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When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters.
In the Protection Booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring. Got it off, lover.
I miss you so much. I can sense in my insides that you are alive and out there somewhere. You must be very scared.
What the people the people of this kind is jobs, handouts. I'm trying to get just a little further down the road.
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I know you have to do whatever it takes to survive, but I think there is another way, one that doesn't end human lives.
Are you okay?
Yeah?
I guess we're gonna have to start assimilating sooner rather than later.
What happened together, We escaped our dying plans.
For our circle.
We found each other before, and I know we'll find each other again.
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with Zach Clark and we're talking all about his latest film, The Becomers. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this interview. We've talked before at different festivals and things, because I've seen, gosh, almost all of your features, I think so far.
You've seen Modern Love. Yeah.
I even hung out with your star at a film festival here in Betton Harbor or something in Michigan or Waterfront film festivals. So, yeah, that was nice talking about the behind the scenes of Modern loven is automatic. Yeah, then you know, well, so tell me about the Becomers. How did this one come about for you?
So?
Joe Swanberg and Eddie Linker, who were executive producers on Little Sister, my last movie, reach out to me in February twenty twenty one and so that they were trying to put together a slate of micro budget genre movies to be shot in Chicago and asked if I had any ideas, And this is the idea that I came up with. So the script was written in about three or four weeks, and we shot the movie pretty much
right after that. It was roughly like a three month turnaround from when I started typing the screenplay to when we had wrapped principal photography.
Where did the idea for this come from?
It was February twenty twenty one, we were eleven months into the pandemic, not even a year, and January sixth had just happened and Cuomo had just resigned. I live in New York, and it felt like making a movie about COVID was the right thing to do. It's what literally everyone had been going through. So the movie itself is actually a pretty sincere attempt to capture what COVID felt like for me.
So many movies that were produced at this time were like small, We're going to keep two people in a room, keep them in their bubble type of thing. I liked that this is expansive. I like that you explore places and have a lot of different characters in here.
My sort of clever idea at the time was like, oh, it's still a movie basically about two characters. Those two characters are just played by five or six different people, and it's not one location, but each character is isolated, Each sort of version of the alien is isolated to one location. The first alien is in that hotel, and then the second alien is in the house, and the third alien is in the sort of mansion. So that
was how I brained initially conceived of it. There aren't that many scenes that has more than two people in the movie. There's that sort of big set piece of a lot of people in it in the middle, and then towards the end there are a few peripheral characters that are hanging around. But on a day to day basis, we still were a small contained group shooting scenes and
not a lot of people in them. And we had a crew of maybe ten to fifteen people on any given day, and we were all non union obviously because we could not have before on this budget level to do any of the actual union SAG protocols, but we masked up as often as possible, and everyone reported on their first day with the negative COVID tests.
Yeah, because this was right around the time that the vaccine was finally being released too.
Yeah, I think I got my first shot. I'm trying to remember if I was even vaccinated when I made this movie. I was absolutely vaccinated, But I do remember like the most stressful part of leading up to making this movie was getting on a plane to Chicago, because I was only in Chicago for less than a week before we started shooting. When it was if I get COVID on this plane, then that's that dere goes half our days.
Tell me a little bit about your crew. Who were some of your key players on this.
Darryl Pittman, who's shot all of my features, shot this one as well. And Alex Sadlo and Kevin Marshall, who've also worked with me and who've worked with Darryl. A Ton also came out to work on this. We were supposed to really only bring in you know, this was supposed to be almost all Chicago crew, almost all Chicago cats.
Was sort of part of the package. I was sold by Joe and Eddie, but we you know, I was allowed to bring in Darryl, and then Darryl was sort of we sort of talked into bringing a few other people on to work with Darryl. Everyone else was Chicago based. It's our production designer glam Hagg made this incredible movie called Holy Trinity that they wrote, directed story in that is just like really visually NYE popping, and they just
really got what I was going for. And then on the post end of the things, Fritz Myers, who has also written all the music for all My movies, did the score for this one as well, and then he also designed what the alien voices sound like in the movie as well.
Were you able to cast them remotely? Were you zooming with them?
Yeah, the cast is all Chicago based, and Molly Plunk, who plays Carol to the alien habits for the longest time in the movie, is in Little Sister, And that part was the only part in the entire scroup that I wrote with anyone in mind. Other folks like Mike Lopez and Frank Ross came through friend recommendations in Chicago, and then my friend Stephen Cohene, who was also a very talented filmmaker in his own right, teaches acting in Chicago and he sent me a bunch of his students.
So Isabelle, who plays the first alien, and Rusher, who is one of the sort of last incardations of the alien, both came from Stephen. But I would say half of this movie was cast on backstage. Dot Com put out a casting notice and yeah, it was all zoom auditions and tapes and in Yeah, a lot of people I met in person for the first time when they showed up once.
Do you think that's the way that it's going to be going forward? I know, tape auditions work at the thing for a little while do you think Zoom is gonna take that over?
I mean, tape auditions were certainly a thing when we were making A Little Sister, and that was in my twenty fifteen so getting a sort of first round of submissions on tape. It's been a while since I have sat in our room with other human beings doing auditions. I will say that in is like anything, you can totally have a conversation with Someboddy over Zoom, but it's different when you're in the room with them. We have
and we did pretty well. We only had to reshoot one scene in the movie because the actor recast off of Backstage dot Com was not up to snuff. But yeah, I don't know. Certainly. I think in even the way we're recording this right now, I think a lot of
the stuff is going remote. But yeah, I do think a little something has been lost in the audition process and not being able to be in the room with somebody, because someone's presence and physicality does matter, and it is much easier to suss that out and also just suss out a general sort of like how well I get
along with this person vibe? What were they like when they arrived, what were they like when they were waiting to come into the you know, like that stuff alls informs what it's like to work with someone in that capacity. But much like other things post COVID, I don't necessarily see that coming back super soon.
How many pairs of sunglasses do you think you went through for this production?
This movie had no money. I believe a pair of sunglasses on every single person in the movie is the pair of sunglasses.
That's pretty impressive that they didn't break or get lost.
Yeah.
I think one of the very last scenes we shot is the scene where they drop onto the which is like the first scene in the movie, but it's what we ended up doing at the very end. But yeah, I think it's I'm pretty sure maybe there was a second pair for backup. Maybe, but I don't necessarily remember their being was.
And then you said this was a pretty quick process as far as shooting goes. How was the post process and can you tell me a little bit about your editing?
The post process was very long. This is opposite of how production went on my last movie. Usually you go through this sort of lengthy process of writing a script and showing it to people and sitting with it working on it developed, and you find the money, and the people who give you the money they have thoughts and stuff about that, and you get to live in it and by the time you get around to it, you really feel like you've like you can hold it all
in your head. I had to read the scenes every morning before we shot them so that I could remember what I The sort of rush of going through production meant that there was just a lot more unpacking to do in the editing process. You know, it's a in some ways Chandre is straightforward from an editing standpoint, because you can't really like, I can't take a scene from later in this movie and move it to earlier. It
just does it. You can't rearrange stuff as freely, and so you're sort of locked into the timeline, into the narrative progression that you set out for yourself at the beginning of it. And so it all just comes about tone and making sure every moment is as potent as it can be. And I will say that we shot and then for about a year I was working on a cut of this movie. But it was very difficult because we had shot so quickly the first time that
we had screwed a bunch of things up. So at the end of that year process, I sort of got to a place where I was like, we need to do some pickup. Three shoots came back about a year later. The original shoot was fourteen days, and we came back about a year later and shot for six more days, and those six days were almost all reshoots of scenes we had already shot. We reshot about a third of the movie.
In those sixties, that sounds really difficult, especially just to regroup with that cast or any of the people that weren't involved. That sounds like it might have been a little nightmarish.
The logistics actually weren't that bad because everybody still lived in Chicago. It was the summer, so I think as soon as we knew that we needed to do it, we checked in with everybody and said, what's the ven diagram of everyone's availability. Okay, it looks like this week works, let's do it this week. And then it was also nice because again, we shot an entire ninety minute movie in fourteen days the first time through, so having six days to shoot to reshoot basically twenty thirty minutes of
stuff was felt like luxurious by comparison. Oh, we got to live in stuff a little bit more, and things work is rushed, and we got to take the time that we maybe didn't have for stuff the first time through. It made the movie a movie. Basically. I don't know what would have become of it were it not for those six days. It really did transform it. And then once we had that, we cut that together. This movie has voiceover in it, but the script that I wrote
did not. And I always knew. I knew when I wrote the script, and I knew even when we shot that first shoot that this was a movie bad. I probably wanted to have voiceover in it at some point, but voiceover wasn't even written until all of that stuff from the second shoot had been cut in and we could take a look at it. And then I figured, well, if I'm going to try to put voiceover in this movie, I might as well give it a shot. And so I just wrote some stuff, recorded it myself, and put
it in. And then that did a whole new thing to the movie. And so it became a process of n doing that. And then once all that was done, this movie has over one hundred v effect shots in it, and so then it became a process of wrangling all of that stuff and wrapping our heads around all of that stuff. So Little Fister we worked on for three years and wrote the script and tried to find money, and I had a round of trying to find money and that not really working, and then regrouping and saying,
here's a sort of tighter budget. Was trying to find money for that. Okay, now we found money. So Little Sister had a traditional We spent three years trying to get to make it, and then that post process was almost instantaneous. We shot in like October November of twenty fifteen and premiered in March of twenty sixteen. And this
was the opposite. It was like the writing and making and financing process was three months and then everything after that process was another two Yeah, it was another two years.
Wow, had you ever done a film with this many special effects?
No?
I mean Little Sister. They all have some sort of version of special effects in them, and all the other effects in the other movies are all practical, they're all in camera. The biggest one is Keith Poulsen and Little Sisters and Burn Victim makeup for the entire movie, and the artists who did that, Brian Spears and Pete Gerder also designed the adult alien looks for this movie, but that was the most involved thing on the previous thing.
But that Keith looked like that the entire time, and so he was stating with our special effects makeup artist in the same airbnb, and he would literally just cut arrive on set looking like that and then at the end because they would just do it all in their Airbnb and then they would take it all off back of the Airbnb. The couple weeks that Keith was there. That's just what he looked like to everybody, because that's how he showed up in the morning and that's how
he left in the evening. On the weekend, you'd see when you'd be like, oh, that's regular Keith. But so the practical effects in this were done while we were doing other things, and we would have to shoot some stuff with an actor, release them to get their makeup put on while we shot stuff with a different actor and then released that. It was real frantic, send this person over, bring this person out in a way that like in the end product means that we do have
a kind of a lot effects in this movie. But it was the result of some hectic sort of planning and scheduling during the shoots to get at all, to get at all to be ready for camera on time. And then I'd never done anything with post v effects on my own work before, I've done other stuff I've worked as an editor on stuff that post VFCS, never on my lind.
Just a ton of coordination for the VFX stuff.
We really just didn't even plan for any of it. We knew we were going to do all the work, but we didn't bring the VFCS person on until after we'd already shut and so there wasn't anything done on set to make their job any easier, unfortunately. But Josh Johnson, who did all those vfcs, did an amazing job. It was a real trooper to come on board this thing and a load his talent to us.
Do you have any sort of process when it comes to testing out your different cuts with people? Do you have that test audience that you sends up to or is it just all you?
No, So I'm my own editor, so if it was just me, I would go insane. Already go insane a little bit editing my own movie, and so way I get through it is I constantly show it to people. I do. I think we did one actual test screening in a room with a bunch of people, but I was regularly sending cuts off the people to get opinions during the process, just because you need to hear what
works and what doesn't. And then the other thing, too, is you get so close to it when you write and direct and live through the process, but edit that sometimes you need people to be like, no, that's good.
Oh yeah, I'm sure you can be your own worst critic.
Yeah, yeah, I actually think that's the skill you have to have if you're going to edit your own stuff. I think if you think everything you do is great, you probably shouldn't edit your own.
When did the film have its premiere.
Premier last year at the Fantasia Film Festival.
And what was the audience reaction for it?
They seemed to do it. I always say that the world premiere of a movie is when I celebrate watching it for the last time. So I'm just always so on edge just to make sure the dckey doesn't have any dropouts in it. That's all I can think about. Yeah, people seem to into it, and this is all my work is this to a certain degree, But I think this movie is definitely more in the camp. It's for the people that it's for and not for the people
that it's not for. But Fantasia has a very expansive view of genre and they have very adventurous, inviting curious audiences. So the response there was positive. Yeah, it was good.
Yeah, I was very surprised when I read, oh, a science fiction film from Zach Clark. I love that you go in all these different directions with your films.
Yeah. Well, when we were getting ready to make this, I have also always said that this is a science fiction movie in the way that White Reindeer is a Christmas movie, which is that it's all the stuff is there. If you made a list of things that you would expect to see in a science fiction movie, pretty much we check all those boxes on that list. They're just all deployed for different reasons and what the movie is interested in and the sort of cumulative effect it is
maybe different than a traditional science fiction movie. But you know, my ex and I during COVID watch all of Star Trek original series of all of Star Trek Next Generation, and that really was like the biggest influence on this movie. And why those two alien characters are sort of like you know, it's about these two people who have to who are stuck together against the chaos of the world, and what do they have to keep them together? This sort of weird science fiction language.
So what are you working on these days?
Oh, I'm writing, trying to write. I'm like an editor by trade. I've been editing stuff. I cut Calvin Lee Reader's new movie The a Frame that premiered at Tribeca this year, and I recently finished working on my friend Caroline Gollum's movie just called Revelations of Divine Love, which is micro budget movie set in the Middle Ages shot at a warehouse. Looks incredible. And yeah, I've been editing some stuff. I'm working on a documentary, which is something
I've never done before that's been fun. And working on a small sort of narrative project right now, and just writing. Trying to finish a couple of scripts that are genre adjacent in a similar way. So if anyone sees this movie and thinks that guy should make one more movie like this, I'll have a project or two ready in that vein.
Yeah, how many projects are you trying to get off the ground at the same time?
Up until Little Sister, I had a one to one finished screenplay to completed movie ratio. But since then, since Little Sister, I tried to make some larger budgeted movies and none of them quite stuck. So I have those scripts sitting around from those bigger features, and then now trying to like this is what I've learned in the time since, to try to diversify and have a few different projects at a few different budget levels. But it's also difficult to hold old, different storylines in your brain
at the same time. So I'm doing my best to try to have a few different things ready to go.
Is there a place for people to keep up with you and your work online?
I am recently on letterboxed, which is the only real social media that I have. I'm Zach underscore Clark there, that's not what I'm Zach.
Thank you so much for your time. Is always great talking with you. I was great to see new work from you, so thank you so much.
Yeah, of course, of course, of course, have a great day.
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