The body-snatching alien partners of The Becomers are in quite the galaxy-sized predicament. Fleeing their planet, they head to Earth and embody several different humans while on their quest to find each other and rekindle their love in perhaps the most bizarre place of all: America.

Writer and director Zach Clark leans heavily into his love for kitschy, 60s science fiction, but the star-crossed lovers in this wacky, low-budget tale contend with a different kind of monster: modern-day society. Clark sets a darkly humorous path for the aliens amidst rising societal tensions, all while reminding us that love can traverse all obstacles.

With The Becomers now available on VOD, Clark talks about his adoration of Star Trek, how the COVID era affected the film, and the story of how Russell Mael of Sparks became the narrator. 

Culture Flux: I first of all want to talk about writing. You wrote this really quickly in less than a month, right? So did coming up with those different scenarios for those characters- because they were so unique in that film- did they come really easily to you, having to come up with all of those?

Zach Clark: Yeah, well, it’s one of those things where when you write something that fast, it’s just whatever comes out of your head. There’s not a lot of like, sitting and thinking through, “oh, what would be for the next best thing for…?” You’re like, “I have to hit five or six pages a day,” you know?

So, a lot of this movie is just what was happening kind of around the time that it was being written. It was not long after January 6, so the cult element is very sort of QAnon-inspired. The governor is very Cuomo and Gretchen Whitmer-inspired. Yeah, in a lot of ways it is just sort of a mirror of what 2020 was like for me. 

When you are looking at current events going on in the world, especially during that time during COVID, are you purposefully keeping your ear to what’s happening in the world for the purposes of writing, or is it just so happening that you had it in your head?

No, it just happened that I had it in my head. I wasn’t sitting in 2020 thinking like, “oh, this would be a good idea for a movie…” When the producers of this movie came to me and asked me if I had ideas, I was sort of like, “oh, what do I think about all of the time?” The crazy news, the pandemic…so, it was more like, all of a sudden, the events of and the emotions that I went through in that previous year now had a place to go, if that makes sense. They had a home to live in that homes the movie.

And there isn’t one particular lead character in this film since they’re obviously changing bodies, and we do see the aliens become more humanlike throughout the film. Can you talk about how you created that progression with the different actors throughout the film?

Yeah, I got everyone together- as many people that played an alien as could come out- for like, half a day before we started shooting. And we just sort of generally talked through performance stuff. 

We didn’t run scenes, we didn’t do acting exercises or anything. I mostly just told them they weren’t in a rush, which was my overarching direction to all of the alien actors- to take their time. 

And a lot of the way they speak is written into the script, but it was also a happy accident of scheduling that each actor who plays an alien, their first scene would be with them playing a human interacting with the actor who plays the alien before them, so there’s this sort of handing off of the baton of that performance in a way. So each actor could see how the previous actor was playing the alien and then take that in and do with it what they want. 

And even though, you know, they are these aliens from a different planet, there’s a very human element to the story. They start developing more human emotions throughout the way. So why did you want to discuss society and current events through that sci-fi lens?

Part of the assignment was, when the producers contacted me, was that this had to be a genre movie. So I during COVID had just watched all of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I had never seen before. 

In a similar way that this movie became a place where all of the sort of like, fears and anxieties and feelings of 2020 would find a home in, it also became a way for me to sort of process my Star Trek obsession I had developed over the previous couple of years. I really really fell in love with it, especially the original series. I hadn’t really seen any of this before COVID. 

Original Star Trek is sort of a bold, Technicolor palette that is a somewhat perverse, somewhat kinky approach to science fiction and relationships, and it’s sort of hopeful vision of the future all were really inspiring to me for tone and this version of science fiction. 

It’s interesting how you have a series that was made, I guess, 50 or 60 years ago at this point still relevant. 

Sure, I mostly watch old things anyway (laughs), especially during COVID. It became like a really safe space to escape into to watch an hour long show with these bright colors set in outer space. It sort of says humanity will figure things out, you know? It was like, a really comforting thing during that time. 

There are also kind of elements of The Twilight Zone I feel like when I watched this movie. Did you have any kind of ideas from that show as well?

Nothing in specific [was] referenced in this movie, but I also love The Twilight Zone and also, maybe like a decade ago, watched every single episode of The Twilight Zone in a row. I’m doing the same thing with The Outer Limits right now. 

That sort of like, hour-long science fiction storytelling from that era is very influential in general. So, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits all feel like they’re on the same wavelength. 

They’re all pre-Star Wars, so Star Wars comes along and science fiction suddenly has to have like, space fights basically. All of that stuff from the 60s, they feel like reading a short story, like a science fiction short story. 

That would make since that you were more influenced by sci-fi television, because it almost seems episodic the way the movie plays out and the plot points, so was that intentional that you did it like that?

Well, it’s episodic in the sense that I wasn’t thinking that this will make it more like a TV show. The body-snatching element became a sort of way to explore different things about the pandemic. It’s like, “I want to put all this stuff in a movie, how do I get it all into a movie? Oh, if the alien can traverse multiple bodies, it’ll sort of start here and end up here.” And it becomes a way to sort of navigate those sort of things that I want to put in the movie. 

Was it difficult to balance the humor, the romance, and then those tense moments that were further in the film?

Yeah, I mean, that stuff usually gets figured out in the edit. So, on set, you write it, you say, “this is a bunch of stuff,” you direct it. You sort of, on this movie especially because we were going so fast, you rely mostly on just like, what feels right in the moment. And then when you get in to editing the movie together, is when you can sort of adjust one way or another. It always is a bit of a tightrope walk. 

I do like playing around with and mixing tones, but it also in this movie, again, the sort of nature of the aliens moving from body to body also allows a sort of natural tonal shift as well, like each body, each section, each location, could sort of have its own tone, and style, and vibe that evolves as the movie moves along. 

Did you know from the beginning that you wanted to include narration, because you don’t really see a lot of that anymore in film?

Yeah, so from the beginning I knew the movie could have narration in it. The script that I wrote, that we shot originally, did not have any narration in it, but I was intentionally sort of shooting some longer takes with the idea that maybe narration could go here later. 

We just hit a point in the edit where I either needed to see if the movie could use narration or not, and so I just wrote some stuff, recorded it myself on my phone, and that’s how we sort of workshopped the voiceover in the movie. I would just sort of rewrite stuff, record it on my phone, and then when we had it all, figure it out in a good spot, then we found the narrator for the movie

And how did you find Russell from Sparks to be involved? That was such an unexpected part of it.

A friend of mine during COVID was running like, a sort of secret Zoom movie club, and he was able to get celebrities to come in and do Q&As, and he got Ron and Russell Mael from Sparks to come in. I’ve been a huge of theirs since high school, and they were sent a link to my last movie Little Sister, and watched it and liked it. 

So we all got on Zoom in like, the summer of 2020 for like an hour and just said hi and hung out. So I had met him then, so when it sort of came time to find the narrator for this movie… when you’re making a movie on this scale, you usually rely on like, “who do I know?” or who might be cool that I sort of have access to. I thought Russell would be an interesting choice, and I sent him a link and he said yes. It was pretty easy after that. 

What do you think that the narration adds to the film that you didn’t have before?

It really locks it in as a love story. It locks it in as a story of this relationship. One thing that’s interesting: so a lot of that narration is sort of based on the last relationship that I was in. A lot of people are like, “oh, it’s interesting that you made the aliens’ home life sort of plain.” It’s not super crazy. There’s sort of sci-fi words in there. 

I think the narration gives the sense that these aliens aren’t too different from us in a way, you know? The life they come from and the reasons why they left it aren’t dissimilar from the space we found ourselves in during COVID.

That’s really interesting. As far as the music, Fritz Myers did a really good job of composing for both subtle and chaotic moments in the film. Since you’ve worked with him several times now, is there a particular process that you have when working with him, or does it feel like it’s brand new each time?

So for the last couple of movies, Fritz has read the script and when written some music before we even shoot anything, so he did that this time. There are some cues in the movie that are like, more or less the same as to what he originally gave us. Then the rest of it, we sort of feel out as we go. 

Each movie is sort of… there’s usually a different way into the movie. Sometimes it’s like, “oh, we can figure out this scene in the middle and then that’ll sort of inform everything else.” For this movie, we wrote it start to finish. So we would work on the first cue, when that felt good, we would work on the next cue, and when it felt good we would work on the next cue, which again makes sense in the grand scheme of that. 

The alien is changing and evolving, and so our path through the score was also changing and evolving as we were working on it. But yeah, we found in this movie way more so than the other movies that we needed to write to picture. 

There’s a lot more stuff musically that sort of like, needed to hit on certain cuts, and the aliens themselves will sometimes not give a lot in terms of information as to how they’re feeling or what they’re thinking. The score also became a way to sort of inform that and help the audience identify with them.  

Also, I love the visual effects in this film and it was very practical. Did you know from the beginning that you wanted to have a more practical and not heavily use CGI? I mean, obviously for the eyes you couldn’t really do that practically, but overall there’s a lot of practical effects. You knew that was going to be your approach, I assume?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, and that also really comes from the Star Trek influence. I really wanted the effects to feel like the effects from things like Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits felt, and those are all practical, all in camera, with some optical effects too. 

So the eyes were always meant to feel like an old optical effect. They don’t look spherical, they look sort of painted on and that was always intentional. But yeah, even the pink device thing that they use to drain people’s blood and stuff was all intended to look like it was… felt like it was of that era of Star Trek, The Outer Limits, and The Twilight Zone.