: My whole purpose of making the film was just to put something out there. It's the first thing that I've ever put out in my life, and the fact that I feel like I spent four years of my life basically spending every single day in fear over this thing, fear of getting something finished. Like, to finish something at all, and to put it out publicly—that's my success. That’s why the release is so important to me. We're going to do a few screenings, and then maybe I’ll put it out online. Everything about the film is informed by that prior failure.

Maya: Why do you see it as a failure?

Alex: Because I never finished it, I never released it.

Maya: Maybe this is like a non-helpful reframe. You know, you're  gonna say meaner things to yourself than what other people are gonna say or think about you.

Alex: Of course.

Maya: It feels like a ‘the journey was the friends we made along the way’ type of thing, where you learn something by doing it, not necessarily finishing. You demonstrated this very interesting thing about male ego, I think, with Jake’s character as it relates to you as a man writing this. Even what you just shared says, ‘I'm really proud, I'm really excited that I'm going to be doing this thing, and the fact that I'm doing it is important.’ But then when you actually never do it, and it's like, ‘Wait, I actually am not important, and I failed at this one thing.’ The failure is not completing the material of the movie, but the success is like what you are able to learn about yourself. I think what you're able to tap into into the movie with male ego, because I genuinely do not think you would have been able to write Jake had you not have had this feeling of failure.

Alex: Yeah of course. But I’ve experienced much bigger failures than that. I mean, I grew up trying to get a division one basketball scholarship.

Maya: Wait. Say more.

Alex: All I did growing up was play basketball. I dedicated my entire high school experience to trying to get a division 1 college basketball scholarship, and it didn’t happen..

Maya: But you did end up playing some division.

Alex: I moved to the city because I got recruited to play division 3 at Baruch. About three days into going there, I decided I had to drop out, and then I went to acting school, and that was the pipeline. I mean, you won't talk me out of it being a failure.

Maya: I know I can't :)

Alex: I feel like you have to call it what it is, but that doesn't mean that it's not valuable. Have you seen any Kobe Bryant motivational videos on YouTube?

Maya: Nah.

Alex: A lot of them are about the value of failure and how you should want to fail. Failure is incredible if you use it to help yourself improve.

Maya: In a lot of ways I think failure is very feminine, but fear of failure is very masculine. Failure as in, ‘I failed to complete this thing.’ Saying that is feminine, and doing all you can to protect yourself from having to say that is masculine. What that can do to a human being… I think that's what Jake's character touches on in a way that is super unique to you. There really are never fully realized male characters that express sensitivity, but also call attention to the culture of how that works. 

*Alex cracks beer*

Alex: Hm, that’s refreshing. (it unclear whether or not he means the beer or the question)

Maya: Do you think Jake is a failure?

Alex: I don’t think any one person is a failure. But they can fail. In a lot of aspects of Jake’s life, he's failing.This movie pretty much just covers his romantic life, which he's obviously failing at. It’s implied that things were obviously a lot different before Ava started doing OnlyFans. This idea of failing as a man is what drives Jake's character because, I feel like as a guy growing up in male-dominated environments like Catholic school for example, the idea of success as it relates to women, is very simplistic and primal and athletic.

Maya: Say more about that. Why?

Alex: The pursuit of women is treated as sport in our country. It's about like you know stacking up numbers in terms of body count, and not just that, but how well are you performing? Are you dominating? Do they want to continue fucking you? For Jake, his fatal flaw is that because he’s so male-brained in a very simplistic wayThe only justification for Ava not wanting to have sex with him anymore is because he's not fucking well enough. And in that way, he's not dominant as a guy, and he's inadequate or beta or whatever you want to call it. 

Maya: Totally. It’s the whole fear of beta-sub culture, but also doing nothing about it. Then it turns into two different flavors, you said this to me once: Andrew Tate, or like this soy cuck. That's also a theme that the movie does with introducing the third object character, who literally ends up voyeuring them. What was the character's name? The biggest fan guy.

Alex: He doesn’t have one. We call him ‘The Subscriber.’ 

Maya: When he comes in as the third object, he’s also a third thing between those two types of me. He is not as handsome as Jake, he's not like the peak male performance you described. And, he alpha’s Jake by being, like, ‘This is what peak male performance looks like.’

Alex: 100%. He introduces himself by telling Ava, and technically Jake, that he’d be the best fuck of her life. He dominates in the one area that Jake doesn’t.

Maya: What was your thought behind having it be like the whole subscriber thing, especially because Jake manages Ava's messages. Why not just have it be like, ‘Oh they have this really deep conversation’ and choose to introduce a third into their relationship for this one night?

Alex: I mean, you said it, something has to happen. But this type of relationship is very specific, OnlyFans model girlfriend and boyfriend that runs her account for her. One of the struggles that Jake has is that he's having to deal with all of these different men who believe they have an intimate relationship with his girlfriend through the internet. And that’s not to discount that, there’s an intimacy to it. In a way, [that choice] was about making that fear that Jake had very real, because even though Ava’s not the one directly talking to these guys, she sort of does have a relationship with them through Jake. 

Maya: Yes, Jake is the third in that way too. Woah.

, 

Alex: Jake has a relationship with him too. He’s the guy posing as her.

Maya: That’s like…queer. Not as in gay but as in weird, or…

*Maya searches for word*

Progressive. Perhaps the woman that these men who subscribe to her find most attractive via words, is a man who is just using her image. It's like men actually really only want another man's idea of a woman; they don't actually want a woman who is herself and is sexy because of that. 

That’s the thing with this movie. It's one of those ones where the more you think about it, you see how actually every choice creates these infinite meanings as they apply to us today. To ask you as the director and writer—because it doesn't matter what I think as an audience member—what was it that you were trying to say with the relationship of Jake and Ava by the end? Is it like, ‘Don't date a girl who does OnlyFans’? Is it ‘Don't date a man who's a bitch’?

Alex: Even though the relationship [dynamics] are sort of hyperspecific and hypercontemporary, the problems that they're dealing with are not very complex. In my eyes, it's just that Jake is fearful of what would happen if he lost his girlfriend, and it leads to him being ultra-agreeable to the point where his fear of disagreeing has snowballed into him managing his girlfriend’s OnlyFans and not being honest about how that makes him feel. That's not to say that somebody couldn't genuinely be okay with that, but it's clear that Jake’s fear is the reason why he’s gotten to this point. And with Ava, her whole thing is that she's fucked her life up by doing OF, has no way out, and is no longer attracted to her boyfriend anymore. And all of that is made much worse because she has a deep fear of being honest and talking about these painful things. So in that sense, the movie is very simple. Two people who are scared of being honest are forced to be radically honest, and it helps them. It’s always been that way. We just have way too much language to describe it.

Maya: Dude, language fucking fails all the time. That’s where your movie succeeds too. I’m thinking about the scene where Jake is doom scrolling and it's literally the same shot, and then all of a sudden it's dark outside. It's like someone can watch this in 40 years and say ‘Oh, this was 2026 when there was the whole like male rage epidemic and social paralysis for everyone being on social media for too many consecutive hours.’ But were you thinking that? Or was that just a ‘Wouldn't it be funny if,’ thing?

Alex: Well, there needed to be a time jump because when the subscriber eventually comes over, it’s nighttime. So we needed some way to jump ahead, and that just felt real to me. I’ve been there.

Maya: What’s your screen time?

Alex: Five to seven hours a day. When I was making this film, though, also important to note, in the year that I made it and the year prior, I spent no more than 120 total minutes in any sort of deep thought or contemplation. That whole time to me was just 2Hollis in my headphones, scrolling Instagram Reels, watching sports, watching porn, and that's it. Which I feel is probably an experience that a lot of young men in America share.

Maya: The whole theater really laughed when they saw that, and I think it wasn't just because it was like comedically timed in a way with the editing, but also because they’ve seen something so true, but we don’t want to say it out loud. I think that was also true with the colorgrading too. I think about your Instagram presence, your lack thereof, as in the one deepfried, up-contrast, super saturated pic that you have. It’s 2014 nostalgic, but in a way that is very modern. Is that a part of your style that you want to extend in all your work beyond your internet presence and this movie?

Alex: That’s definitely intended. The first half of the movie is naturalistic in the way that it looks. And then the second half, once the crash out ensues, I wanted it to look deepfriedAva and Jake are meant to be incredibly fried, and victims of eight hours of doomscrolling. So I wanted the look of the film to represent their headspaces and how they see the world in some way. These big blocks of text that they speak to each other in is a reference to infographics and TikTok blah blah blah. Originally, when I started writing it, the idea was that all of Jake and Ava's dialog would be comprised of things that they had heard online.

It was a little too high concept for how fried I was back when I wrote this. But it does show up at times. When Ava wants to delete her TikTok and Jake is like, ‘Well, I think you look perfect how you are, but if it's going to bother you, I obviously support you for deleting it. Your confidence matters more than a post.’ 

Maya: Yeah, that was perfect. 

Alex: I wrote that line and then prompted ChatGPT with the exact dilemma Jake was dealing with and it spit out basically the same line in terms of what he should say. A way of checking my work.

Maya: That's brilliant. How many times did you do that?

Alex: Not that much. It really didn’t affect the script at all, like tonally. For the most part, I just wanted to capture how people actually speak. How the characters speak is how I speak, that’s how the people I grew up around speak. Like, bro-y.

Maya: You can always tell when someone's writing a movie where they're really obsessed with the idea of a normal guy because it sounds noble. 

Alex: I get really turned on by, like, improper grammar or if somebody uses a word kind of wrong? I always remember that stuff, and I love trying to convey that in my writing. It feels way more interesting and truthful and captivating than anything that’s really manicured.

Really good pic of me and Lukmann at his first screening

Maya: I have rapid fire for you though.

Alex: Yep.

Maya:  What's your favorite color? 

[Pause]

Alex, rapid fire. Come on, bro just say blue.

Alex: *Bashfully* Yeah, it is blue.

Maya: How tall are you?

Alex: 6’3”.

Maya: Important. What position did you play in basketball? 

Alex: Shooting guard.

Maya: Period. Um, what kind of porn do you watch?

Alex: I don't watch porn anymore. I've been off it for over a year.

Maya: Okay, but what kind of porn did you watch? 

Alex: Pretty vanilla..

Maya: Couples in love.

Alex: Real intimacy.

Maya: I’ve got a vivid imagination. But when I do watch porn, amateur section, always. 

Alex: You still watch porn?

Maya: *Agast* I watched porn this morning.

Alex: I guess you don't, but you don't feel the guilt that men do?

Maya: Why would I?

Alex: That's cool. I just got sick of the shame.

Maya: *In jest* Oh, of girls making you feel bad for watching porn? 

Alex: No, it had nothing to do with girls. I mean, it was just like a spiritual thing. God in my left ear, Kevin Gates in my right.

Maya: Important. I'm doing a really bad job. 

still from It’s Never Been More Over

Maya: Who is an actor you most admire at this very moment, dead or alive?

Alex: Oh, I have so many. I'm gonna throw a wild card. 

I really fuck with Sean William Scott, who played Stifler in American Pie. I think he's so sick. He's so charismatic, so funny, has an amazing jawline, such a good look. He should have been a huge leading man in American films. If I could be the Gen Z version of him, I would be really satisfied as an actor.

Maya: As a director, same question.

Alex: This is more down the middle, but I’ve  been on a huge [Robert] Altman kick. He’s just the perfect director to watch if you are somebody who's a perfectionist and paralyzed by fear of imperfection. So much of his ethos was about sloppiness, and there are a lot of moments in my film that are technically imperfect. Like, that’s just the nature of making a movie for $1,000 on a phone. I felt like a like a real sense of insecurity about it until we watched the final thing, and then you realize that if you have the heart, and you have characters you care about, and you have a good story, then a lot of that stuff doesn't really fucking matter. That being said, I don't think that's cope. I've always wanted to prioritize emotional closeness over technical perfection. I will always do that.