J Paul Johnson
With his most recent film The Becomers, writer-director Zach Clark weds Star Trek-style sci-fi with lo-fi physical comedy, shot and set in the start of the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s a film that mixes and matches genres in its tale of two body-snatching aliens arriving separately on planet Earth, hoping to reconnect with each other on what must be the strangest planet of all—and at the strangest time at all. The Becomers is a road movie, a buddy comedy, a sci-fi exploration film, and an all-too-on-the-nose depiction of Earthlings’ inexplicable response to a global pandemic.
Writer and director Zach Clark has been making independent films for more than a decade and is always fascinated with social outcasts, tortured souls, and fractured families, but in The Becomers, love blooms—and you’ll root for love to bloom—in surprising ways. Earth’s humans are impossibly flawed beings, and it’s the aliens who know and understand how to experience love, even when the odds are stacked against them. Starring Molly Plunk (Little Sister) and Mike Lopez (All Jacked Up and Full of Worms), and featuring the voice of Russell Mael, lead singer of pop-rock band Sparks, The Becomers is a savvy, strange slice of sci-fi comedy that will surely resonate with anyone who has been given pause to reconsider their humanity in the wake of the pandemic.
Clark recently spoke with Film Obsessive’s J Paul Johnson about the film’s inception and production. The transcript below the video has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: It’s a pleasure to get an opportunity to talk with you, Zach. Some of our audience will not have seen The Becomers yet. It’s been in Festivals. It’s moved its way through its theatrical release. Can I have you just talk a little bit in your own words about what this crazy film is?
Zach Clark: Yeah, The Becomers is about two body snatching aliens who are in love with each other, who make their way to planet Earth in the middle of global pandemic and try to find their way through modern America.
You know, it’s such an interesting film. It is a genre film, and it’s also very much a COVID era film or a pandemic era film. Is that really when you conceived of the story?
I wrote the movie, and we shot the movie in spring of 2021. So it was roughly a three-month turnaround from when I wrote the script to from when I started writing the script to when we had finished principal photography.
That’s early on, and that’s really right in the throes of it, as I recall, when a lot of places were in fairly strict lockdowns. When you were trying to imagine like a COVID era project, right, something you could shoot when there were a lot of restrictions, what led you to the sci-fi angle here of visitors from another planet, looking at our weird place?
So our producers had reached out to me, Joe Swanberg and Eddie Linker and asked me if I had ideas that would sort of fit into this box they were looking to make movies in. And that box was a $100,000 budget and then a 12 -ay shoot. We ended up spending more than that and shooting more days than that. But that was the original idea. That we could shoot completely in Chicago with non union cast and crew. So it needed to be a genre project, and I had just finished watching, almost all of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. So this sort of version of science fiction was on my brain. I was especially taken with the original series, and it’s sort of candy colored, you know, perverse but hopeful view of the future.
Although it’s inverted as well, right? In original Star Trek, it’s the Earthlings who are out exploring and encountering aliens who seem to them odd, but instruct them in ways, you know, so that the main characters kind of grow and learn. But The Becomers is kind of the inverse of that, right? Where it’s the aliens coming to Earth and trying to fathom and navigate what must be the strangest world I can imagine them encountering.
Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been drawn to outsiders and outside perspectives, and I love Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I love the book. I love multiple versions of that book as movies. But just, you know, part of the core concept of the movie was that we would follow these aliens. And that’s how we would sort of traverse the story and that each character would be played by multiple people. And, you know, the challenge to that is in a traditional body snatcher narrative. The tension sort of comes from who is an alien, you know, who is going to be taken over next? You know, who might be working for the other side. And that’s removed from this narrative. So instead, you know, the tension comes from, like, what trouble are the bodies they take over going to get them into. And that’s where, you know, a lot of the physical comedy comes from in the film.
A lot of the pleasure, a lot of the joy for me in watching it is, you know, enjoying your aliens, and I’m thinking Molly Plunk specifically in a really, really lovely role. But them trying to mimic or adopt the weird things that humans do.
Yeah, Molly is a professional circus performer and is just so in command of her physicality. So I knew the only part in the movie that was written for a specific actress was written for Molly. Molly is in my last film Little Sister.
Okay, let me ask you a little bit about directing physical comedy, and just, you know, what’s that like in your interactions with your cast at those moments? Is there some level of improvisation and experimentation in it, or do you and she both have something really concrete in mind in the way a gag is going to play out?
I mean, Molly is, again, because of her performance background, just sort of and because we’d worked together before. Kind of showed up on set understanding the assignment intuitively. And, you know, we also made this movie so fast that I have very little memory of how of what the conversations on set were like. I remember, you know, needing to shoot the next scene mostly and, like, needing to make our days and wondering where lunch was, you know, are my primary memories of making this movie.
But, you know, I remember one of the first things that we shot was that scene in the Home Depot parking lot, where Molly is putting basically, like, you know, like, a murder drum into the back of her car. And I just remember her saying, like, she was like, this is like my favorite thing. She was like, I love, like, figuring out how to, like, get this in and drop it and all that stuff. So, yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes, scenes work well because you have a great idea, and you storyboard it out, and you’ve got it all planned out, da da da, and you like, impart your vision perfectly to everybody involved. And then sometimes scenes work out because you’ve hired really talented people who just show up and do something amazing, and you’re like, Well, great. That was wonderful. And now we have to move on.
Yeah, that is fun. And that is a fun, fun scene, too. This was a time when you’re shooting with a lot of restrictions, is that right? And so, you know, an empty parking lot in Home Depot is one of those places where you might pick. And then it’s a shoot, like, without a lot of extras. And with probably a pretty bare bones cast and crew, I’m imagining, as well, right?
Yeah, I mean, there are zero. If you see extras in the movie, they were just people walking through shots! There are no paid extras in this movie. But one thing that was nice about shooting during COVID is that a lot of them are wearing masks. So, you know, we don’t have to chase anyone down. Because their face is going to be in a movie. But our COVID protocols are pretty simple. We weren’t SAG, so we didn’t have to do the sort of zoning thing. We had about a ten to 15 person crew given the day. You know, again, the cast is basically whoever you see in front of camera.
I think our biggest days is when we shot with that cult, which is six or seven people in those scenes in the cast. Everybody just reported to set with a negative COVID test on their first day, and everyone wore masks as often as they could certainly behind camera. With actors in makeup, it was harder. But we ate all our meals outside, and we didn’t have any COVID incidents.
You’ve got a crew and a cast of people who are kind of normal, right? You’re going about your business, you’re doing your work, you’re performing your job. And then the world that you’re depicting in your film, Zach Clark’s The Becomers, is one that is just riddled with cults and disinformation and secret societies and bizarre religion, and a governor who’s addled, and it’s, like, in the craziest place possible. How did humans get so weird? Was it just due to COVID, or have we always been so?
Yeah. I mean, the movie to me is really an effort to capture what that moment in time felt like, you know, when the producers, when Joe and Eddie reached out to me to ask if I had ideas, it was, you know, the capitol had been stormed a month before. The plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer was in the news. Cuomo had just resigned here in New York City. Andthat was that was what the news looked like.I remember listening to a podcast about, you know, people who had sort of lost family members down these Q-Anon rabbit holes.
And so in a way, it wasn’t even like, Let’s make the world seem crazy. The world was crazy, and the world, I think, is still crazy. And you know, to me, I thought what we needed more of were just, like, at a little more kindness and a little more understanding and a little more, you know, like, love and affection and caring for other people, which of course is how these aliens treat each other.
I think what I felt like at the end of COVID or certainly at the point in COVID when I wrote the movie is that, you know, the world might not be ending, per se, but but fundamentally and permanently changing. And given the state of things during COVID, maybe that wasn’t the worst thing.
And as awful as it was, and acknowledging that, in many ways, it’s not really completely over, there was a lot of great art that came out of it, as people had to rethink the ways that they were creating things, and for you, the very notion of this pandemic and humans’ often bizarre, irrational reactions to it became a motivation for what you were doing in your script. What’s your take on how it’s impacted the industry and the art it creates? Is there a way forward for us all who are invested in this art?
Well, I mean, you know, the industry has been hit with a lot of stuff the past two years, COVID and with the actor strike and with AI coming in and all that. I have a lot of friends who are still in a place where work is hard to come by. I also think that I’ve been hearing some sort of version of the industry is ending since I started. So, this industry, like other industries, and especially industries that are sort of governed by technology like filmmaking is, is in a constant state of flux. I think people who want to make these things will continue to find a way to make them. I mean, the scale at which this movie was created on and the scale at which my other films were done on is really they’re so small that they can be made for no money kind of any time. Does that make sense?
I think we’ll see sort of what things like AI and stuff do to studios and to Netflix, and, you know, all of this other stuff, YouTube, algorithms, et cetera. But I think, people who want to make small, meaningful work on manageable scales will always find a way to do that. Y
There’s never not been a form of independent cinema, right I mean. It’s always been around. There have always been people making films against the grain, and in their own way, like you’re doing, and like we at Film Obsessive want to support and promote and spread the word about. I just want to say, thanks for taking your time to speak with us. I hope everybody gets an opportunity to see the film soon. Is it continuing in theaters?
We are out of theaters and on VOD (including Prime Video, YouTube, and others) and Blu-ray (via Vinegar Syndrome).
You are! Again, The Becomers is a really excellent, a thought provoking film. And it’s a wacky, weird, funny film, as well. Thanks Zach Clark for writing and directing it, and thanks for taking the time to talk with us today at Film Obsessive.
Thank you so much, Paul.
