by Sasha Ravitch, Staff Writer

I was privileged to have an opportunity to sit down and interview writer, director, and editor Zach Clark about his new film: The Becomers. This multi-genre work constellates the nostalgic imagery of vintage Science Fiction, immersive sound design and music, a gifted ensemble cast, and the capacity to repulse and endear in equal measure. Influenced by Clark’s COVID-catalyzed watching of the original Star Trek and the Next Generation, and with an ending that pays tribute to Douglas Sirk’s storytelling mastery, The Becomers gives us an alien love story fueled by suburban discomfiture. It was a fascinating experience to learn more of the influences, inspirations, and experiences that begat such a special and touching film: a film for the aliens.

Sasha Ravitch (SR): The Becomers is one of the most unexpectedly uplifting speculative films that I've watched in years. I didn't go into it with expectations, but l left uniquely heartened. I'm curious if this was an original intention, or if that was something which revealed itself along the way?

Zach Clark (ZC): I am a huge fan of the work of Douglas Sirk, and there is this thing in his work: the Sirkian ending. It's like this ending that on one level feels very hopeful and uplifting but has a sort of dread or sense that if the movie was 15 minutes longer, it might not be such a happy ending. So in telling a love story, I wanted the love story to succeed. And also, in telling a story about aliens visiting this planet, I wanted the movie to feel aimed at other aliens. The movie is for the aliens, not for the narrative thrust. The voice of the movie is speaking to those aliens, and to other aliens like them. It's not speaking to human beings on planet earth.

SR: I love that point. It feels evident that it’s a film by others, for others. It strikes an audience who are seeking that compassion, that connection in the midst of their alienation. And I feel that the backdrop of Suburban Americana, of Illinois creates its own absurdism, its own surrealism by how pivotally contemporaneous and American it is. It creates a greater contrast for the strangeness, the otherness and the alienation of our culture, too.

ZC: Right. The movie has an ending that's wonderful for the aliens, but bad for humanity. To me that was sort of the intent: this idea that there is a path forward through all the chaos and uncertainty of modern life, but it might mean a sort of clean slate.

SR: Yeah, at what cost for the humans in the equation, right?

ZC: Yeah. I've said this before, but I've always viewed this movie as pro people, but anti-humanity.

SR: That's really interesting because one of the points that felt really prescient for me was how, prior to watching this film, I'd recently read Philip K. Dick's essay “Man, Android, and Machine”. He discusses how humans don't have the monopoly on “humanity” and that humanity is qualified by the awareness of an existential suffering, and the capacity to make choices and act against legislative or hierarchical governance. And I actually found this to be a potent continuity in the film. You mention Sirk being inspiring and influential for you. What else facilitated the inspiration for The Becomers?

ZC:  I mean, the biggest influence on this movie is the original Star Trek series. Like, hands down. I had never really watched it before COVID came along. And then my partner at the time and I watched all of the original series and Next Generation [...] and fell in love with it. It's a vision for the future, but also it's a kitsch vision of the future. There was a time during COVID where [I was] just like: I don't know, what do I do? What do I do with my life? Nothing's happening. I looked up all the rules to make a Star Trek fan film. I was like, is this the space I could operate in? All of that enthusiasm for that original Star Trek series ended up in The Becomers. It's most obvious, I think, in the way we approached the visual effects of the film.

SR: The aliens, their aesthetic, the various tools that they use, feel really nostalgic. The neon, large almond eyes, the color of the neon, itself. I really loved that. It felt like an homage to an origin, or this legacy they arose from, but really rooting it in something that is modern and familiar. I thought that was really successful.

ZC: Thanks!

SR: The sound design and soundtrack are also really strong in the film, and I appreciated the choices, both in the dissonant abrasive noise moments, as well as the melodic indie tracks. I am curious about the intention in designing how you wanted the film to sound, because it’s very distinct.

ZC: Fritz Myers is the composer, and he's done all my movies. We started talking before we even shot anything about what the movie would sound like. Fritz even designed all of the alien voices that you hear when they sort of call to each other. The noise music in the movie is from this band Mind Flayer, so anytime it's like super abrasive, it's Mind Flayer, who I've been a big fan of. [All my work] tends to use these disparate musical elements. There's usually something on the more abrasive side, and something on the more traditional side, that play against each other. 

The stuff that Fritz and I were talking about was a lot of early Devo and Throbbing Gristle, these sort of, more textural, rough-around-the-edges, analog sounding stuff. There were sequences early on that Fritz would send me cues for, and I would say, this scene feels too tense for the people in it. Like the score feels like it's on the side of the people, and we need it on the side of the aliens. There's a sequence in the middle of the movie where the two protagonists make love. I think the early cues there leaned into a bit more of a “isn't this crazy what you're seeing”,  but we landed on actually scoring it like a beautiful love scene. Which it is. And that’s really the musical side.

Max Phillips was our sound designer, and similarly, there was a lot of finding the sounds for the different things that the aliens do. Similar to the visual aesthetic, we pulled a lot from old Sci Fi sounds, beeps and boops, mixed with the analog approach to, to stuff. A sort of handmade feeling.

SR: Absolutely. I noticed that the love making scene could have been written, shot, et cetera, in a way that would construe it as a gross spectacle, and there were a few moments where it is! But it was genuinely tender. It was that sense of intimacy.

ZC: Certainly it's not not a gross spectacle. But at the same time, what I wanted to do with this movie and with its approach to these Science Fiction tropes, is to deploy them in different ways. So I think if you're going to see an alien movie with a sort of oozy body horror element to it, you're not expecting the zenith of that to be in a sweet, tender sex scene.

SR: Yeah, absolutely. The film is kind of labeled as mixed or multi-genre, and that feels really right. There’s Science Fiction, and there is Body Horror, but there’s also dry comedy, and romance, and all this absurdity. Was it deliberate to incorporate so many genres, or did some of them take you by surprise? 

ZC: I wrote the script very quickly. The first draft was written in three or four weeks, and we shot it very soon after that. I was just getting it out of me. About five years after I've made a movie, I can look at it and figure out what was happening, and where those ideas came from, and what they meant to me in my life at the time. This movie-by necessity of how quickly we had to make it–was ripped out of me. I don't approach these things like: it's going to be a mix of A and B and C and D and E. I just have the idea and write it, and I wrote a story. All my work plays with tone, mixes tone. It's not for [any particular reason], it just feels right to me. Life doesn't feel one-tone. 

SR: That multiplicity of all the different things which create an emotional or visual experience is really lovely. And it does feel organic. It doesn't ever feel at any point throughout the film like you are reaching, or trying to manipulate a feeling from the audience. Of course. I also found myself curious if Illinois, and Chicago, was an intentional choice for the setting of the film?

ZC:  Actually, the producers of this movie are Chicago-based, and they put up most of the money for my last movie, Little Sister. They reached out to me and asked for ideas for low-budget genre movies in Chicago, and so this was the idea that I pitched them. Which is why I had to write it so fast, and why we shot it so fast. Being set in Chicago was given to me as a requirement of the story, but I have spent time there before, and worked as an editor on two other films there. I knew the vibe. I grew up in the suburbs, made other movies set in the suburbs, so I did also take Chicago as an Anywhere, America, you know?

SR: Totally. I thought the suburban component also brought in more of that nostalgic Sci Fi. I thought that the choice to do an ensemble-based casting, with a lot of really strong, really relatable, really believable, cameo appearances from many different characters was wonderful as well. It evoked this confusion and chaos that the aliens are feeling as they're being thrust into all these little lives that already exist independently. That must have been super fun, too. I know you wrote it in a rush, but it must've been fun to write and then watch come to life with such really skilled actors.

ZC: Yeah, absolutely. We were very gifted with a really great cast who all got the assignment. I'm used to making these low-key, kitsch dramedies. So with the leap into more high-concept storytelling, on the first day of shooting, I wasn’t sure I would feel good about stuff. Like, which alien is in which body, can you track when they go from body to body? I really didn't know if any of that was going to work when I sat down and planned it out.

One thing that worked to our advantage, and this was sort of a happy accident of scheduling, had to do with each actor playing a central alien having their scenes shot chronologically. So the first scene was them playing their human selves, interacting with the previous actor playing the alien. The alien performance was sort of like the baton being passed to the human-soon-to-be-alien.

We had a day before we shot, where I got as many of the actors playing the alien together as possible, and we all just hung out and talked through some general theories behind the alien performances. I mostly told them that they weren't in a rush, as the alien, they're never in a rush to do anything. Take your time. Take your time. It's sort of a consistent alien directive: the pods are coming, everyone else is coming soon. You just have to wait it out until your time comes.

SR: I absolutely love that. Do you have any hopes about how people will reflect on this film after? Or any  personal dreams, theories, or ideas of what happens after the film ends?

ZC: In an early draft of the script, there was a scene where you just follow someone around, and you think it's the protagonist, and you realize it isn't, similar to Antonioni’s L’Eclisse. In this following-around,  you weren't entirely sure, but it’s implied, that more of them were aliens now. And it ended with seeing, maybe, the two protagonists having switched bodies again, but it leaves it open. Are those the main aliens? Are there more aliens now? But I don't usually have ideas of what happens after the script is done. I certainly think more aliens are coming. 

I don't necessarily come to a project with things I want to explore, or feelings I want to digest and put into something with a hope that people will get X out of it. With this project and with other projects, I've read reviews where people state “the aliens represent this”, or “isn't it interesting that the movie explored this thing?”. And not all the things the reviews mention are what the aliens mean to me, or what I was trying to explore. But in not having a single message I’m trying to beat people over the head with, it allows more of an open interpretation. A space for people to put themselves in, which is really what I want from any project.

SR: And I think you did that and executed it very well.  Zach, you've been very generous with your time today. I'm really excited to observe more of the response that people have toward The Becomers. In the meantime, anything coalescing on the horizon for you?

ZC: I'm writing a few scripts that are more in-genre. I'm very close to finishing a spooky castle script. I really love the old Roger Corman, Vincent Price movies. So I’m trying to make something in that vein, that is also like my work. And I'm writing a script with my producing partner of many years, Melody Sisk. That's a bit more in the weird, kitsch-dramedy zone. And I'm an editor by trade, so I've been chipping away at a few projects for other folks.

SR: This is wonderful news. Thank you so much. I really look forward to seeing some of those future works, too!

Read Sasha’s full review of The Becomers here and watch the flick, available for rent from various platforms here.