Boston Underground Film Festival 2024: The Becomers | Interview of Zach Clark
We interviewed Zach Clark, whose genre-bending film, The Becomers, captures the surreal essence of pandemic-era America through its quirky characters and extraterrestrial twist.
Zach Clark was given a special opportunity as a filmmaker and was able to get as creative as possible with his latest project, The Becomers (2023). The film had its New England premiere at the 2024 Boston Underground Film Festival. Clark’s film had its worldwide premiere at the 2023 Fantasia Film Festival. Clark was previously at BUFF back in 2016 to show audiences his film Little Sister (2016), and now he’s got the chance to present a genre-bending story unlike anything shown at the festival this year. Shot in Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic, this sci-fi and romcom journey follows a body-snatching alien who visits Earth to reconnect with their partner as they live in crazy, modern-day America. In this film, Clark takes his experiences from the pandemic and turns them extraterrestrial. Film Fest Report was given the chance to connect with Clark on how he received a phone call from Joe Swanberg to direct a movie in Chicago and how he got his dream come true working with Russell Mael from the band Sparks.
Kristin Ciliberto: So this was a crazy movie. Very unique and I enjoyed it. I couldn’t guess what was happening next. What made you want to tell this story?
Zach Clark: The germination of this project is unique, and financiers who paid for most of my last movie, Little Sister, reached out to me in February 2021 and said, ‘we’re trying to put together a micro-budget genre movie to shoot in Chicago. If you have any ideas, let us know when you can probably just make a movie soon.’ It was February 2021, I was doing truly nothing. I was waking up and looking at the internet and going to bed. I figured, well, why not? Why not make a tiny micro-budget movie in Chicago? This was the idea that I could offer. It was written less than a month after the Capitol riot. Not even a full year into the pandemic. So the movie largely is sort of an effort on my part to encapsulate what the pandemic felt like, how crazy America felt, and how strange everything became during that time. It’s sort of been kicking around in my brain for years, just that I had a very early first four or five minutes of the movie. It wasn’t an idea that I’d had for a while, which is that like you very quickly, you meet this young woman who’s giving birth on the side of the road and you think someone is coming along to maybe help her. It turns out to be a body-snatching alien who takes over the body and throws her baby away. That was sort of like, oh, that’s, you know, sometimes ideas kick around in your head like, I can put that in the movie one day. I was just really trying to force my way through the year we had all just been through. The body-snatching thing lets you explore a lot of things and because they can just go to a new body, you’re like, you know, what trouble is this body gonna get them into.
KC: It’s interesting to see how they adjust to those problems and troubles. One interesting thing exploring your filmography is I’m very familiar and have seen Little Sister and White Reindeer (2013). I know one of your longtime producers is Joe Swanberg who is no stranger to the indie scene. What’s it like working with him and bringing him on as a producer to this film?
ZC: I did not bring Joe on to the film. I didn’t come up with the idea for this movie and then bring it to Joe. Joe said, if you come up with an idea for a movie, we’re looking to make these kinds of movies. Joe’s company Forager Films paid for most of Little Sister, and Joe is in White Reindeer as an actor. On this one, he made that phone call. He really wasn’t around the set that much. He was only if we needed him to be. Usually we’d be like, we need someone to play this guy tomorrow. He would make a few phone calls, and someone would show up and play that guy. I mean, it was his idea to make a movie like this. I sort of took parameters that I was given and made this movie if that makes sense.
KC: That makes total sense. Now the casting process which you brought up. What was the casting process like?
ZC: So because we shot during COVID and because I don’t live in Chicago, we cast most of the movie, maybe I would say half of the people in this movie, we cast on backstage.com, just from an open casting call. My friend, Stephen Cone, is a very talented filmmaker and teaches acting in Chicago, and he sent us a few of his students. Then some other people were just sort of actors that were recommended through a few different people like Frank V. Ross and Mike Lopez who are sort of the people who we’re friends with and a lot of people who we were working with. The only person who had the part written for them was Molly Plunk who plays Carol. She was in my last movie, and so when I knew I was making a movie in Chicago, I was like, I’ll just write the biggest part for Molly because she has such an incredible energy on and off-camera. I just knew she would get it. If we had her as our sort of guiding light, that we would have a good time. I tried to get, I wasn’t able to get all the actors to play the aliens together before we started shooting, but we did have a little hang out as many of the alien actors could make it. We didn’t do like acting exercises or anything. I just sort of talked generally about theories behind how the aliens behave and stuff. I mostly just told them to take as long as they want. I mostly told the aliens that like, ‘You’re never in a rush like a lot of the people in the movie tend to always be in a rush to go somewhere. Or they tend to have a lot to say when the aliens tend to take their time, and tend to sort of let the people talk to them. To figure out what to do with them.’
KC: Yeah, to think of letting them absorb it all in and I see what you are saying. How did you get Russell Mael from the band Sparks? When I heard his voice I was like, Oh my gosh that’s Russell!
ZC: They’ve been one of my favorite bands since high school, and during COVID, a friend of mine was hosting these sort of like secret movie clubs, Zoom screenings, where he would send people a file and we would all download it. We’d all log into zoom, we all hit play on the same movie at the same time, and then chat about it on Zoom and talk about it afterwards. They went really well and he started getting guests to Zoom in for Q and A’s after the movies. Just like for 50 or so people are watching on Zoom and he got Sparks and Ron and Russell to zoom in afterwards. He knew I was a big fan, and he sent them a link to Little Sister. They watched it and really liked it, and so I connected on Zoom with them. Summer of 2020 was very surreal to be zooming with your favorite band. It was just really as simple as I was trying to think of someone who would be a good narrator for the movie. As you often do in independent film, you think of who you have access to or who you’re one or two degrees away from. You know, I was able to get Russell’s contact info and I reached out to him and said hey, remember when we zoomed in the summer of 2020 and you watched my last movie? I’m making a new one, would you be interested in narrating it, and there was a cut of the movie where I did all the temp narration while we were editing it into my phone just to see what works and what didn’t work. I sent him that and he basically said yes. They’re a very important band for me, and I think Russell’s voice brings a lot.
KC: His voice reminds me of something alien-like or something from out of this world, so I get the picture of that. Just to move on to the editing process, was the editing difficult for this? Was it difficult to put this film together, or did you have a vision for that?
ZC: So we made this movie very quickly. The initial shoot was maybe about two and a half weeks. I had finished writing the scripts like a month and a half before that. Literally the first day that I started typing the script and the day that we wrapped was initially like a two and a half week shoot but was about three months apart. So because of that, we rushed through some things. We didn’t have time to do some things quite as well. We shot the whole movie in those two weeks and we shot a whole movie, not the whole movie as you see it. Because about a year later, after we put the whole thing together, we could sort of look at it and say, well that practical effect didn’t quite work out. We didn’t really have to try to do that scene that should have taken half a day to do and an hour. We came back about a year later and shot for six more days. Then after that things fell into place pretty well. That journey, I was telling someone this earlier today, usually the long part of making a movie is the like writing it and finding money, finding people to star in it, work on it, and all this other stuff and where you’re going to shoot it, etc. That was the shortest part of this. So it was after that, that things took a while to come together. The movie also has something that I’ve never really worked with before, it has over 100 VFX shots. So all the eyes and every you know, those are all individually tracked. There’s other you know, there’s a lot of VFX and that also took time. This sort of having to go so fast the first time and then being like, oh, we really should fix some of these things that didn’t quite work out the first time.
KC: Then my final question for you is, can you discuss the special effects makeup? Also, there is the one shot of the full-grown alien in the bathroom scene.
ZC: So the adult aliens because there’s an alien it’s like an alien you see at the very beginning of the movie and sort of like in pink fog. Then, there’s the bathroom alien. Those are two separate aliens and then there’s the alien baby. So the adult aliens were designed by Brian Spears who did the burn effects make-up on my last movie. The alien baby was designed by Ben Gojer who is from Chicago and is a special effects artist, but he’s based in LA right now. He did a lot of work on if you saw All Jacked Up and Full of Worms (2022), he did all that VFX work as well. So I basically just had, I still have it somewhere I just had a little one sheet of paper where I drew what I thought all the VFX should look like. It had all the aliens and all the orifices and the baby and everything. Then, I just showed it to them and basically it was like it just sort of would look and feel like this. The aliens in the script are not called this anywhere in the movie, but in order to be able to refer to them as things, the main aliens were named Y, the partner aliens were named Z, and the baby was called Z. They all have those letters sort of subtly built into their faces. So the pink fog alien has a sort of vertical mouth and two eyes that go like a Y. Then, the bathroom alien has to, you know, two eyes, then like has a mouth that forms an X . Then baby has two eyes and a slit mouth. So it was just what we called the aliens in the script. We were talking about them on set. We’re like this is Y and this is X, and it was easy to have names for them even though the movie doesn’t name them. Those names are built into their face designs.
