The Brooklyn Rail

I first met director Ben Mullinkosson when I interviewed him for The Last Year of Darkness (2023), his intimate, fluorescent documentary about the underground club scene in Chengdu, China—my hometown. He has always struck me as someone who meets life where it is, with equal parts determination and whimsy.

That same playful conviction carries into Serious People (2025), co-directed with his longtime friend Pasqual Gutierrez, who had already made his name directing music videos with his CLIQUA teammate Raúl “RJ” Sanchez.

Most people in this acidic comedy play parallel-universe versions of themselves. It follows Pasqual (Gutierrez), a Los Angeles music video director, as he approaches the birth of his first child with his wife Christine (Gutierrez’s real-life wife, Christine Yuan, who’s also a successful director). When a major opportunity to direct a Drake music video collides with the baby’s imminent arrival, Pasqual hires his lookalike Miguel (Miguel Huerta), an earnest local actor, to take his place on set.

The film starts as a self-deprecating joke about working in the entertainment industry, complete with lines like “Our thematic focus is strippers.” It then grows increasingly real and unexpectedly tender—and ends up becoming an all-encompassing commentary on ambition, parenthood, and agency.

Beneath the satire is a sincere question about what it means to “make it,” for creatives in Los Angeles, and for us all. Mullinkosson’s films tend to revive the lost art of the tagline: The Last Year of Darkness has “From throwing up to growing up;” Serious People says, “Life’s a movie.” We may dream of living life like a movie, or of making movies for a living, but life itself should always be the end goal.

Weiting Liu (Rail): I know the film started as a dream of Pasqual’s. Ben, how did you get involved with this project?

Ben Mullinkosson: Pasqual had this dream that he landed a big music video gig on the eve of Christine giving birth, so he hired a doppelgänger to direct the video while he got to be there for his family. He called me to go to LA and help turn that dream into a feature.

Pasqual and I go way back: we met in film school, were roommates, got repped by the same company afterward, and had talked for years about making a feature together. We just didn’t have the right idea for it; instead, we kept collaborating on shorts, experiments, commercial work, etc.

Fast forward to 2023: I had just finished The Last Year of Darkness around the same time that Christine got pregnant. Pasqual was understandably going through an existential crisis about becoming a father and a new version of himself. His sense of urgency set the film in motion.

From his dream to our premiere at Sundance, it only took about a year and a half.

Rail: How long did the actual production take?

Mullinkosson: We developed the script loosely in a Google Doc and pulled together minimal financing. In total, we shot about twenty-four days over two months, just a few days each week. The production was piecemeal and came together through favors. For example, our producer Ryan Hahn got us the strip club location for free, but only from 8 to 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. We just took what we could get and built our schedule around these economical constraints.

Rail: That makes sense. It’s Wednesday morning from 8 to 10. Who’s even at a strip club then, other than an indie film crew? [Laughs]

Given its small budget, the film feels surprisingly cohesive, finding its rhythm in these offbeat conversations where people bounce random ideas off each other at parties, on sets, and, of course, in strip clubs. It’s refreshing to see a character-driven film about LA without spectacle or gloss, but full of chemistry and pulse.

Mullinkosson: Everyone in the film is smooth and funny. I’ve known many of them for over ten years, so I felt confident that whenever I pointed the camera at them, something interesting would happen. We also took an affected approach with Roy Andersson in mind: what if he made an absurdist documentary about music video directors in Los Angeles? He was our guiding light.

Rail: The title Serious People is apparently ironic, but there’s an actually serious scene where Pasqual has a heart-to-heart with his partner RJ (Sanchez) about Miguel. Pasqual actually believes in Miguel because they were both born and raised in East LA. Miguel is actually a hard worker, but he may never get an opportunity unless Pasqual and RJ give him this shot, however ridiculous it might seem.

Pasqual Gutierrez: You’re pointing out something subtextual that many LA audiences will pick up on. There are very few people in Hollywood who were born and raised here, especially from underrepresented backgrounds like Miguel’s.

LA is our home, but a gap exists between proximity and access for someone like him. He can grow up right next to the industry and still get shut out of it. That’s something personal I’m tapping into through the bond between Miguel and me. And it’s not just about us—it’s about how arbitrarily the industry defines who “belongs.”

Rail: That’s why the film works so well as docufiction. It says a lot, both on and off screen.

What about you, Ben? As “the man behind the camera,” what did you contribute to this aspect of the film?

Mullinkosson: Around the time of filming, we had watched Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) together, and its observational style became an inspiration.

We shot everything on tripods without imposing much lighting. Our cinematographers, Neema Sadeghi and Nicholas Bupp, brought their own gear and set up quickly. We would anchor scenes with a wide shot, and then add a second angle for perspective. I wanted to compose shots where the audience could explore the frame like a page from Where’s Waldo?.

In the baby shower scene, for example, Christine is in the foreground receiving a gift from Miguel while Pasqual talks to someone else in the background. You hear both, but you choose what to see. This brings about that layered but naturalistic viewing experience you enjoy.

A lot of comedy today relies on flat shot-reverse-shot, which I find boring. We made something with more depth, both visually and thematically.

Rail: The ending brings this meta film together: Miguel and his girl replicate an earlier scene where Pasqual and Christine walk their dog up a sunlit LA hill. That sense of replaceability ties back to a larger question of self. How did you arrive at that ending?

Gutierrez: We had that ending in mind from the very beginning, even as the rest of the story became fluid through improvisations. Like you said, the line between what’s on screen and what was behind the scenes kept blurring, so we were constantly rewriting the script in real time.

But the core idea—that Miguel would replace me in some way—was always there. It speaks to this anxiety that someone else could step into our life and work, negating our identity in the process, while on a macro-level, the rest of the world stays unbothered. We aimed for a sci-fi ending that unsettles and haunts.

Rail: Exactly. How can this bizarro world of hustling and clout-chasing even be real? But at the same time, this is what you care about, what you’ve built your lives around, and to a large extent, who you are.

That brings me to my last question: What does “making it” mean to you?

Gutierrez: That’s a great question. Are you asking me in real life, or the version of me in Serious People? [Laughs]

At the time of filming, “making it” meant something simple to me: creative freedom and financial success without having to work day jobs or side gigs—being able to sustain my family and myself entirely through filmmaking.

Seriously speaking, though, that definition has changed for me now that I’m a father.

Mullinkosson: That’s really the emotional crux of the film: Pasqual gets the opportunity to direct someone like Drake, so he feels he has to say yes, even if it means missing the birth of his child. I feel that pain of the grind. In that sense, “making it” should probably mean being able to say no without feeling like we’ll be passed over and then forgotten as a consequence.