Charli XCX has said she wants ‘Brat‘ to “stop” at the premiere of her forthcoming film The Moment.
Released on February 20 in the UK, the upcoming mockumentary follows a fictional version of the singer as she prepares to embark on the record-breaking ‘Brat’ tour. Directed by Aidan Zamiri, the film is made using a combination of real footage from the tour, interwoven with fictional backstage scenes.
Now, Charli has revealed she’s keen to move on from the album-turned-cultural phenomenon that inspired the film.
During a press conference at the Sundance Film Festival, where The Moment premiered on Friday (January 23), Charli told the crowd, “Right now, I’m like — like me in the film — I’m really wanting ‘Brat’ to stop.”
“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.”
Charli went on to explain how the version of her in the film differs from her real-life persona, saying: “I’m obviously quite related to my character, so I had a lot of inspiration to pull from.
“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?”
She added: “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 Moment is one of numerous film projects coming up for Charli, including an acting role in forthcoming comedy-drama 100 Nights Of Hero. She has also written new music for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.
Recently, she released the haunting new single ‘Wall Of Sound’ from the film, which you can check out here.
The new songs come after Charli recently said that she was “currently feeling more inspired by film than by music” after being left “stuck, empty and barren” after her breakthrough album ‘Brat‘.
“[By the end of ‘Brat’] I sort of felt like I was squeezing blood from a stone, trying to get every last drop of liquid life out of an idea I had already been sat with for years prior,” she shared. “I still love [Brat], don’t get me wrong but I was itching to move on and was simultaneously frustrated that I was so depleted that I couldn’t.”
In May, she hinted that she was expecting her next, non-Wuthering Heights album to go in a completely different direction than ‘Brat’, saying: “You can never really do the same thing twice and my next record will probably be a flop, which I’m down for to be honest.”
And in February, her producers A.G. Cook, Finn Keane and George Daniel – also her husband – said that the follow-up is shaping up to be “anti-Brat”, Keane saying: “Some of the conversations we’re having and music we’ve been playing around with the last couple of months have been completely the opposite.”
Recently, she revealed that she is “exploring a lot of stuff with strings” for the album.
