It’s been far too long of a wait for Zach Clark‘s followup to Little Sister. The filmmaker behind one of 2017’s best movies is back with what’s potentially once of the best movies of 2024, The Becomers. It’s a science-fiction love story about body-changing aliens, both as alone and confused as most of us felt during the pandemic and strange and uncertain times.
Aesthetically, Clark’s film took a lot of inspiration from the original Star Trek series, but in presenting timely themes through an entertaining, colorful lens, The Becomers is very Trek-y in spirit as well. Recently, the writer and director of The Becomers told us about his inspirations for the film, as well as shooting in Chicago during the pandemic.
You’ve said before if you story is rooted in truth, you’ll always have emotional references to go back to if you’re lost while writing. Here, what were the emotional references?
This movie is just what 2020 felt like to me. My partner at the time and I, we watched all of the original Star Trek, which I had never seen before. I was deep diving on not that sort of tone of science fiction, but also that aesthetic, which is very poppy and very technicolor. It was my little safe space while QAnon was taking over the capitol, Cuomo was resigning, and all this other stuff. So, it really is an effort to capture that feeling in a movie.
Yet you end the story with a beautiful feeling. Without spoiling anything, how’d you and your music supervisor get The Cry’s “Alone”? It’s such a fantastic song choice for an ending.
Well, the music supervisor is me. I’ve never worked with a music supervisor, even on Little Sister. It was all me. I did the same thing I basically always do, which is, some different songs that were written into the script. There’s certainly a different song written into the script. You just start a playlist and start listening to other songs you like from recent memory with an open mind.
Then one will present itself, if the one that presents itself also feels achievable. The song made sense. I had heard it years before and put in a favorite playlist. When it came back into my periphery, the vibe fit. It was a very easy process to reach out to the label and get it approved by the band.
Great song.
Yeah, it’s such a good song.
This is the first romance you’ve written, right? What was new in that experience?
I wrote this movie so fast. I wrote the script in three or four weeks. Usually, it takes me a couple years to complete a script. I’m trying to finish some scripts right now that I started six or seven years ago. I don’t know that I can necessarily describe what felt new about it, because what felt new was trying to get it done so quickly.
The fun of it is this inverting of the tropes of a genre movie and the tropes of a science-fiction movie in the service of the love story. That sex scene in the middle of the movie is like, well, let’s take the icky, goopy, gooey scene that happens in most of these things, and then use it to put an underline on the connection between these two characters.
How’d you decide to make some of the body horror more colorful?
That literally is just Star Trek. That is just the technicolor aesthetic and the neon colors. I wanted the aliens to feel like these pops of color in a drab world. The humans and the locations, as best we could control, we tended to go with more muted colors for spaces and for costumes. The bright pops of the alien’s eyes and the goo would feel like this neon thing that comes to this world.
The practical effects have a lovely simplicity to them, but there was probably a lot of complexity behind them, right?
It was really tough. We had a very truncated production schedule as well in the first go round, and there was some stuff that just flat out didn’t work. We ended up coming back about a year later and shooting for six more days. Most of that stuff was to redo some practical effects, stuff that didn’t quite land.
Sometimes something feels like a disaster when it happens. Then you can look back and say, “Oh, well, it felt terrible when it happened, but now, it yielded this thing that’s probably better for the movie in the long run.”
In the long run, the effects in the movie are sort of done by different people. The baby and the adult aliens and the orifices are all designed and executed by three separate group teams. I think that ultimately helps. It makes it feel like the aliens aren’t just kind of one thing, a little bit. Does that make sense?
Absolutely.
I will be honest and say that there was a real steep learning curve, not just for me, but for the little crew that we had with sort of managing the practical effects while shooting.
Chicago, right?
We were all Chicago, all the crew, except for my cinematographer and our gaffer. All of the cast was Chicago based. That’s where the producers are from, so shooting in Chicago was also part of the assignment I was given.
The crew members in Chicago are great. How were they for you?
I think when you’re used to making things on a small scale, usually the people who you get for those things are cool and nice, enthusiastic people. Assholes who care about money or they need dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, to be on a set aren’t going to work on these kinds of movies.
The big thing for me is that almost all the previous features, my producing partners on those, Melodie Sisk, Darrell Pittman, and I, had over time come up with a merry band of movie makers. Like, oh, you were great, so work on the next one.
And so, I hadn’t worked with most of the people on this movie before. In those previous movies, we tended to fly out a bunch of people from different places and put them all up in a few houses. Everyone lived where we were making the movie, except for myself and three other people on the crew. There wasn’t really that sort of summer camp vibe that you sometimes get on an independent production.
But everyone did a great job. People were totally cool with the size of things. I always say feed people, just make sure everybody has enough food and that you don’t run out of snacks. That goes a long, long way. People were fed well because of Covid. Usually, they were handed menus to restaurants that they were ordering from, so it was even more a la carte than your traditional micro-budget film caterers.
It worked well. We were, again, going so quickly that it just sort of, great, here we are. We’re doing this thing. Let’s do it.
The masks in the movie, although specific to the pandemic, that detail in the movie will probably be timeless. People could watch this 40 years from now and just assume it’s the atmosphere of this apocalyptic story.
We very specifically didn’t say Covid. There is a group in the movie reminiscent of QAnon, but they’re not called QAnon. The politicians have fake names. You don’t really hear any real politicians’ names or the names of any real people. Some of that is so that they wouldn’t get mad at me, but also, to have this one step removed thing that you can think about it as an allegory.
This isn’t a Covid movie as by means of being a gimmick. I audaciously thought I could make a Covid movie, make a movie about Covid without falling into, hopefully, too many of the pitfalls of the sort of, maybe more cutesy, “Oh, we’re all on Zoom covid movies,” if that makes sense. Everyone behind the camera was wearing a mask when we made that movie, so it didn’t feel right to pretend like it wasn’t happening.
I wanted to tell you, I love the movie Little Sister.
Thank you.
As someone raised religious, it’s so rare to see a good movie that deals with faith. Similar to The Becomers, it’s about these individuals in a larger system of rules, choosing thesmelves or a higher calling. What interests you in that conflict?
Yeah, that certainly is a thing in both of those movies. Again, it’s not like I write or create movies in a way where I sit down and make a list of all the themes I want to address in something, and then think of ways to integrate them. They are just a byproduct of what interests me about the story to begin with.
I’ve made very small movies. It’s not necessarily for lack of wanting to make a bigger movie, so perhaps I also feel like an individual against a larger system. In a way, I’ve also learned recently that I can save a lot of money on therapy by just having people ask me what I intended. I’m learning a lot about myself doing interviews for these movies. You’re right. No one’s pointed that out yet about those two movies, but it’s very true.
The Becomers is now playing in theaters.
