Full Spectrum of Online: An Interview with “www.RachelOrmont.com” Filmmaker Peter Vack

By Bree Jo’ann Flannelly

I met Peter Vack last year at Story Fort Festival, a subset of Treefort Music Festival held every spring in Boise, Idaho. Peter was there to promote his novel, “Sillyboy.” Sitting on a panel, he had a jocular bravado. As an audience member, he had an explosive laugh that made the room turn to see who made such a sound. When Sammy Loren invited me to read during Casual Encounters’ curated set, I was startled and delighted to hear that laugh during my performance. After the reading, Peter came to tell me he liked my essay. 

I ended up joining a friend at a shared AirBnb to watch Peter’s feature film, "www.RachelOrmont.com." I had no idea what I was in for. I felt a little star struck when I saw the character Mommy 6.0 was played by Chloe Cherry, the adult film actress turned traditional actress that had a brief but impactful role in the second season of the HBO show “Euphoria.” “www.RachelOrmont.com” is about a young woman whose mother sells her to an ad agency, where she is raised in captivity. It’s not an easy watch, often combining socially awkward cringe with violence, but it’s poignant, hilarious, and brilliantly executed from the top down. It's more than a feast; it’s a visual binge session. The actress Betsey Brown, Peter’s sister, shows a next level commitment to bringing the titular character to life, clutching viewers by the neck so we feel every bump and texture of her character’s experience. Peter and I recently met virtually to talk about his process as a writer and filmmaker. 

Bree Flannelly: One of the things that intrigued me about an actor getting into the indie lit scene was the notion of embodied experience, how acting seems so much about fully inhabiting another person’s experience. How has acting impacted your relationship to creating narrative?

Peter Vack: It's interesting you ask me this because it's something I was just talking about with my students in the acting class I teach. We do full spectrum emotion improvs, where we devise a scene and play it without a script. I tell my students “trust your intuition, your body and your heart.” There's so much potential for language creation there, and it does carry over to my writing practice. The final step towards making a character really pop is not an intellectual translation of your idea of their personality onto the page, but a visceral embodied experience where you become each character. 

That’s something I really struggle with in my own writing. It’s easy to do with characters that are similar to you, or even with characters that you feel somewhat neutral about, but harder to do with characters that are “opps.”

One of the first things you learn as an actor is not to judge your character. This person believes they're the hero of the story. That's what makes your villain or your opp character three dimensional, not just mustache twirling. Yeah, it's fun to write a self-insert. It's cathartic. But sometimes it can be even more cathartic or differently cathartic to go deep into the psyche of characters that you yourself would not like if you met them on the street. 

What are some of the core differences you’ve found between writing a script and writing a novel?

Writing anything always feels like writing, but the main difference is your idea of the end product.  When you're writing a novel every sentence needs to work, to flow into other sentences. Theoretically, you could work on a novel for 20 years. You can “reshoot” your novel ad infinitum. If you decide you want your characters to go on a trip around the world, you don't need to raise an additional $5 million. When you're writing a film script you usually write with some understanding of a budget. It's not a literary document in itself, but I still hold my scripts to a high standard. You want to make the script fun to attract producers, investors and actors, but for me, since I use so much improv on set, there's always a sense that the script is just a jumping off point for more invention when I’m filming.

When did you start writing the script for "www.RachelOrmont.com"? 

I started writing the script in early 2014. It was a conceptual continuation of my first short film “Send,” which also uses the idea of the Internet as content on a stage in front of a commenting audience. It's gone through at least 20 major rewrites and probably another 50 to 100 minor rewrites. Even when I'm shooting, I'm adding material. The version that existed back in 2014 bears almost no resemblance to the finished picture.

Did changes in technology prompt a lot of those edits?

Yeah, basically changes in the way the Internet and social media worked, also the way I interacted with social media. At the time, I wasn't really a poster or chronically online so I didn't understand the intricacies of the comment section. Artist Brad Troemel said in one of his famous reports that our experience on the Internet is actually 50% content and 50% comment section. 

Yeah, there’s an almost masochistic drive to go to the comment section.

Right! You even have people commenting on that phenomenon in a meta way, saying things like ‘I came to the comment section just to see this comment.’ The comment section is not secondary to the content; they’re of equal importance. When I started my meme page, The Master Of Cum, I was in the trenches as a creator. I was reviled and adored and dealt with people crashing out, sincerity posting and schizo posting in my comments.

Yeah, people definitely treat comment sections like their journals, and the comment section in the film well represents that experience. How did you get the comment section in the film to be so well rounded?

We “cast” the commenting audience by posting on our Instagram pages. Between my meme page, my producers the Ion Pack, and Dasha (Nekrasova), we attracted this constellation of people. It was just the perfect time and our online presences attracted the right group. It feels like, ‘oh, those were Peter's friends,’ right? The viewer might recognize people in the comment section but I didn't know any of them at the time. It was the movie that connected us. I have to attribute them to something spiritual. I couldn't cast that. I couldn't write that. I was lucky enough to allow it to happen and to capture it. 

When did you start filming “www.RachelOrmont.com”?

In 2022, so right at that point in the pandemic where people were beginning to break convention and come out. During the pandemic, online culture proliferated so much. People had developed these Internet voices and needed to exercise these Internet demons. I didn't have to explain much to the people that showed up to do the film. I just prompted them very widely, like ‘Now brag! Now shit post! Now joke! Now be sincere if you want. Now comment on a popular podcaster who is a little bit of a shock jock.’

Chicken or the egg? Did Dasha Nekrasova inspire the creation of the Darci character, or did the archetype of cunty female Internet provocateur inspire you to cast Dasha?

That character existed in the first draft of the script when I started writing it back in 2014, and I didn’t become friends with Dasha until maybe 2017. Darci was a much younger character in the beginning. It sounds implausible almost, but a lot of elements for that character existed before I even met Dasha. When I was writing that character, I was trying to project myself into the future and I imagined this caustic edge lord. When we were casting the movie, it felt like ‘oh it has to be her.’ I prompted both Dasha and the audience to include more details of Dasha’s persona. I did my best to blur the personalities because it worked so well.

I loved the character Darci’s looks in the movie. Her and Mommy 6.0 and even the more idealized “shiny” version of Rachel had such amazing makeup and costumes, especially those wigs! What inspired those glam elements?

John Novotny did the wigs and Grey Hoffman did the makeup. I was so lucky to work with those two. They come from the world of fashion and fashion people don't always mix with cinema people because it's a very different schedule. Fashion people are used to one off shoots in hermetically sealed environments, where film people are used to locations and long shoots, and moving from place to place. I knew we needed these high glam looks, and my friend Gutes Guterman connected me with John and Gray, who are at the top of the game. Because we mostly shot in one location I think it felt similar to the way they were used to working. 

I noticed a lot of anime elements in the glam too, like Darci’s anime girl mask and even Rachel’s school girl uniform. What brought anime into the picture?

The language of anime images just felt so native to Internet culture, especially when we were filming in 2022. I've seen a couple anime in my life and something that I'm interested in is that very embodied but extreme performance style in anime. It’s similar to how people turn up the extremity of their voice online. To write a banger tweet, you turn up your personality. For better or worse, the Internet is high intensity passion. I am interested in pushing live actors to the same over the top, full throttle presentation of anime. 

The film definitely captures that Internet intensity. It’s very visually dense since it flashes between depictions of the idealized world Rachel sees on the Internet and the visceral world of her imprisonment. What inspired some of the visual elements of the setting? 

That image density is one of the hallmarks of scrolling. Usually films try to go for a cohesion of images and voice and the 20th century filmmaker in me wanted that, but I was more interested in finding playful incoherence as much as I could because that really felt like the texture of online life. Me and the DP, Bart Cortright, are great friends and we work together a lot so we share a shorthand and were on the same page. The production designer and I, John Arnos, designed so much. For example, there's a lot of posters in Rachel Ormont's room at the beginning but we designed probably 3 or 4 times the amount of posters that made it into the room. John hired other great designers like Chris Habib of Visitor Design. Emily Costantino did costume design and Eli Keszler did music. Almighty from Atlanta did the trap beats with a few of his fellow producers. There were about ten people who worked on the soundtrack and design alone. You remember those multi-admin accounts, posting memes on a certain subject? What I loved about those accounts was how multiple admins and their takes on the subject created this great chorus of voices singing in interesting, off harmonies. That’s how we did it with the film. Anywhere we could maximalize the images and the texture, costume set, lighting, props… The only way to do that is having amazing collaborators that are as passionate as you are.

Rachel’s room was definitely a lot to take in. One of the things I noticed on my second watch was the box a Slim Fast shakes in there and realizing that those might be all she ate.

John Arnos, the production designer, and I wanted to be stylish but realistic. We shot Betsey in Rachel Ormont's room for three days. In terms of making it messy, I really wanted to employ unconventional techniques. We had rotting food in there. On the third day of shooting you could hardly be in the room, it smelled so bad. But I stand behind that because a lot of what I do as a filmmaker is a reaction to my experiences as an actor. We actors actually want to be uncomfortable. I want to challenge myself physically and emotionally, and not have it be fake. If I'm picking up a heavy suitcase, I want that suitcase to be heavy. I don't want it to just be full of paper towels. Betsey's that kind of actress as well. She really wants to be put through a great ordeal. 

The scenes where Rachel’s living in the subway station make a big impression on the viewer. I could tell Betsey was really inside of Rachel’s experience, especially in those moments where Rachel is swaying and talking to herself, just the way traumatized people on the street try to self soothe.

It's interesting you say self soothing because that’s how Betsey discovered that voice she uses for Rachel. She was using this voice that vibrates in her chest more than her normal voice, like creating the vibrations of another person. We had to include the reality of somebody who is forced to live on the streets. If we're gonna be honest about the abjection of online life, we have to be honest about how abject offline life can become too. Someone like Rachel, when she’s forced into the real world, has no safety net whatsoever. 

During that train scene she tells herself “Rachel off” to shut off her racing thoughts, and that was interesting to me because it pointed to how overstimulating modern life is, both online and IRL. 

That was something that came through Betsey. I didn't write that. Something can happen if you let your actors really play. They start to channel things about the character that are way deeper than the writer’s understanding. It was kind of a happy accident. Betsey understood that even though Rachel’s been handicapped by her circumstances she’s a smart person, so in that scene she's intuitively understanding that a way to deal with her loneliness is through mindfulness meditation.

I liked that during some of the darkest parts of the film, there were those weirdly spiritual moments.

I’m not any sort of spiritual guru, but there’s something religious about the way we interact with our phones, you know? I was thinking this a lot of the time while shooting because it was when, at least in my corner of the Internet, the New Catholic Movement was happening. And I thought that made sense because in a way you go to your phone in a ritualistic way, the way you do with rosary beads. I'm not a Catholic so I don't want to speak out of turn, but the way we turn to the phone and to the online space, the way we confess and try on different aspects of our personas can feel spiritual.

What are some things you like doing on your phone or online outside of work?

There's something so satisfying about sending a friend a meme or getting a meme. It's like a way people pass friendship love notes these days. I see things that really challenge me aesthetically and I love that. I always look forward to seeing content that feels fresh. The online space is a really profound breeding ground for human creativity. And I love witnessing that.