{"id":676190,"date":"2026-11-05T23:30:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T23:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/676190\/"},"modified":"2026-11-05T23:30:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T23:30:11","slug":"alex-karpovsky-on-returning-to-filmmaking-and-maybe-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/676190\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex Karpovsky on Returning to Filmmaking (and Maybe Girls)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEven if Alex Karpovsky was no more familiar to Girls<\/a> viewers than the rest of its breakout cast, the Massachusetts native was already relatively established by the time of the HBO<\/a> show\u2019s premiere \u2014 only, behind the camera. He\u2019d directed three micro-budgeted features from 2006 to 2009, and another two that released in 2012, the same year as Girls\u2019 first-season run. The work showcased an idiosyncratic filmmaker freely following his heady, sometimes absurdist instincts.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen Girls became what it became, and Karpovsky suddenly had an acting career coming off of his deadpan turn as Ray Ploshansky: Now 51, he\u2019s gone on to star in Homecoming<\/a>, Nobody Wants This, Angelyne and multiple Coen brothers movies. He\u2019d tried to get other projects off the ground over the last decade-plus, including several TV ideas that got stuck in limbo, but he also acknowledges that time was an issue \u2014 he simply didn\u2019t have the \u201cmojo\u201d to get another movie going.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt feels fitting, then, that Karpovsky returned with his first film in 14 years less than two weeks before Lena Dunham<\/a>\u2019s announcement that Girls would be coming back as a five-episode limited-series revival. Karpovsky hasn\u2019t been announced to be part of it \u2014 he won\u2019t confirm or deny in our interview, but he\u2019s open about imagining Ray\u2019s future and his experience making the show \u2014 but there\u2019s a full-circle quality to this arc nonetheless. The world, and the industry, have changed quite a bit, but Girls is back, and Karpovsky is back making movies.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film in question is Riptides, and it is again very low-budget, playful with its humor and dense with ideas. Set in Sayulita, Mexico, where Karpovsky visits regularly, the movie imagines the collision between Toby (Steve Little<\/a>), an American beach bum who oversees hotel properties in the idyllic town; Paul (Dylan Baker<\/a>), a renowned self-help author sneaking in a quick vacation before his next big book tour; and Paul\u2019s daughter, Michelle (Bojana Novakovic<\/a>), an even-keeled manager who spends most of her time keeping her famous father out of trouble.<\/p>\n

\n\tTragedy strikes, and an opportunity arises for Toby to make something of himself and find some meaning, inspired by Paul\u2019s writings. He winds up entangled with Michelle in this scheme, going down a \u201cdemented\u201d path as Karpovsky puts it in our conversation.<\/p>\n

\n\tRiptides next screens at the Indie Memphis Festival on Saturday evening. So far, its path is not dissimilar from the low-fi projects that Karpovsky helmed back in the late aughts and early 2010s, despite drastic changes in the surrounding independent landscape. We get into all of that and more.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tSteve Little in Riptides.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMatt Clegg<\/p>\n

\n\tYou premiered about a month ago at New\/Next Film Festival. How did it go?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt went really well. I mean, for me and my disposition, it\u2019s terrifying to show this. The theater had 300 people in it. I know six people in the theater. It\u2019s mostly strangers and you just never know how it\u2019s going to go. Perhaps this is obvious, but the thing about a comedy is that everyone knows in real time whether or not the movie is working or not working \u2014 a binary thumbs up, thumbs down feeling \u2014 at least for me. You\u2019re in the room and then you have to go up there and do a Q&A. But luckily everything played as I wanted it to\u2026. One little test you can have of how a movie plays at film festivals: Do people stay for the Q&A, quite simply? And they did, and they asked good questions. So I was very happy \u2014 perhaps, more than happy, relieved that the movie didn\u2019t fall apart.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s been 14 years since your last feature came out, the same year that Girls premiered \u2014 so the timing there is interesting. What do you attribute the gap to?<\/p>\n

\n\tI made five movies before this one and they were all really ultra, ultra low-budget affairs. Two of them came out in the same year \u2014 2012, I guess, Rubberneck and Red Flag \u2014 and we were in the middle of shooting Girls. It was fun and exhilarating, but really exhausting. Making any movie is exhausting. But making ultra low-budget movies, because you\u2019re wearing so many hats, it exhausts you in a very specific way. I felt very depleted and I didn\u2019t really have the desire to make another movie, at least a low-budget movie, for a while.<\/p>\n

\n\tI also then got caught up in TV projects. I sold or was adjacent to sales for six TV shows; some of them got close, one of them aired, but it didn\u2019t open a new chapter of my life as much as I wanted it to. But it took a decade of my life developing these six TV shows and shooting some of them and writing scripts for other ones. I thought about, \u201cWell, I have four months here, maybe I can write a script and then shoot it in my next break.\u201d But I just quite honestly didn\u2019t really have the mojo. I didn\u2019t have the drive to make another movie. And yes, I also started acting more after Girls than I\u2019d ever acted before. But about two years ago, I had more free time and, more importantly, a resurrected enthusiasm to make another movie.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe industry has gone through so much since 2012. What felt different about making this scale of movie now versus then?<\/p>\n

\n\tI expected to feel more of a change than I actually did, to be honest with you. The biggest changes that I experienced were technical. The cameras are a lot better and cheaper. The lights are a lot better and cheaper. The editing software\u2019s a lot better and cheaper. So it\u2019s easier in a sense, financially and technically, to make an ultra low-budget movie that looks decent. When I shot my last movies, we were using these Canon DSLR cameras, which were all the rage back then, but you can\u2019t really do handheld stuff \u2014 there were a lot of limitations to it. Now for almost the same price, you can have a camera make an image that I think most civilians couldn\u2019t tell whether it\u2019s Hollywood or the camera you got at Best Buy for $3,000.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tOn the set of Riptides<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJorge Pineda<\/p>\n

\n\tDid you consider scaling up, budget-wise, in your return to filmmaking?<\/p>\n

\n\tI couldn\u2019t get the money to scale up, so I did it this way \u2014 very affordably. My approach over the past few years has been to write something that would require funds and resources and patience. While that is hopefully incubating somewhere and getting slow momentum somewhere behind the Hollywood curtain, you\u2019re not waiting for the phone to ring. You\u2019re keeping busy making smaller projects that you can actually control and have agency over. It\u2019s also the approach a lot of my friends and I\u2019m still waiting for some of these other projects to maybe have an opening, but I can\u2019t just hope that that\u2019ll happen. I have to stay busy.<\/p>\n

\n\tI want to go back to what you asked a moment ago.<\/p>\n

\n\tAbout what\u2019s changed? Go for it.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow that I think about it, although I don\u2019t know how conscious of it I was when I was shooting it: The world has become more spicy. I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the adjective, but there\u2019s a lot more anger, it seems like, in the world than there was 14 years ago. A lot more people seem to take a thrill in criticizing you. There\u2019s a lot of haters, you can say. There were haters around back in the day, but they didn\u2019t seem to be in these numbers or have this type of volatility to them. So back in the day, I think it required less courage to make movies. Now, in addition to everything else it requires to make a movie, you also just have to have the fortitude to endure the arrows that will invariably come your way. I feel like there are more arrows than there used to be.<\/p>\n

\n\tEven with something as simple as the advent of Letterboxd, the feedback is also more immediate in a way that I imagine is probably terrifying.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, it\u2019s absolutely terrifying. There\u2019s so much fear involved in making a movie to begin with, and then you add this other very powerful and visceral layer on top, it stops a lot of people from expressing themselves, I think.<\/p>\n

\n\tYour film is in conversation with this topic to some degree \u2014 you play around with the Instagram interface as a way of introducing characters, and the power of an influencer\u2019s support makes for a key plot point. It\u2019s not the most obvious theme for this story, so how did you find your way in there?<\/p>\n

\n\tSocial media and social media influencers are now woven into our new economy. The way that people share and present and market ideas and products in the world \u2014 social media influencers now are a huge factor in that process. I wanted the movie to feel relevant in certain ways. Since COVID, there\u2019s been a real surge in self-help interests. They\u2019ve spiked upwards and I don\u2019t know all the answers, but I\u2019m curious why that\u2019s going on. And a lot of people are now making their money through social media influence. I read somewhere that they asked 8-year-old kids, \u201cWhat do you want to be when they grow up?\u201d \u2014 the question they\u2019ve asked for generations \u2014 and now it\u2019s like 40 percent?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat else inspired the film? It\u2019s set in Sayulita, Mexico, for starters.<\/p>\n

\n\tWe shot in Sayulita, which is a small town. It\u2019s an hour north of Puerto Vallarta. I\u2019ve been going there for about 10 or 15 years because it\u2019s easy to get to and it\u2019s so beautiful. I started to meet people down there. There\u2019s a lot of stoners and burnouts and yoga people and surf people and local people. When I was talking to the expats and gringos that are down there, they\u2019d spend their days surfing and smoking weed and drinking with their pals. In moments of stress, which is often when I visited, I was filled with a sense of envy for these people because they seemed to be really enjoying their life and they seemed genuinely happy. It wasn\u2019t a front for most people. And then there were other times where I would talk to some of these people and I felt judgy, like I pitied them.<\/p>\n

\n\tI thought, \u201cWell, these people feel like they\u2019ve abandoned something. They\u2019ve surrendered a dream, they\u2019ve surrendered their ambition, and there\u2019s something sad in that too.\u201d I kept oscillating, and that became an interesting subject for me: Happiness versus meaning is ultimately what it could be crystallized down to. And I wanted to Trojan horse this idea into an absurd, silly jungle comedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tCan you talk about finding the tone in terms of the casting? Steve is very broadly funny, while Bojana is a grounding force. How did you develop that so it\u2019d feel complementary?<\/p>\n

\n\tI really wanted to make sure we nailed the tone, and I wanted to make sure everyone was acting in the same movie\u2026 When you\u2019re mixing absurd comedy with something kind of grounded, and there\u2019s death involved, and there\u2019s darkness involved, I just wanted to make sure those things can blend together \u2014 and if they do blend together, make sure that everyone knows how they blend together and know how to plug into the same movie together. That really starts with the actors, and I feel like, exactly as you said it, Steve really captured the comedy of it, but also the heart of it and the tenderness of it and the innocence of it. Bojana really captured the drama and the tragedy of it.<\/p>\n

\n\tI didn\u2019t really know if it would work until they started having scenes together. When we shot the movie, I wanted to make sure we shot some of their pivotal interaction scenes early on to establish the movie, so everyone could see the movie we were making tonally.<\/p>\n

\n\tGoing forward, do you hope to work at a more accelerated pace behind the camera now? Does it feel sustainable to you to keep making movies at this scale, given the current mechanisms for distribution and indie financing?<\/p>\n

\n\tI would like to keep making movies in an accelerated way. What\u2019s really nice about making low-budget movies, to say the obvious, is that you have a lot of control. I don\u2019t have to answer to anyone, for better or for worse. If I want to cast this person, I can cast them. If I want to shoot in this location, I can do so. If I want to make these choices in the editing room, I can do so. You also don\u2019t need to wait very long, relatively speaking, to make these low-budget movies. You don\u2019t need to wait four years to package and then hope that no one drops out at the last minute.<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m still hoping one of my bigger projects might catch momentum out there in Hollywoodland. It\u2019d be a fun and new adventure to embark upon, but I can\u2019t just wait and do positive visualization exercises all day and hope that that\u2019ll happen. I have to take control of my own life. Also, I should say it\u2019s fun. I had a tremendous amount of fun making this movie, and to me, that\u2019s one of, if not the main goal, to be creative with friends, doing something that you are hopefully proud of in places that hopefully are fun to shoot in.<\/p>\n

\n\tLet\u2019s talk about the Girls revival. All very exciting. Are you in? What are you hearing?<\/p>\n

\n\tI hear they\u2019re making it. I hear it\u2019s happening. Will I be in it? Who knows!<\/p>\n

\n\tDo you have hopes for Ray if you are?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m very curious what he\u2019s been up to. It\u2019s been 10 or 15 years, so I\u2019m very curious what he\u2019s been up to as the world has changed so much since we last saw all these people. I love Ray and I care for him deeply, and sometimes I\u2019m concerned about him, and I hope he\u2019s doing well. I hope he\u2019s found meaning in his life. He seemed a little bit existentially adrift at times to me, or existentially disoriented. That allowed for him to view things maybe a little bit more clearly than other people, but it also has created an inner turmoil. I hope he\u2019s less tormented than he has been, but maybe he won\u2019t be as interesting if he\u2019s less tormented. Mixed feelings!<\/p>\n

\n\tYou were talking earlier about the explosion in haters online, which made me wonder: Did you read Lena Dunham\u2019s memoir?<\/p>\n

\n\tI didn\u2019t, no. And I don\u2019t know if I have a good reason for it. All of my friends read it, and they all gave me their own synopses and also their own descriptions of when I was mentioned \u2014 which, from what I understand, was very sparing, contained. So I haven\u2019t read it. One day I will.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe\u2019s very open<\/a> about what she went through on that show, including all that negative feedback.<\/p>\n

\n\tI can tell you this, David. When we made the show, they were very happy years in my life, those six or seven years. I loved playing Ray, and I loved being in a show that people were talking about. The vibe on set, from my very limited point of view, was really positive and fun. I\u2019ve been on some sets before and afterwards; invariably, there\u2019s tension that brews. It just happens, especially the longer you spend time with people. I just didn\u2019t see too much of it from my very limited perspective, but I\u2019m an actor on the show. I\u2019m not privy to a lot of these conversations.<\/p>\n

\n\tLena was just incredibly open and receptive. The vibe on set almost always trickles down from the leader. Lena was definitely our leader, and so the vibe that she at least presented when I was there was just very positive, enthused, and receptive. That shaped a lot of people\u2019s feelings on set. It shaped my feelings on set. I\u2019m getting around to saying that my time during those six years was very positive \u2014 and maybe the reason why I haven\u2019t read the book yet is because I don\u2019t want anything to change that. I heard there are things that might change that, so I kind of want to stay in my happy place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even if Alex Karpovsky was no more familiar to Girls viewers than the rest of its breakout cast,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":676191,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[286400,321,286401,93,1302,86974,3284,120176,61,60,12648,286402],"class_list":["post-676190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-bojana-novakovic","tag-celebrities","tag-dylan-baker","tag-entertainment","tag-exclusive","tag-girls","tag-hbo","tag-homecoming","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lena-dunham","tag-steve-little"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/676190\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/676191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=676190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=676190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}