Charli XCX discussed The Moment and her burgeoning acting career during a press conference at the Sundance Film Festival, where her quasi-mockumentary premiered Friday.
During a Q&A panel following the film’s premiere, the singer was asked about how her real-life persona differs from the exaggerated version of herself that she portrays on-screen, and whether she drew from actual experiences for the role.
“I’m obviously quite related to my character, so I had a lot of inspiration to pull from,” Charli XCX said. I would like to think I’m not as much of a nightmare as Charli in the film, but my real managers are in the audience and they probably know the true answer to that. And I know that sometimes I do give them a bit of a hard time, and I think for me those real spiral moments that you see in the film, I have been there. I think I am, as an artist, quite a volatile person… I’m nice too. I’m nice, right?”
Charli continued, “Having been in the music industry since I was 16, I’ve gone through various different stages of my career where I’ve felt on top of the world, where I felt like an absolute piece of shit, I’ve gone through it all. And I’ve also met different versions of like all of the characters within this film. I’ve met the people who are truly kind of like rooting for you no matter what, even if you are an asshole. I’ve met the people who are in it to be close to the artist. I’ve met the sort of people who are so like, ‘We totally get you’ and they really don’t. I’ve met all of them, so I think for me I’ve had a lot of practice reacting to all of those different kinds of characters in my real life. I was just drawing from that, really.”
The singer is set to busy at this year’s Sundance as she appears in three films at the festival: In addition to The Moment, she also stars in the Gregg Araki-directed I Want Your Sex and Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist. During the Q&A, Charli XCX talked about her post-Brat move to the big screen.
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“Right now, I’m like — like me in the film — I’m really wanting Brat to stop,” she said. “I think for all of us as artists, it’s like, you wanna challenge yourself and you wanna totally switch the creative soup that you’re in and go and live in a different bowl for a while or whatever, you know? I really just want to work with these incredible directors like Aidan [Zamiri, The Moment director], Gregg Araki, Cathy Yan, like who I feel like I can just live completely different lives with.”
The Moment opens in theaters on January 30.
