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Last September, in the middle of the Sweat tour and right before the Brat 2024 Arena Tour, Charli sent Zamiri a message; or, as he describes it, “word vomit.” Zamiri had worked with Charli directing the “Guess” and “360” videos, the latter featuring an It girl theme embodied by guest stars including Fox, YouTube star Emma Chamberlain, model (and Healy’s fiancée) Gabbriette, actors Hari Nef and Rachel Sennott, and proto It girl Chloë Sevigny. “It almost felt like a diary entry of, ‘This is how I feel right now,’ ” Zamiri says of Charli’s message. “This feeling of having just almost got everything she could have wanted, and what that felt like on kind of a human level.”

The document became the genesis for The Moment. Zamiri and Bertie Brandes finished the screenplay in a few months with input from Charli, and Zamiri filmed it last spring. “I really don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who works as hard as Charli does,” Sivan says, noting that in between Sweat dates, Charli would take on roles in movies, including Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, in which Araki says Charli does a “top-notch” American accent and nailed a scene in which “she’s faking an orgasm with Cooper Hoffman’s character.” What was Sivan doing during his downtime? “Resting,” he says.

One project Charli turned down during this period was a tour documentary. She felt the market was already saturated with similar projects and says, “I feel like my problem with a lot of musician documentaries is it often shows the musician coming up against some kind of opposition and eventually overcoming it to be the hero. And that’s just not been my experience, you know? Maybe it has been a lot of other people’s, and that’s awesome.”

Charli calls The Moment “a 2024 period piece.” “It’s not a tour documentary or a concert film in any way, but the seed of the idea was conceived from this idea of being pressured to make one,” she says. “It’s fiction, but it’s the realest depiction of the music industry that I’ve ever seen.”

Asked to describe his role, Skarsgård says he plays someone whom “the record label convinces Charli is the hottest director out there at the moment; the right person to capture the essence of Charli xcx and get the most out of this phenomenon that brat was.”

Director Zamiri calls Skarsgård’s character “one of the villains or antagonists of the film.” (Charli herself may be another one; she describes her role as “sort of a hell version of myself.”) Zamiri is cagier about the plot, saying only that the film explores what would have happened if Charli had made “entirely different choices” around brat. (As far as we know, in this counterfactual, Charli’s viral X post “kamala IS brat” still does not make Harris win the presidential election against Donald Trump. At least, as Charli told Zane Lowe, she’s “obviously happy to be on the right side of history.”)

The Moment features a score by Cook. Skarsgård did not reveal to Charli until after they’d wrapped that she was his second most-played artist on Spotify in 2024. (The first was a Japanese pop star from the 1970s and ’80s named Eiichi Ohtaki, which Skarsgård concedes is a very brat choice.) He has just seen Charli perform for the first time at a music festival in Gothenburg, Sweden, a few days before we speak and says, “I got to see the snippets of that when we shot the movie. But the other night when I got to see the full show, it was really remarkable how the second she steps offstage, she sheds that part of her personality. Then she’s back to being this sweet little Charli.”