Ask every independent filmmaker you know to tell you how they got their latest project off the ground, and you’ll never hear the same story twice. The task of finding funding for passion projects often feels so sisyphean that there’s no “right” way to do it. It comes down to timing, hustle, and a decent amount of luck. Zach Clark was already a celebrated indie filmmaker in his own right for films like “White Reindeer” and “Little Sister.” But he’ll be the first to tell you that his latest work, the sci-fi romance “The Becomers” was the result of some pandemic-era serendipity.
“Let me take you back to a time in February 2021,” Clark said during a recent conversation with IndieWire. “I was sitting in my apartment doing truly nothing, and Joe Swanberg called me and asked if I had any ideas for $100,000 genre movies that we could shoot in 12 days in Chicago. They were trying to put together four to six of these things to shoot in 2021.”
“The Becomers” was born out of that simple challenge — even if it didn’t ultimately satisfy Swanberg’s exact parameters. While Clark says that he ended up utilizing a few more resources than his producer initially hoped, the film still embraced the low budget ethos that powered so much of our genre film pantheon. Clark’s past films were more closely associated with American Realism than sci-fi or horror, but he embraced the opportunity to immerse himself in the tradition of genre filmmaking. After spending much of the pandemic binge watching the original “Star Trek” series — which he describes as “a homoerotic, psychedelic ‘Twilight Zone’” — he came up with an idea for a love story between two shapeshifting aliens that owes as much to his own sense of pandemic alienation as films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
“They ended up not shooting any more of them after this movie, possibly because we spent over $100,000 and shot for more than 12 days,” Clark said with a laugh. “I was basically given that sort of box to try and put a movie into. This is the idea that I came up with. It was not two months after the Capitol had been stormed. It was not even 12 months into the COVID pandemic. I wanted to make a movie that felt like what that preceding year had felt like for me. And so, in its own weird way, ‘The Becomers’ is a very sincere attempt to capture what 2020 felt like, if not for everyone, certainly for me.”
How do you capture something as singular as the COVID-19 pandemic in a film that never explicitly mentions the disease? To start, you have everyone wear masks. Clark saw the incorporation of masks into his film as a natural extension of the world that he and his crew were living in on set — but in a film about two aliens who try to blend into our society while occupying various human bodies, giving them an excuse to conceal their faces turned into a convenient plot device.
“Everyone behind the camera was wearing a mask when we shot it, so it felt like lying a little bit to not depict that in front of the camera” Clark said. “The pandemic isn’t really talked about explicitly at all in the movie. We just sort of had people put masks on and also do the chin strap thing when it would be natural, when people would just do it in the normal world around us. That sort of became the ethos of when they would have it and why.”
While the love story, classic sci-fi references, and low budget production value are all impressive, it’s safe to say that many audience members walking out of “The Becomers” will be talking about one thing: the alien sex scene. During one surprisingly sincere sequence, its two nameless protagonists copulate with their unrecognizable alien genitalia while tenderly moaning “I want your orifices.” The slimy practical effects could be ripped straight from an early Cronenberg movie, but the romantic sincerity is closer to something you’d find in Clark’s non-genre work.
“In thinking about making a genre movie and making a science fiction movie, what I did want to attempt to pull off was to take these tropes and these boxes that you need to check and deploy them at the service of the emotional core of the movie,” he said. “In most movies, if you hear that there is a gooey, icky sequence with orifices in it, where people finger them and ooze comes out, you’d usually think, oh wow, that’s got to be a really horrific, disgusting thing. In this movie, it’s a beautiful love scene, because the two main characters are aliens who are partnered with each other and are trying to make it through this experience together.”
Clark says that he embraces the fact that many fans will remember the sex scene first and foremost, joking that every film of his has to have “that scene” that takes on a life of its own in audiences’ minds. If alien orifices are his window into bridging the gap between sci-fi audiences and his typical fanbase, so be it.
“I’ve always been drawn to the idea that within a movie, that there is this sort of set piece that is very representative of the movie, but also can become a sort of like ‘And then that happened, and then the movie took that turn,’” he said. “For this movie, it’s the sex scene.”
“The Becomers” is now playing in select theaters. It will be released on VOD on Tuesday, September 24.
