Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements is coming soon to MUBI in many places.
The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), as seen in Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025).
Following a seven-year gap between features, director Alex Ross Perry has returned with two documentaries released this year. Pavements, a shapeshifting chronicle of the iconic ’90s indie rock band Pavement, arrived in the spring. And now, in the thick of summer, there’s Videoheaven, a three-hour essay film about the rise and fall of video stores. With a potent nostalgia for an era of pop culture when underground trends seeped transgressively into the mainstream, the films offer prismatic accounts of previously niche or otherwise bygone phenomena that have regained cultural currency in recent years as a new generation of young people has been exposed to the curiosities of the late twentieth century through social media and various streaming platforms.
Inspired by Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book, Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, the film, which was made over a ten-year period, offers a rigorous, absorbing look at the way that video stores have been depicted in cinema, charting their evolution from neighborhood shops of slightly seedy profile to family-friendly franchises scrubbed clean not only of those connotations, but also of the character that once made them so intoxicating. Perry and editor Clyde Folley pair an encyclopedic array of movie clips—from the first depiction of a video store in a Hollywood movie, Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984), to a recent recreation of a Blockbuster Video in Madame Web (2024)—with the kind of academic yet sardonic voiceover familiar from Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which surveyed a century of representations and misrepresentations of the city by the very industry with which it is synonymous.
Videoheaven proceeds through various chapters corresponding to Herbert’s book, surveying the representations of independent video stores as dens of iniquity, danger, and perversion—not least because of the role these establishments played in the growing accessibility of pornography, which was frequently cordoned off in its own section by nothing more than a beaded curtain. By the mid-’90s, however, popular television shows like Seinfeld and Frasier had begun to feature “regular” people patronizing video stores, often finding themselves in awkward situations with pretentious clerks or civilian acquaintances with whom they’d rather not have to make small talk—particularly about their taste in entertainment. Before long, the Blockbuster Videos of the world began putting independent stores out of business, and this, as well as the debut of DVDs, would sanitize the rental experience while oversaturating the market over the course of the early 2000s. Perry, a former employee of Mondo Kim’s in Manhattan, has created an ode to these bygone spaces and the still-relevant notions of curation and curiosity that they fostered.
In January, shortly after the premiere of Videoheaven at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, I met up with Perry to talk about the film’s prolonged gestation, the fringe titles and surreal scenes of video stores he discovered along the way, and how side projects like Pavements and Videoheaven have become fulfilling creative outlets for the director as narrative filmmaking opportunities have waned in recent years.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Do you remember the first video store you went to, or one that you frequented as a child?
ALEX ROSS PERRY: For me, in Philadelphia, that was West Coast Video, which, even concurrent with the late-’80s rise of Blockbuster, was a fairly prominent chain throughout the region. That’s why I fought to make sure there was a West Coast Video commercial represented in Videoheaven—just as a little tip of the hat. But I remember many of that store’s key locations—primarily one in the middle of Bryn Mawr that was very small but was connected to a cookie bakery called Hopes. So you could get videos and cookies at the same time; the video store always smelled like fresh baked cookies. I also have a lot of very clear memories of the video section at my local library—memories of renting Follow that Bird (1985) and Mr. Rogers’ tapes there.
NOTEBOOK: When did you discover Daniel Herbert’s book and at what point did you think it could be turned into a movie of some sort?
PERRY: It's not impossible that I saw either an advertisement or a book roundup in Cinema Scope or Film Comment. Because it's an academic book; it's not like it gets mainstream press. And like all academic books, it's $40 and 350 pages and you have to buy it from the university press website. That said, it's highly readable and very, very pop.
So I wrote Dan a fan letter and said, “Hey, I'm a filmmaker, and a video store clerk. I love this book. If there's ever anything that could be done with this, please let me know.” And he wrote back that he had cut a chapter from the book that was about the depictions of video stores in movies and TV. The chapter wasn't even finished, but it was largely written. He sent me the chapter, and when I looked at it, I said, “I think this is a movie.”
NOTEBOOK: What’s the book like? I haven’t read it.
PERRY: The first two or three parts of the book are very similar to the first half hour of the movie, which is an overview of videotape as a medium—how it came to be, how it came to be used for commercial releases of Hollywood movies, and how those commercial releases began to find their way into electronics stores, and then ultimately how things spun off into small video stores. So he basically tracks that industry into its heyday, and then geographically tracks it throughout America in the way that stores would appear in places like Dallas or the Midwest—regions of the country where, just like the Cobb salad, there’s no agreement on who did it first. And then the book moves on to more cultural topics. He has a really great chapter on the idea of clerks as characters—not based on film depictions, but on the socioeconomic conditions of the retail employee in the ’80s and ’90s and what that meant. In the mid-to-late aughts, you could work retail and live in a city. You could make $500 a week at a video store, or a record store, or a bookstore, and live in Brooklyn. That went away, and he tracks affordable retail labor as a socioeconomic condition of these stores existing.
He has this interesting point that we ultimately cut from the movie where he focuses more on the way that the idea of the video store and video rental has changed, and he describes this streaming-on-demand commercial that features bickering video clerks. They finally pick a movie, and they put it into some portal, and it beams up into a living room. And on the screen it says, “Movies On Demand: The Video Store Has Now Entered the Home.” Originally, streaming on demand, renting on demand, pay-per-view, and eventually Netflix by mail, were advertised as extensions, if not replacements, of the video store experience. It was reminding customers: No more trips to the video store; Netflix comes to your mailbox—the video store was used to advertise what would ultimately replace it.
NOTEBOOK: How important was the influence of Los Angeles Plays Itself at this point in the process, as you began to conceive of the film formally?
PERRY: It was key. Dan's book came out in 2014, and 2013 was the ten-year anniversary rerelease of Los Angeles Plays Itself. I had seen the film at its infrequent pop-up screenings. At the time, if you screened it, you would just get a two-DVD set from Thom Andersen. There was no DCP. A friend of mine who had screened it let me burn those DVDs when she had them at her office. So I had a bootleg copy of the movie probably from 2008 onward. But that 2013 rerelease was a slightly different version; the fact that Thom had upgraded the quality of a lot of the video sources was huge for me. I had seen it in the theater once before, but I got to watch it again, and then I was able to own it on Blu-ray. It just became an obsession. It went from a documentary I had seen that was sort of like a shooting star to something that I view as indisputably the greatest documentary of all time. Like anything I ever do, the starting point is that I love something and I just think, “How can I make something like that?” Oftentimes in narrative filmmaking, you're looking for your version of a story. And in this case I was like, “What is my version of this format?”
I also really like Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2012), which came out around the same time. That's another highly watchable pop-film-history playful thing. If you describe Los Angeles Plays Itself to someone who doesn’t care, it probably sounds unwatchable—as I'm sure Videoheaven does. And yet the thing goes down like you wouldn't believe. You can watch the whole thing without pausing it or getting up. It's so compelling. And that's what we aimed for with this, where basically every forty to sixty seconds you're getting a new visual language. So that was always there for me, and it really only became clear to me later that the rerelease of that film and the release of Dan's book were so clearly the two competing parents of this idea.
Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001), as seen in Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: Can you tell me about the process of gathering the clips you wanted to use, and how much of these came from memories you had of certain films with scenes set in video stores versus how much you had to research or even just discovered along the way?
PERRY: This is a great example of why this movie took over ten years to make. It wasn’t because we needed ten years to find these clips, but because over ten years magic happens and mysteries occur and things present themselves—stuff just emerges. But to start, Dan’s unpublished chapter included about fifteen key texts that he had already done the work on. Those are the ones that make up the peaks and valleys of the movie. If you watch the movie right now, it would be clear which ones were already analyzed: it’s Body Double, it’s Disconnected [1984], it’s Video Violence [1987]. And then it gets into romcoms: Walking and Talking [1996], Sidewalks of New York [2001], The Holiday [2006]. Dan also talks a lot about Seinfeld, and when he talks about clerks-turned-filmmakers, he focuses on The Watermelon Woman [1996] and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 [2008]. And then, like the film, Dan wraps it up with I Am Legend [2007]. So those were the key examples that he had pulled out to prove little pieces of what we ended up building.
Dan also still had access to his researcher, so she compiled what was for years our only spreadsheet. She got to like 70 films. Just by thoroughly Googling, she found stuff that I never would have found—mostly terrible 2000s movies. Then after that it was seven more years of telling all of my maniac friends that I’m working on this and hoping that a few times a year they throw me an idea—just like, “Hey, I saw something for you.” Because there is stuff in the movie that is psychotic to have found. If you ask me how I found images of video stores in the backgrounds of Ghost [1990], Sister Act [1992], Lethal Weapon 3 [1992]—well, at some point in the last ten years, I watched those movies. I wasn’t watching them looking for this. I was watching Ghost, which I’d never seen, and I thought, “Oh, wow, Patrick Swayze gets killed by a gang in front of a video store.” That’s not the point of the scene. No one else would even notice this. But I’m working on this film, so now I have my Notes app open on my phone with, like, “Ghost: time code, 11:00 minutes,” and I text my editor, Clyde, “We got one.” A lot of it grew like that, just one at a time.
And then, miraculously, in the lifespan of making this movie, twenty more things appeared that weren’t on the table ten years ago. We have things in the movie that are 2024 releases that came out when we were basically finished. But I was like, “Clyde, we have to add Madame Web." I was exhausted on vacation with my daughter and finally got her to sleep and I threw on Madame Web,and I saw the Blockbuster in the background, because it’s set in the early aughts. So, of course, we have to get that. The world just kept giving us these things, which proved that there is interest in at least giving people that visual signifier of, “Oh, this is a period piece? Yep, there’s a video store somewhere.” Clearly filmmakers are having fun with that.
NOTEBOOK: Were there any movies that you discovered along the way that proved particularly important for supporting the points you wanted to make in the film?
PERRY: There were definitely films that emerged late as absolutely essential that Dan hadn’t found. For example, Remote Control (1988), which is a sci-fi body-snatching VHS-brainwashing movie. One character says, “They must have taken the tapes to every other store. Quick, where’s the nearest video store?” And the other character says, “One mile that way.” What a gift it was to find an actual source that completely proves Dan’s point that, at this time, video store owners said their nearest competition was less than five miles away.
One of the real miracles of a lot of this was not only getting to dissect a movie like Toxic Avenger 3: The Last Temptation of Toxie [1989], which starts with a nine-minute sequence inside a video store, but finding numerous references to Troma films in other movies. Because Clyde used to work at Troma, he was able to pause scenes and be like, “That’s Terror Firmer [1999]. That’s Toxic Avenger [1984].” And the more Clyde kept finding, the more we were like, “We have to sidebar about Troma.” This has gone from a running coincidence to, like, actually the point we are making, which is that even into the 2000s, even into Dawson’s Creek [1998–2003] and Men in Black II [2002], if you’re in a video store, the symbol for the audience to know that this is a weirdo place is a Troma poster. Clyde noticed all of that. That shot in Men and Black II that we use, where David Cross is walking out of the bathroom, you can see the bottom third of the Tromeo and Juliet [1996] poster. You have to have worked in the Troma office to clock that. And then we call back to it later in the movie with some of the 2000s films, where there are still Troma movies everywhere. That just became this running thing that we never could have counted on, and I’m certain Dan never thought about or noticed. But that’s just part of the collaborative editing voice that Clyde and I have established by working together for so long.
While Los Angeles Plays Itself is undeniably a better film than Videoheaven—I would never say otherwise—it has in it twenty of the greatest films ever made: Double Indemnity [1944], Chinatown [1974], Sunset Boulevard [1950].... We have, like, thirty of the worst movies ever made in this film. So we’re operating at a disadvantage of just, like, pure imagery and enjoyability. But we did joke, “What are going to be the things that when people see this they’ll say, ‘What is that movie? I have to see that.’” And then, ten years later, these films are in the canon, because that’s exactly what happened with The Exiles [1961] and Killer of Sheep [1978] when Los Angeles Plays Itself came out. Of course, they’re all silly answers, but you never know.
Men in Black II (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2002), as seen in Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: It seems significant that your name and Clyde’s are paired as the first credit of the film, as almost coauthors.
PERRY: It’s coauthored in every respect. And this is actually true of Robert [Greene], as well, certainly with regard to Pavements. Robert was more essential on Pavements than I ever knew, even though I had made four fiction movies with him. It’s just a different kind of information; to edit nonfiction requires a different way of editing. Clyde’s name is the first you see with mine simply because he worked on it as long as anybody could.
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk about the evolution of the voiceover text: how early you started writing it, how it’s changed over the years, and what you were looking for as far as conveying these somewhat theoretical ideas via narration?
PERRY: It started with excerpts from Dan’s deleted chapter—just planting that seed and letting it grow. Initially, he and I had a shared Google Doc, and we would talk once a week or every other week, and we would talk through how to expand some of these concepts. I would just pick his brain, like, “I found this clip. What do you think this means? In the context of your work and your book, what does this say?” I would take notes, and I would say, “What are some things that you want to say that we don’t have a clip for yet, that we need to keep an eye out for.” I would come up with bullet points like, “We want to hit this point”; “We need to find something that represents this”; “This point is really a stretch, but I think we can find a clip that proves it.” Then there was stuff where I’d think, “We’ll never find a clip that proves that less than five miles from every video store is another video store,” even though that’s essential, and they mention it in Video Violence.
Dan, who has three kids and a full-time academic job, [eventually] said, “I just can’t carve out this time anymore. I want you to finish this." What that did was put the onus on me to write in a continued and evolved version of Dan’s voice, which at that point was very known to me from reading his book, talking to him, and dissecting the text he had shared with me. So the first half of the movie, basically up through the porn section, is very much Dan’s historical-academic-factual analysis of the video store as a physical space in the American retail landscape. And then from the porn section into the clerk section into my thesis in the “Decline and Death” section about how Hollywood was complicit in the deconstruction of video stores by depicting them as negative for decades—this is my analysis. The conclusion I reached after six years of looking at these clips and trying to decode what these mean is that I believe that the average movie and TV watcher was conditioned, not subliminally, but very directly, to think that these are places you don't want to go. We were given fifteen years of example after example of this, so it’s like death by a thousand paper cuts.
Hamlet (Michael Almereyda, 2000), as seen in Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: Is there any significance to having Maya Hawke do the voiceover and then starting the film with Ethan Hawke in Hamlet? I found it funny to think that for a lot of people our age, Ethan Hawke movies represent the video-store era, but by the time Maya Hawke was born, video stores were going out of fashion.
PERRY: It was hugely significant. Maya grew up in the West Village and has childhood memories of going to Alan’s Alley, which was on 9th Avenue. It’s where Jake Perlin, one of the film’s producers, worked early in his time in New York. Alan’s Alley only closed in 2014, so Maya has lots of memories of going there and renting movies. She’s pretty much one of the youngest people that would have those memories. But she remembers the store, she remembers the sections, she remembers the cat that they had there.
The narration was always a question. In Los Angeles Plays Itself, you don’t know who’s speaking. It’s like, “Is it some friend of Thom Andersen?” It’s inimitable, but most people watch the movie and think it’s Thom Andersen talking. You think that’s what Andersen’s voice would sound like. So I always knew that the narration needed to be something. And for a while I thought, “Well, there’s so many clerks in the movie, maybe I’ll get different actors who have played a clerk, and they’ll each do one of the sections of the film, and it will change.” I thought of that idea for years. But then when Maya came in my mind, I thought exactly what you’re saying.
By the late 2010s and early 2020s, if most fifteen-year-olds have ever seen a video store on screen, they’ve seen one on Stranger Things, where Maya and Joe Keery are clerks. And then, of course, if you ask anybody, “Who’s the first person that comes to mind when you think ‘video clerk’?,” they would say Quentin Tarantino. Maya's family history is intertwined with him, in the same way that her family history is intertwined with that space because of the Hamlet clip and her now playing that character on TV. It just was too obvious—nothing could beat this idea for me.
NOTEBOOK: It’s not exactly obvious that you would include TV shows as examples in the film. Was there ever a point that you thought they might not work, or was Dan’s use of them enough to convince you to open things up beyond cinema?
PERRY: Dan did make a meal of Seinfeld in his chapter. Every scene on Seinfeld is about awkwardness and humiliation, so the fact that that show returned to the space so often was very obvious and logical. Then the research just has to expand and you start Googling every one of those shows: “Frasier video store.” Yup, there's a scene. “Mad About You video store.” Yep, they did one there, too. And it just keeps snowballing.
NOTEBOOK: All the way to Dawson’s Creek…
PERRY: Dan actually found Dawson’s Creek. I had never seen it. But in his description of the clerk in the book, he noted that amidst a sea of unflattering depictions of clerks, there’s this one highly popular show that features a sweet, sensitive, aspiring filmmaker working as a clerk. And that is very anomalous. Los Angeles Plays Itself will go into Dragnet or things like that, so it’s all connected. There’s much less TV in the film than there is cinema, but the point almost proves itself, which is: If we’re saying that by the ’90s the video store and the retail landscape was such a foregone conclusion as to be unremarkable, then that is proven by the fact that in ’86, ’87, ’88 you have to see underground films, cult films, or horror films to see a video store on screen. And by 1998, every Must See TV show on NBC has a video store as a recurring or somewhat understandable location. This almost proves Dan’s point that the ubiquity of this space was such in the real world that it became such in entertainment. And that means leaving the realm of horror movies and entering the realm of theoretically watching three sitcoms in a row that all have a scene in a video store—to the point where you would think nothing of it.
But then a lot of the recent examples also come back to TV: Stranger Things, but also Yellowjackets, which uses the video store as a nostalgia drop-off for its characters to talk about the ’90s, and the Netflix show Blockbuster, which is an abomination. So it’s just sort of swung back around to TV.
NOTEBOOK: The fact that there aren’t many examples of prestige films featuring video stores also proves your point I guess.
PERRY: You could argue that the Egoyan films we use are prestige, but those are from the ’80s. And you could argue that the Villeneuve movie Enemy from 2013 is prestige-ish, but it just features a very quick, nondescript scene in a video store. You have to remember, Clerks [1995] was a highly prestigious, acclaimed independent film. As hard as that might be to remember for some people now, that wasn’t seen as a disposable comedy at the time. That was seen as a serious look at independent culture. And I think that’s because the identity of the video store got so co-opted, for better or worse—I think for the better—by Tarantino’s identity. After his big bang on culture, all of the video stores scenes in films were just riffing on the idea of a Tarantino-like scene or a Kevin Smith–like scene, and those two filmmakers, by 1995, had radically altered the idea of what a video store clerk was capable of, so much so that the rest of the decade is reaching for what those two guys both represented or put on screen.
Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1995), as seen in Videoheaven (Alex Ross Perry, 2025).
NOTEBOOK: What do these two documentaries—Videoheaven and Pavements—about ’80s and ’90s pop culture phenomena mean to you as a filmmaker at this point in your life and career?
PERRY: It’s sort of coincidental because this movie had been in progress for six years before Pavements ever happened. And Pavements only reached the finish line a few months ahead of this film. But I think for me, even starting with Her Smell [2018], all of it represents this obsession I have with returning to the time of my youth, which is obviously a very common and not at all remarkable thing for someone to feel. But you get excited by the idea of doing something new or doing something first, but also doing your version of something that you love. For Her Smell it was: We haven’t seen a movie that treats alternative rock of the ’90s, grunge, as the subject of a serious film. No one’s made that movie yet, because the people who love that music are probably not in a position to make anything.
In the case of Videoheaven, as Dan says, “No one had written the definitive academic book on video stories in the American retail landscape, so I wrote it.” And I have the same thought: There are many video store documentaries—good ones, terrible ones—but no one had made the totemic video-stores-on-screen movie. Same with Pavements: No one had made the definitive indie-underground-slacker ethos, this-is-a-real-band documentary, because there is no band that you can make that about other than Pavement. So the ongoing project of these last few years has become, due to many unforeseen circumstances, this ongoing cultural conversation within myself about the time I grew up in.
I’m incredibly suspicious, almost distrustful, of the filmmaker instinct to pretend you know about something you don’t. Why would I, as a 40-year-old, born in 1984—why would I not make the ’90s indie rock movie? Why would I make the ’70s rock movie? That had nothing to do with me. I say this in Videoheaven through Maya when she says that future depictions of video stores will be created by people who didn’t experience them firsthand. Like the western or the World War II film, this will certainly lead to some form of as-yet-unknown revisionism—in which, speculatively, I assume that video stores will no longer be seen as horrible places where bad things happen. They’ll be seen as magical places where you could get everything. That’s what the future holds. But the fact is, over time, depictions change from someone’s firsthand experience to someone’s imagined experience that they only know through films or books. And that becomes irrelevant and unreliable.
This is why a hero like Paul Schrader says things like, “I really try to avoid making period pieces. I’m really not interested in pretending I was there for something I wasn’t.” And this project for me of juggling these films has been this wonderful opportunity to just really critically analyze my life—my lifetime, really—which to me is the only thing any one person should be responsible for analyzing. Body Double is the first example of a video store on screen in a Hollywood film. That movie came out three months after I was born. Both me and Body Double are products of 1984. Videoheaven is literally the story of my lifetime. It’s not my life story. It’s the story of my lifetime, from 1984 to the present. And what, if not that, should I be fascinated by? Both as a way of understanding it and codifying it and putting it down for people to think about, to explore, and to be critical of—because they definitely go hand in hand. Also, both movies have Beavis and Butt-Head [1993–97] in them, which is the most important thing.
Good Dick (Marianna Palka, 2008).
NOTEBOOK: Does it say something about the state of independent filmmaking that you haven’t made a narrative film in seven years, and that instead you’re making documentaries?
PERRY: These films are not smart uses of my time, particularly when weighed against my family responsibilities. Pavements struggled tremendously to get financing. We ended up making the movie for less than half of what we initially budgeted for. So those problems follow you wherever you go. It's not like anybody thinks, “If you really want to make money and have it easy, you should make some nonfiction.” But there’s two directions to go with making these films, which also includes a narrative-concert-hybrid film [Rite Here Rite Now] I codirected last year with Tobias Forge about the band Ghost: First, I like working. I like creating things and having open channels in my mind where every day I can put an idea in this bucket and one day the bucket will be full. And having nonfiction projects on the side is a great way to do that. But then the question becomes: on the side of what? As I said to my wife about a year ago, everything I’m working on right now is something I would describe as a side project. And I have three of them. Everything I’m doing is the kind of thing I used to do because I was doing other things and I could kind of noodle on the side. Now my entire plate is side dishes. And that’s very peculiar. But it’s fine because, if you care about creating things, this is what you want to do, right?
An idea that I think is very foolish is the director who just wants a clean filmography. Who are the best directors of our lifetime? [Martin] Scorsese, David Lynch, Spike Jonze, Spike Lee—they make commercials, music videos, concert films, filmed theater. Whatever strikes their fancy. They’re always making different things. David Lynch dies: Here’s a playlist of 50 commercials he made and his music videos and his concert films. I don’t understand how anybody could want anything other than to create more things with more collaborators and more different styles, because many heroes operated that way their entire career. A lot of these individuals are restless people of an advanced age that are still constantly making work. I think that should be the goal. That was my goal when I was fifteen years old, and it’s still my goal.
The problem is the narrative world is just over, for all intents and purposes. What we get out of it now is worse than you could ever have imagined growing up in the ’90s, when independent cinema was king. I could say I have no interest in working in that method, but really, that method has no interest in me. It’s like, of course you have no interest in going to the party, you weren’t invited. So your lack of interest is irrelevant because nobody wants you there. That’s sort of where things are now. And not just for me. It’s like that for most people I know who spent our entire lives—from film school up to making microbudget movies—fighting through the jungle, only to get to the dock and see that the boat had left about fifteen minutes before we got there. I know people who could say the same thing, having not made a scripted film in five, six, seven, eight years. The difference is they don't experience the joy and freedom that I do in doing anything else. They just want to make the movie. They want to write a script, create a character, dream up a set, cast the role, and film it with one camera. And now that I’ve realized that that’s both boring and not likely to happen, I'm much more free in my ideas. I’m also much poorer than I would like to be.
A life lesson of working with [Pavement frontman] Stephen Malkmus—who I’m not equating myself to in terms of brilliance—was realizing that he never did that either. The band broke up at a very low level of commercial success. And then, twenty years later, his career stacks up against anyone’s. His integrity is his greatest asset as a middle-aged artist. He never took the swings that would, fifteen or twenty years later, render your choices not admirable. That’s become very important to me while working alongside him on Pavements. That is a viable path. You can always have less ambition than your peers, and if you never make an egregious misstep—well, time will be the judge.
This is a funny thing to say at Rotterdam, where we’re surrounded by bold, form-breaking, exciting, and—simply put—good movies, but the problem is there’s nothing good that really inspires what I could do. Because I can’t make a European art film; I don’t have state finance to make something that explores my own cultural identity within my own country’s framework. So films like this, films that I see at festivals, while admirable artistically are irrelevant for me in terms of inspiration. Because I could never make movies like that. For me, just seeing what gets out there narratively in America, nothing is inspirational. And if nothing’s inspirational, you have no motivation to contribute to the conversation.
Pavements and Videoheaven are such odd films, in that they live kind of inside and outside of what normal things are. I just don’t know how I could care about spending that much time or effort on something if I know going in how slight the end results might be. It makes more sense for me, not a financial level, to spend eleven years making Videoheaven and thinking that everyone who loves video stores and misses them and is inclined to watch a three-hour documentary—which is not a lot of people—will see this movie. This movie will reach one hundred percent of its target audience. It doesn’t matter how big that audience is. Whereas a narrative film, it's like, this movie could appeal to many people, if it had these grotesque marketing campaigns that essentially spend millions to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would reach more people, but that’s just not available to me.
Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: One of the things I like about the two films is that, even though they may have been side projects of a sort, they don’t come across like that. If anything, they’re as substantial as anything else you’ve made.
PERRY: No great Scorsese documentary feels like a side project—I haven’t seen all of them; I'm sure some of them do. But the ones I’ve watched don’t feel like side projects. They feel like passion projects. And that’s really inspirational if you care about the totality of cinema, which is also an interesting thing to talk about here at Rotterdam, because this is the totality of cinema. Sundance is not the totality of cinema. That’s one kind of movie. Toronto is not the totality of cinema, even with a program devoted to more groundbreaking work. The totality of cinema is an evolving thing that I’m extremely interested in, mostly because I need to figure out what I can do to fit into it. So if I want to make another essay film, which I do, I would know how to do that in four years instead of ten years. And that would be really fun. If I wanted to make another music documentary, which I do and already sort of am, I know what not to do.
I also know that you get to buy a home if you direct dogshit TV. But because that is also not available to me, that means six-figure paychecks and home ownership might not be available to me in the same way that it is to people that made promising indie films and now make disposable, streaming content. And I both disregard that entirely as an artistic enterprise and am seethingly jealous of those opportunities. So I can dismiss it because I would say yes to it in a second. But no one’s ever asked. The fact that I desperately wanted my first film, Impolex [2009], to play in Rotterdam sixteen years ago—it was the place I really felt that movie would premiere, and didn’t—and now I’m here close to twenty years later with two films totaling over five hours—you know, if I can play the long game with Rotterdam, I can play the long game overall.
The thing that I think a lot of people lose track of in the middle of their professional lives is that you do have to care about something, or else you’re just a cog in the machine. The lessons of a Malkmus are: Never be that. That’s not gonna get you anywhere. That’s the end of your reputation as a freethinker. And that’s a hard thing to keep track of as you get older and have life responsibilities. It's kind of an ongoing battle to preserve that.