Pasqual Gutierrez
Pasqual Gutierrez
In 2023, Pasqual Gutierrez had a classic anxiety dream. The busy music video director was doing bigger and bigger projects with Raúl “RJ” Sanchez as one half of the directing duo Cliqua, and his wife, Christine Yuan, was seven months pregnant. How would his work life have to change with a baby on the way? How could his collaboration continue to function? Gutierrez’s slumbering mind came up with a surreal and ingenious solution: He could hire a doppelganger to take his place on the shoots, and clients would be none the wiser. Yuan thought the dream was hilarious and a great idea for a movie, saying “‘Let’s make this weird autofiction thing and put our friends in it.’”
The irony of combatting fears of being overworked in the final months of his wife’s pregnancy by taking on even more work didn’t escape Gutierrez and Yuan. But Gutierrez invited longtime close friend Ben Mullinkosson to direct the project with him, and, after a rapid pre-production, they began shooting Serious People, a hilarious L.A. music video scene satire that’s also an unexpectedly tender relationship story. Gutierrez and Sanchez play themselves, as does Yuan, and Miguel Huerta is the doppelganger, whose ego-fueled, cluelessly misguided attempts to play director (“This entire production is going to be a fucking movie—cinematic style,” he repeats to anyone in earshot) threaten to torpedo the directors’ careers on the eve of shooting a big Drake video. Scenes play out in long takes, giving the film a doc-like feel, and the framing is appealingly eccentric and receptive to unexpected elements intruding from the corners of the frame.
Gutierrez and Mullinkosson (a documentarian whose recent work includes The Last Year of Darkness) divided up directing duties, with the former focusing on performance and the latter on visuals. Robert Altman and Ruben Östlund were guiding references, and the group’s friend circle filled out the supporting cast with scenes and conversations drawn from real life relationships. “The goal was always to have the viewer wonder where the line is drawn,” says Gutierrez. “How much of this is happening, and how much isn’t?”
The L.A.-born Gutierrez always planned to break into longform, but when “young and starting out it was difficult to do that.” Through an engineer friend, he got hooked into the music video scene, eventually meeting Sanchez, forming Cliqua and bringing the ambition of ’90s high-concept videos shot by inspirations like Jonathan Glazer and Spike Jonze to works by artists including Rosalía and Bad Bunny. “A lot of these artists wanted to cross over and appeal to a broader, more American audience, but [with directors] who still understand who [they] are,” is how Gutierrez explains Cliqua’s appeal. Soon, their spots attracted the attention of The Weeknd, for whom they’ve now directed ten music videos. With The Weeknd committed to their collaboration, the Cliqua duo got to think even bigger: “We were creating narrative-based ideas around his albums—ideas of worlds, clubs, tunnels and purgatorial concepts.”
As for spoofing another Canadian artist—Drake, played by a double—in Serious People’s finale, Gutierrez says, “We [know] big artists who would have come in and played [the part]. But we kept saying, “It needs to be a doppelganger. The goal was to create an uncanny, ambiguous representation that would add another layer of meta-commentary to the film. We landed on Drake because he’s so big. He even hosted his own lookalike competition.”
With Gutierrez and Yuan’s daughter now two, and Serious People succeeding (it premiered in the NEXT section of Sundance 2025 and will be released this fall by MEMORY), the director is at work on a sequel. “It will explore the existential themes I’ve been feeling as a father,” including, he says, “this ideology of ‘trad life,’ specifically among Gen Z and millennials. There will be a lot of comedy around searching for traditional family values in this new world.” As for the budget, “We’re scaling up, for sure, but not too much. There will be meta aspects again, and we’re going for a lot of cameos as well. And my daughter is going to be in it.” —Scott Macaulay/Image: Christine Yuan
