Alex Lee Moyer Is Directing Her Third Documentary
Art by Tanzanian Wojak. Photo credit: Heji Shin
An interview with the filmmaker of TFW NO GF and Alex’s War.
If you’re a chronically online meme page admin, or a disillusioned “doomer” who spends their days scrolling 4chan or Reddit, or a conspiracy theorist who’s lost all faith in the mainstream media—or all three combined—then some of the only films over the past five years that would have had any cultural relevance to you would have been director Alex Lee Moyer’s two documentaries, TFW NO GF and Alex’s War.
These documentaries took scalding-hot subjects—4chan culture and Alex Jones—and gave them a fair shake. They displayed a level of fast-paced editing talent unusual for their cultural sphere, with original music by indie artists like Ariel Pink, Eli Keszler, and Barrett Avner. Most significantly, they didn’t just document one aspect of the giant, floating, amorphous blob we call “the culture,” they became a part of it. Countless thinkpieces were written about the films, either condemning Moyer for not criticizing her subjects harshly enough or crowning TFW NO GF “the defining documentary of a generation”—a prescient film about the crisis of isolated, alienated young men which now all but the most hardened of misandrists accept is real.
Moyer is now making a third documentary, and “it’s going to be the biggest one yet,” she tells Countere. “I wasn't sure if I wanted to do another doc and I was sort of wrestling with it, and then I found something that I got excited about finally…I can tell you that [the documentary] is related to AI, and it's specifically related to the cultural landscape that's been spawned by AI. I think it’s going to be wild.”
Moyer spent much of her early life moving between different parts of the US, and still moves around often. She spent her formative years in Fresno, California, then went to college in Portland, Oregon. After becoming a self-taught video editor and editing dozens of music videos, one day she answered a call on Craigslist to edit a skateboarding film.
The Craigslist poster was director Adam Bhala Lough, who would eventually would ask her to edit his 2017 documentary The New Radical, a look at anti-government radicals like anarchist hacker Amir Taaki and “ghost gun” activist Cody Wilson. Lough’s film was a tunnel into the world of dissident culture. “I was getting blasted with a lot of stuff that I didn't know about and that I learned about through doing that movie,” Moyer recalls. “I started observing things about the culture and how it was shifting…the world was starting to feel more complicated to me and I had more questions about it. And thinking critically sort of alienated me from my normal friends, so I found more friends and more interests on the internet. And eventually that turned into me making TFW NO GF.”
15 years ago, Moyer’s directorial talents and indie sensibilities would have likely been embraced by the progressive mainstream. But in an age of Hollywood stagnation and an extreme aversion to risk, she’s maintained an independent streak to make her films: she recently founded a brand-new production company, 0nset Creative, to produce the “AI movie,” as she calls it during our interview. 0nset’s tagline is “For A Post Hollywood Age.” Moyer does have a number of supporters in Hollywood and the tech world, though, and the AI movie is her first collaboration with a larger Hollywood studio.
We spoke to Moyer about 0nset Creative, her favorite movies, UFOs, and being a filmmaker in a post-Hollywood age.
On Directing Her Third Documentary
I want to make something that's more cinematic and more ambitious in terms of tying these themes together that I’m interested in: technology, the past, the present, and the future. This could change, but I want to have way more characters and people in [the documentary]. I want to create a real tapestry of the moment we're in right now and make a detailed exposure—psychologically and spiritually—of what's happening in technology right now.
It’s definitely in league with my other films spiritually. I wasn’t always sure what the thread [between them] was myself, and I wasn’t conscious of it when I was doing either film, but looking back on it and and seeing the way that other people have perceived what I've been doing, I think it has something to do with the way that the world is changing so fast and how people are grappling with that psychologically. And how people, especially in the West, are coping with this acceleration in life.
I'm doing work about accelerationism, kind of. I don't mean accelerationism, the philosophy. I mean literally how everything is accelerating. So [the movies] are just a reflection of how I'm grappling with those things. It’s totally therapeutic work. It helps me make sense of the world, and I hope it helps other people make sense about everything that's been happening in the last ten years.
On Her New Production Company
We called our production company Onset Creative. It's me and my main producer JJ Eisenman. 0nset Creative is basically an incubator for film projects: the concept has been to find a common space to concentrate the talents of other filmmakers, writers, and smart people who are doing cool stuff.
Some of our projects have moved on a little faster than other ones, of course; we only have so much money and time. The AI documentary is actually a collaboration with a larger Hollywood studio, so that's obviously a boost for us. In some ways it's kind of going to be challenging too, but in this case it's good because I think conceptually it’s going to be the most ambitious [film I’ve made].
I just want to create a centralizing energy for these great minds not just from the internet, but from the art world and beyond. To bring us all together and make some real movies that are unapologetic and culturally relevant and fun, you know?
And I want to help other people make docs. The barrier of entry [to making a film] is not the same as it was 20 years ago. I made TFW NO GF with paychecks from my day job on the weekends for a year, and I didn’t have a crew until the very end when I finally got some momentum. But I’m living proof that you don’t need the permission of Hollywood executives or investors to do your work. So I just want to kind of whitepill other people on that.
On the Disappearance of Analog Media
On one hand, I think it’s a bad thing that we aren’t generating more physical media [especially as it pertains to art], but I think in order for us to understand the importance of physical media, there had to be a dying off of people’s interest in it.
And now you have things [disappearing]. YouTube's got this new policy of removing videos from accounts that haven't been active recently. There's a lot of amazing old sound footage and relics on YouTube, and things posted from anonymous accounts one time only. That's all going to get wiped away in the next six months. So to everybody out there, if you have old videos on YouTube from an old account, you need to log back in or you need to download them and have them yourself.
But you see people gravitating towards physical media now because everything has sort of become ethereal. And that's one reason that I make films instead of web content or podcasts. I love web content and podcasts, and I actually take in more of that than I do documentary films, but [I love] the act of creating something and making more of a fanfare around it…Louis from Massacre Video has been making beautiful physical media for my films when no one else was going to do that as a way of making sure those things are still around. So I think there's just going to be more and more of a demand for that.
On Her All-Time Favorite Movies
As a kid, my favorite movies were Howard the Duck and The Witches (1990 version). I also have vivid memories of watching Pet Sematary and The Exorcist many times, courtesy of my older brother—and that is trauma I still carry with me, though I'm not sure any of it impacted my work.
Music videos made me want to become a filmmaker. Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham and so many others. In high school, I was a dedicated MTV viewer. MTV "Buzz Bin” clips and anything off “120 Minutes” or “Headbangers Ball” made a lasting impression on me. I was a punk rocker, so I loved the docs The Decline of Western Civilization and The Punk Rock Movie.
My favorite films are 3 Women by Robert Altman, Straight Time and 8 Million Ways to Die by Hal Ashby, Adaptation by Spike Jonze, and The Harder They Come by Jimmy Cliff. My favorite documentaries are Gates of Heaven by Errol Morris, Sherman’s Merch by Ross McElwee, and my all-time favorite documentary is Let’s Get Lost by Bruce Weber.
On Playing Video Games as a Kid
I used to wake up two hours before school just so I could play video games: all the old SquareSoft games, RPGs, lots of Final Fantasy…Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye, all the classics. I had an older brother who was super into video games and anime and comic books, and he got me in all that stuff. My favorite SNES game was Secret of Mana. I played a lot of games on [the Sega] Genesis too: X-Men, Alien, Ecco the Dolphin. I quit when I got into college, and then I didn’t get a TV again until I was like 30.
On UFOs
I'm super interested in UFOs, and I always have been. I consume a lot of UFO-related content—sitting around and watching that is like going to the spa for me.
What’s a UFO theory that I think is true? I’m not one of these people that thinks that I know anything. But if I had to speculate, I think that there probably is a connection between all of the alien abductions that were happening in the 60s and 70s and the MKUltra program. I've always thought the government was sort of fucking with people.
But I feel like the layers of disinformation are so vast around aliens that it’s impossible to actually know. And we keep hearing that we're going to find something out, but we never do. Me personally, I'm fine not knowing. In fact, it’s more fun.
Do you know what the weirder part is? The critics will say, “Oh, well, it’s just a distraction from what the Democrats are doing and blah, blah blah.” But the truth is that if aliens landed tomorrow, most people are so tuned out that they wouldn't even grasp the importance of a huge event like that. It would be a New York Post headline, but unless it was getting heat on TikTok, nobody would give a shit.
On Filming TFW NO GF and Alex’s War
TFW NO GF was just so personal, it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I thought it was an art project that was never gonna see the light of day. But towards the end of it, I was like, wow, this is really special. We could really do something with this. And we did.
With Alex's War, I wanted to do something totally different from TFW NO GF. There are crossovers between those two obviously in terms of cultural resonance. But I wanted to depart from that kind of quiet, intimate little thing. I wanted to make something more next-level with somebody who was already a star. I didn’t have to protect [Alex Jones] so much because he lives is life out loud and airs all his dirty laundry in public or whatever. So I had a blast making that, hanging out with him and getting to know him.
There were times during [the shooting of Alex’s War] that were kind of harrowing. When all the “Stop the Steal” stuff was happening and no one knew what was gonna happen next. None of us did. It just kept building and building until the wheels came off. That’s what it felt like! It was surreal to be with Alex Jones through the bulk of Covid and through the election.
And when it was over, I was like, great, we’re out. Let’s go plant some flowers or something.
On Future Projects
There’s a few other projects we’re working on. One is a scripted project with Walter Kirn that’s related to Art Bell. And then we also have a doc about Ariel Pink directed by Niall Trask, who’s this cool director from England.
Maybe [the AI movie] is my last doc, maybe it’s not. We’ll see. The plan for me now is to turn around this tech doc in the next six to eight months—famous last words. But 2024 is going to be a crazy year. Especially with the work I do, I’m somewhat at the mercy of the political atmosphere. Since I do all my fundraising through unconventional models, it depends on how people are feeling about their money and investing in art or film. So we'll see what happens in the next year.
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