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Make a $100,000 Genre Movie in 12 Days in Chicago: Writer/Director Zach Clark on The Becomers
The Becomers High-concept movie formula makers will have a field day with Zach Clark’s The Becomers. Is its tender, yet often violent, saga of star-crossed – and serial human body inhabiting – lovers a hybrid of The Man Who Fell to Earth and Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (whose lead character is played by eight different actors) or an Invasion of the Body Snatchers updated for an N95-masked America? Or … something else? Clark’s first film since his widely beloved Little Sister (2016) wasn’t one he had in the pipeline. The New York-based writer-director-editor had put a heroic effort into launching a project on octogenarian pornographer Doris Wishman, which stalled out, so was particularly receptive when producers Joe Swanberg and Eddie Linker got in touch with an offer: Make a $100,000 genre movie in 12 days in Chicago. The final budget, Clark says, was maybe double that, and the production went on for an extra week. As he reflects, “It was early 2021, after about a year of the pandemic. And honestly, why wouldn’t I make one of these things? I’ve been sitting around trying to get something off the ground. Here is an opportunity to just make a thing. It’s the opposite of how it usually works. The script was written very quickly, and then we shot very quickly. It was about three months from when I started writing the script to when we had wrapped the principal shoot.”
The film, now streaming, reunites Clark with Molly Plunk (Little Sister), and an ensemble of Chicago-based actors who include Frank V. Ross, Mike Lopez, Jacquelyn Haas, and Isabel Alamin. Russell Mael, of legendary pop duo (and Leos Carax collaborators) Sparks, narrates, reading the deadpan (yet so very wry) love diary account of one alien lover to another as they seek each other out – hopping from one human host to another, amid ever-escalating chaos – so many, many light years from home.
Filmmaker recently Zoomed with Clark, who spoke about the pop-cultural and historical inspirations for the film, the joy of cooking up intergalactic jargon and why the movie isn’t a satire.
Filmmaker: When Joe Swanberg called you to propose a Chicago-set microbudget genre movie, did you have ideas already or did you brainstorm?
Clark: When Joe originally reached out to me, I said, “I don’t have any ideas right now, but if I have an idea, I’ll reach back out and let you know.” And then within that next week or so I came up with the idea for this movie.
Filmmaker: So where did that idea come from?
Clark: My ex-partner and I had watched all of the original Star Trekand Next Generation during COVID. That approach to science fiction – I had really fallen in love with it. I hadn’t really ever watched the original series. I’d seen the movies and stuff as a kid, but the show completely blew my mind. I was really excited by that space. At one point, I looked up all of the rules to make a Star Trek fan film. We really burned through those series. So it’s that combined with what COVID felt like. It did really feel like it was my partner at the time and I against the world and that the thing we had to get us through was each other at the end of the day. That’s where the love story comes from. And that line at the end of the movie that the narrator says — “While our planet died around us, there was a love that saw us through …” — was the guiding light for the relationship thing. And then, it had to be a genre movie, and I’ve never made one of these before. So, Star Trek, aliens, COVID, love, feeling like it was you and the person you were sheltering with, navigating this thing, just the two of you, against this world that’s going increasingly crazier and crazier.
Filmmaker: I grew up with the original so those lo-fi vibes really were a vibe for me. With AI and everything else these days carrying us into an ever-more synthetic future, the movie’s throwback special effects are like sci-fi gone garage rock.
Clark: For no money, the effects are pretty good. If we had millions of dollars and the effects looked like this, it would be a different situation. I don’t think it’d be nearly as enjoyable.
Filmmaker: Did you have particular rules for the aliens or for how the story and situation would develop? The narrative is like an exquisite corpse, because as they change bodies, they find themselves in completely new social situations.
Clark: Like any other kind of world building, sometimes I know quite a bit about them and how they operate, and then sometimes I had to write something in a scene, and it sounded right. I knew how the body snatching itself would operate, and I sort of knew how their bodies work and what their MO is. Those rules are rules that had to be consistent and locked in in order for you to be able to figure it out over the course of the movie. You’re never explicitly told in one scene, “OK, they do this, first this, then this, then this …” That information is teased out. But there’s multiple scenes where they talk about the protocols. I don’t have a giant list of what all the protocols were. It’s sort of, no pun intended, fleshed out when it needed to be. I really love, from original Star Trek, that sci-fi lingo, where you change some words to make it sound like it’s a space thing.
Filmmaker: Any favorites?
Clark: I really like “pulse colliders.” It’s in the voiceover: “I didn’t like my job at the Gamma Center. Pulse colliders bored me, but I made do.” I was very proud to come up with pulse colliders.
Filmmaker: The movie begins with one of the most outrageous scenes possible, which also was hilarious. Were there certain strategies you had for concocting the episodes?
Clark: The things that I wanted the aliens to navigate were pretty inspired by things that had very recently happened. The Capitol had just been stormed. Cuomo had just resigned. That particular moment in American politics and history was very fresh. The writing of the movie and the movie itself are less like an attempt to satirize anything and more just a mirror of the times. I don’t really think anything that the human beings in this movie do is that outlandish compared to what people do and were doing at the time. I see it frequently in reviews, people saying it’s a political satire. There are jokes in it, but I don’t know that I’m lampooning anything per se.
Filmmaker: The acting has a deliberate stiltedness, as the aliens are trying to adapt to their situation, which is very funny. There’s a lot of physical comedy. It’s a different kind of thing than the usual naturalism you would get from some types of indie films. I was interested in how you approach that, and the collaboration with the actors – that tension between the possessed host bodies and the regular humans they used to be.
Clark: I’ve always said that, especially in independent filmmaking, but really, any kind of filmmaking, naturalism is as much an affectation as anything else. I don’t think shooting on a long lens handheld feels more like reality to me than other things. So, I’ve always been interested in exploring things like performance and style, in a way that, to me, feels like what things feel like, without necessarily having it feel like you made a documentary about it.
A lot of the way that the aliens speak is written into the script. There are pauses and ellipses as they search for words. I tried to get as many of the actors that played aliens to come out for a half-day and hang out with each other, but we didn’t really do acting exercises. We just sort of [said]: “Hey, hey, you’re all playing aliens.” The one thing I’d tell all of them is, “Take your time. You’re not in a rush to do anything.” The performances were handed off in a way that each actor who plays an alien would get to play themselves as a human, interacting with the previous actor that plays the alien – before they would then have to embody the alien. So they would get to see how it was being performed before them to then internalize and do with it what they wanted.
Filmmaker: It must have felt like a real coup getting Russell Mael to narrate. How did that happen?
Clark: Aaron Hillis was running a secret Zoom movie club during COVID and was getting celebrities to zoom in to do Q&As and stuff. And Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks attended one. Aaron knew that I was a big fan, and he sent them a link to Little Sister, which they watched and enjoyed. I got to Zoom with both of them, for like an hour or so in the summer of 2020. When it came time to find a narrator for this, Russell was the first person I asked. It really was as simple as reaching out.
