Zach Clark’s films embody so many of the inspiring qualities of great low-budget filmmaking: scrappy, rough-and-ready production values stretched to feel more expensive than they are, a troupe of actors present across multiple projects, and an anchoring philosophy of earnestness and sincerity. His latest film, The Becomers, pushes these sensibilities to their most extreme realization yet within his filmography, in an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque tale of aliens, political conspiracy, and a galaxy-wide quest for love.
The film is a true ensemble piece, but if there’s a lead it’s Molly Plunk (also in Clark’s Little Sister), a reactionary conspiracy theorist who becomes the vessel of a soul-searching alien trying to reunite with its true love. As the alien hops from one body to the next, leaving acid-dissolved corpses in its wake, the film takes on a Jarmuschian quality, its many-tendrilled narrative happily propelled by the wave of its own quirky, but deeply felt, humanism.
Clark’s vision for The Becomers was realized in a shockingly short amount of time, which we discussed in our interview. Executive Producers Joe Swanberg and Eddy Linker were looking for genre film ideas that could be shot in Chicago; Clark gave the prompt a go, and within months the film was finished. Even more impressive about the film, with its attention to the early-pandemic American mindset of distrust and paranoia, is how timeless it feels. Despite its era-specific references, both direct and indirect, to #MeToo, QAnon, and Covid-19, trumping (no pun intended) these and other potentially poorly aging qualities is a genuine exploration of what it means to be a person.
Pandemic films were an inevitable byproduct of the pandemic. Most are useless satires, others are black-pilled paranoid messes. A very select few grapple with the moment earnestly by shedding the narrative import of the disease itself in favor of something far more universal: love. In exploring the compromises required to conform and oppose, to live in a gendered body, and to live a kind of love that transcends whatever corporeal container you happen to occupy, The Becomers is one of those select few.
Chris Cassingham: I want to start off by asking about all of the news broadcasts that are in The Becomers as well as your previous films, White Reindeer and Little Sister. I’m curious how you fit the making of those into the production, as well as how you think about how they fit into the world of each film.
Zach Clark: The Becomers was the first time where I hadn’t shot the stuff that plays on the TV before we’d made the rest of the movie. On Little Sister and White Reindeer, because those movies had no post VFX budget, it was cheaper to record and edit all that stuff ahead of time, and then to play it live in the scene. And it was a nice way to ease into making the movie, because that kind of stuff is very low stakes from a production standpoint. It’s usually an actor and a mic and a green screen, so it’s a nice little way to be like, “I’m making the movie already,” but you’re not having to feed and organize 20 or 30 people.
But I think in all of the movies, really, they serve as a way to remind you that the broader world is going on. And so their presence in Little Sister is similar to in The Becomers, where you have a very small view of the world, you’re stuck with those characters in those spaces, and the news exists to say there is a bigger, broader picture out there. And then in White Reindeer, that main character’s husband is a meteorologist on the news. In that movie, it sort of became like this reminder, when you see him on the news, and that’s how you’re introduced to him, and then you see the news again, and he’s not there. It becomes a poignant thing for the main character to see how she looks at her husband and how she looks at the world after he’s gone. On Little Sister, they also became a way to add the period element — because Little Sister was made and released in 2015/2016 but set in 2008, so it also was sort of there to build out that element of the movie.
The Becomers is a Covid movie in a lot of ways, and most of my Covid experience was just being glued to the news 24/7, and becoming acutely aware of the way that different outlets presented the news. So in this movie, the alien is learning how to speak by watching these highly politicized, Fox News-style pundit shows. And then you’re peripherally aware that the Governor of Illinois has been kidnapped and is missing. So The Becomers became not only a way to reflect what “the times” felt like, but also, again, to add a little more scope to something that is sort of, by necessity, contained.
CC: I want to come back to talking more broadly about the film later, but I want to get into the production first. You said it came together and was shot in a really short period of time. Can you talk about what made that possible?
ZC: Yeah, so basically, in a lot of ways, this is a for-hire job for me. I was approached by Joe Swanberg and Eddie Linker, who are producers on this movie, and who were Executive Producers on Little Sister, and they asked if I had any ideas for low-budget genre movies that we could shoot in Chicago. And they gave me a number for the budget, and they gave me a number of days for the shoot. Ultimately, we went over both of those numbers, but they basically were like, “Do you have ideas that could fit in this box? If you do, you could make a movie pretty soon.” And you know, it was about a year into Covid. It was February 2021, and I really wasn’t doing anything, so I figured, why not? Why wouldn’t I just make something? So I came up with the idea for this movie. I pitched them a one- or two-page treatment, that was this idea, and they said run with it. So the day that I started writing the script and the day that we wrapped principal photography were about three months apart from each other.
CC: How did you, I don’t want to say “cope”, but was…
ZC: No, “cope” is accurate! [Laughs]
CC: Okay, how did you cope with such a drastically curtailed timeline?
ZC: The big thing was that as a result of making it so quickly and so cheaply, there were things that we did not get right during the first shoot, and we ended up having to come back about a year later and do some reshoots and pickups. I’m luckily a very good planner, or as good as I can be, when it comes to a production. I’ll go through the entire script and shotlist everything, and have a very detailed schedule for what we need to get through during the days. So, I had that homework that I’d done to fall back on.
But the flip side of that is that, because I had written the script so quickly, I had to read all the scenes every morning because I didn’t necessarily even remember what all the dialogue was about, what all the actions were. If you spend multiple years writing a script and trying to finance it, as you normally do, you have time for all of that information to live in your brain, so that you can come to a scene and intuitively know this is what we need to get across on this movie. I had to remind myself of that every morning, and I would underline important things, underline important lines of dialogue or bits of action so that I wouldn’t forget to include them as we were barreling through the material.
CC: How were the pickups for this film different from the ones you’ve done on other films?
ZC: On this movie, more so than the previous ones, the pickups were really reshoots more than anything else. We reshot about a third of the movie a year later. And there were a variety of factors. We had some practical effects that didn’t look so great the first time around that we needed to come back and fix, and we also had some bigger emotional scenes that, again, because we allotted ourselves two hours for them the first time we shot them, and we should have given them at least half a day, etc. — we were able to come back and get those right the second time through. But largely we were reshooting scenes that we fucked up the first time, whereas on the previous movies the pickups were more for filling in gaps that weren’t covered in the script. It wasn’t reshooting scenes we already had, but adding new scenes to bridge emotional arcs from one scene to another.
CC: No need to give numbers, but from what I’ve read it seems like The Becomers was a much more scaled-back production, financially, than Little Sister. Is that the case?
ZC: They actually have the exact same budget, for what it’s worth.
CC: That’s interesting.
ZC: I will say that while this movie has the exact same budget as Little Sister — the number is the same — obviously, that number went a little further eight years ago than it does today. And the thing we did on this movie that we didn’t do on Little Sister is pay people well. People made a better day rate on this movie than they did on Little Sister. People did get paid to work on Little Sister, but it was very small, right? And we paid people, not an exorbitant amount of money by any means, but a little more generous number this time.
CC: Was that a conscious thing on yours or the producers’ part?
ZC: Part of it was Joe and Eddie’s idea. Because they put up all the money for this, they made most of those financial decisions. But Little Sister was also made in such a way that we were able to stretch the aesthetics a little more, because our producer, Melody, we shot in her parents’ house, and most of those locations were friends of her family. The scope of that movie was allowed to be a little broader because of the favors we were calling in on it. We didn’t pay for the main house in the suburbs, because that is the house of one of our executive producers, Eric Ashworth, but I believe most other locations we paid a not insignificant amount for.
CC: That’s a good enough segue into something I wanted to ask about, which is your relationship to suburbia. They are such important presences in your films, and people have their own opinions about what suburbia means to them. But we see three very unique representations of them in your last three films, so I’m curious what they mean to you.
ZC: That’s where I’m from, I’m from Alexandria, Virginia, which is right outside of Washington, DC. So that’s the backdrop I grew up in. I think the modern American portrait of the suburbs is that it seems all shiny and perfect on the surface, but under it’s the seedy underbelly. And certainly it is in White Reindeer, but I think in Little Sister, as well.
CC: And in The Becomers, of course.
ZC: Yeah, I tried to take this stance of yeah, everything’s fucked up everywhere. I never felt like the suburbs were this ideal place that I grew up in. Everything was fucked up, everybody’s fucked up all over the place. But really, the flipside of it is that under that there can be this real emotion and real hope. I don’t necessarily put the suburbs in movies for a capital “R” reason. It just sort of ends up feeling correct to me.
CC: One thing I felt really connected your last three films together is in confronting the barrier between people that prevents them from connecting with each other, which can take lots of different forms. Why do you find yourself returning to this problem?
ZC: Well, again, like so many of the things in the movies I make, they are the way they are because of the way that I am, you know? I’m not somebody who sits down with intellectual reasons for putting all this stuff into this thing. I tend to just come up with an idea that’s exciting to me, that resonates in me for some reason, that maybe I can’t even fully unpack at the time. But I would say that connecting with people meaningfully is something that I’ve sometimes struggled to do, and that is present in all of our lives.
I do think it’s one of those things that’s meant for other people to say, more than it is for me to say it. You know what I mean? And then I can sort of say, like, “Oh yeah, yeah, you’re right. You are right. That is a thing, that is a consistent thing in all three of those movies.”
CC: What has endeared your films to me is that — not to generalize too much — the American indie film scene, maybe even the micro-budget film scene, for a while has felt overly defined by a sense of ironic detachment, which is totally understandable given the state of the industry and the world. But the reason I think I feel so drawn to your films is there is a sort of unabashed earnestness about them, and a sincerity that cuts through. How do you go about achieving that?
ZC: While making White Reindeer, I always called it an experiment in sincerity. It has things in it that are very deliberate and are very conscious, like this very tearful scene in a bathroom where one of the characters is wearing a strap-on, right. There’s stuff in White Reindeer that’s very specifically meant to show how sincere we’re being by putting this ridiculous thing in this scene and refusing to be insincere. I remember having talks with Anna Margaret as we were starting that project from a performance standpoint, and I would say this movie is totally crazy, but it’s never insincere. I also try to impart to the actors that we are never acting like this is funny. Please take everything at face value. Let me stylize the movie.
I came to movies through cult cinema, through Tim Burton’s Ed Wood and the work of John Waters, and then through that I found myself watching the films of Douglas Sirk and Fassbinder. Sirk and Fassbender, specifically, are these filmmakers who deploy these very abrasive aesthetic choices, but in a truly Brechtian sense of saying, “Look at this! Look at these emotions!” The stylized elements are here to actually say, “Take this seriously. Take this earnestly.”
CC: You called White Reindeer an experiment in sincerity, and that’s what a lot of Sirk’s films feel like. I just finished writing a piece on Magnificent Obsession and ended up calling it an experiment in narrative mechanics, how we use narrative as one framework to make sense of our lives. And Magnificent Obsession is all about the many ways people try and make sense of their lives, with money, medicine, religion, fate, etc. So there was something about the conspiratorial element of The Becomers that I think is another layer to that. Conspiracy is just another framework. Is there something about conspiracies or the mindset that draws people to them that you’ve always been interested in?
ZC: I came up with the idea for this movie like six weeks after the Capitol had been stormed. And I also remember listening to podcasts where people would talk about “losing” a family member down this rabbit hole, more or less. And even though The Becomers was a kind of job for hire, not necessarily one of those stories that I just passionately had to tell, but all this stuff was around all of us at the time, and it was all you could think about. To me, the one thing I wanted to do with The Becomers, and I also would say this to the cast, was make a sincere attempt to capture what 2020 felt like, not even necessarily what happened in 2020, but the daily sense of anxiety and uncertainty. Who is this person, and who is that person, and where does danger lurk? Does it lurk here, or does it lurk out there? It’s the sort of thing I wanted to bottle up.
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