Speaker 1: Oh gee is bot It's show tied. People say good
Speaker 1: money to see this movie.
Speaker 2: When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas,
Speaker 2: hot popcorn, and no monsters.
Speaker 1: In the Protection Booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring. Got
Speaker 1: it off, lover.
Speaker 3: I miss you so much. I can sense in my
Speaker 3: insides that you are alive and out there somewhere. You
Speaker 3: must be very scared.
Speaker 1: What the people the people of this kind is jobs, handouts.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get just a little further down the road.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 3: I know you have to do whatever it takes to survive,
Speaker 3: but I think there is another way, one that doesn't
Speaker 3: end human lives.
Speaker 5: Are you okay?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 6: I guess we're gonna have to start assimilating sooner rather
Speaker 6: than later.
Speaker 7: What happened together, We escaped our dying plans.
Speaker 4: For our circle.
Speaker 3: We found each other before, and I know we'll find
Speaker 3: each other again.
Speaker 5: Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth.
Speaker 5: I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking
Speaker 5: with Zach Clark and we're talking all about his latest film,
Speaker 5: The Becomers. Thank you so much for listening, and I
Speaker 5: hope you enjoyed this interview. We've talked before at different
Speaker 5: festivals and things, because I've seen, gosh, almost all of
Speaker 5: your features, I think so far.
Speaker 1: You've seen Modern Love. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I even hung out with your star at a film
Speaker 5: festival here in Betton Harbor or something in Michigan or
Speaker 5: Waterfront film festivals. So, yeah, that was nice talking about
Speaker 5: the behind the scenes of Modern loven is automatic. Yeah,
Speaker 5: then you know, well, so tell me about the Becomers.
Speaker 5: How did this one come about for you?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 1: Joe Swanberg and Eddie Linker, who were executive producers on
Speaker 1: Little Sister, my last movie, reach out to me in
Speaker 1: February twenty twenty one and so that they were trying
Speaker 1: to put together a slate of micro budget genre movies
Speaker 1: to be shot in Chicago and asked if I had
Speaker 1: any ideas, And this is the idea that I came
Speaker 1: up with. So the script was written in about three
Speaker 1: or four weeks, and we shot the movie pretty much
Speaker 1: right after that. It was roughly like a three month
Speaker 1: turnaround from when I started typing the screenplay to when
Speaker 1: we had wrapped principal photography.
Speaker 5: Where did the idea for this come from?
Speaker 1: It was February twenty twenty one, we were eleven months
Speaker 1: into the pandemic, not even a year, and January sixth
Speaker 1: had just happened and Cuomo had just resigned. I live
Speaker 1: in New York, and it felt like making a movie
Speaker 1: about COVID was the right thing to do. It's what
Speaker 1: literally everyone had been going through. So the movie itself
Speaker 1: is actually a pretty sincere attempt to capture what COVID
Speaker 1: felt like for me.
Speaker 5: So many movies that were produced at this time were
Speaker 5: like small, We're going to keep two people in a room,
Speaker 5: keep them in their bubble type of thing. I liked
Speaker 5: that this is expansive. I like that you explore places
Speaker 5: and have a lot of different characters in here.
Speaker 1: My sort of clever idea at the time was like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's still a movie basically about two characters. Those two
Speaker 1: characters are just played by five or six different people,
Speaker 1: and it's not one location, but each character is isolated,
Speaker 1: Each sort of version of the alien is isolated to
Speaker 1: one location. The first alien is in that hotel, and
Speaker 1: then the second alien is in the house, and the
Speaker 1: third alien is in the sort of mansion. So that
Speaker 1: was how I brained initially conceived of it. There aren't
Speaker 1: that many scenes that has more than two people in
Speaker 1: the movie. There's that sort of big set piece of
Speaker 1: a lot of people in it in the middle, and
Speaker 1: then towards the end there are a few peripheral characters
Speaker 1: that are hanging around. But on a day to day basis,
Speaker 1: we still were a small contained group shooting scenes and
Speaker 1: not a lot of people in them. And we had
Speaker 1: a crew of maybe ten to fifteen people on any
Speaker 1: given day, and we were all non union obviously because
Speaker 1: we could not have before on this budget level to
Speaker 1: do any of the actual union SAG protocols, but we
Speaker 1: masked up as often as possible, and everyone reported on
Speaker 1: their first day with the negative COVID tests.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because this was right around the time that the
Speaker 5: vaccine was finally being released too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I got my first shot. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to remember if I was even vaccinated when I made
Speaker 1: this movie. I was absolutely vaccinated, But I do remember
Speaker 1: like the most stressful part of leading up to making
Speaker 1: this movie was getting on a plane to Chicago, because
Speaker 1: I was only in Chicago for less than a week
Speaker 1: before we started shooting. When it was if I get
Speaker 1: COVID on this plane, then that's that dere goes half
Speaker 1: our days.
Speaker 5: Tell me a little bit about your crew. Who were
Speaker 5: some of your key players on this.
Speaker 1: Darryl Pittman, who's shot all of my features, shot this
Speaker 1: one as well. And Alex Sadlo and Kevin Marshall, who've
Speaker 1: also worked with me and who've worked with Darryl. A
Speaker 1: Ton also came out to work on this. We were
Speaker 1: supposed to really only bring in you know, this was
Speaker 1: supposed to be almost all Chicago crew, almost all Chicago cats.
Speaker 1: Was sort of part of the package. I was sold
Speaker 1: by Joe and Eddie, but we you know, I was
Speaker 1: allowed to bring in Darryl, and then Darryl was sort
Speaker 1: of we sort of talked into bringing a few other
Speaker 1: people on to work with Darryl. Everyone else was Chicago based.
Speaker 1: It's our production designer glam Hagg made this incredible movie
Speaker 1: called Holy Trinity that they wrote, directed story in that
Speaker 1: is just like really visually NYE popping, and they just
Speaker 1: really got what I was going for. And then on
Speaker 1: the post end of the things, Fritz Myers, who has
Speaker 1: also written all the music for all My movies, did
Speaker 1: the score for this one as well, and then he
Speaker 1: also designed what the alien voices sound like in the
Speaker 1: movie as well.
Speaker 5: Were you able to cast them remotely? Were you zooming
Speaker 5: with them?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the cast is all Chicago based, and Molly Plunk,
Speaker 1: who plays Carol to the alien habits for the longest
Speaker 1: time in the movie, is in Little Sister, And that
Speaker 1: part was the only part in the entire scroup that
Speaker 1: I wrote with anyone in mind. Other folks like Mike
Speaker 1: Lopez and Frank Ross came through friend recommendations in Chicago,
Speaker 1: and then my friend Stephen Cohene, who was also a
Speaker 1: very talented filmmaker in his own right, teaches acting in
Speaker 1: Chicago and he sent me a bunch of his students.
Speaker 1: So Isabelle, who plays the first alien, and Rusher, who
Speaker 1: is one of the sort of last incardations of the alien,
Speaker 1: both came from Stephen. But I would say half of
Speaker 1: this movie was cast on backstage. Dot Com put out
Speaker 1: a casting notice and yeah, it was all zoom auditions
Speaker 1: and tapes and in Yeah, a lot of people I
Speaker 1: met in person for the first time when they showed
Speaker 1: up once.
Speaker 5: Do you think that's the way that it's going to
Speaker 5: be going forward? I know, tape auditions work at the
Speaker 5: thing for a little while do you think Zoom is
Speaker 5: gonna take that over?
Speaker 1: I mean, tape auditions were certainly a thing when we
Speaker 1: were making A Little Sister, and that was in my
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen so getting a sort of first round of
Speaker 1: submissions on tape. It's been a while since I have
Speaker 1: sat in our room with other human beings doing auditions.
Speaker 1: I will say that in is like anything, you can
Speaker 1: totally have a conversation with Someboddy over Zoom, but it's
Speaker 1: different when you're in the room with them. We have
Speaker 1: and we did pretty well. We only had to reshoot
Speaker 1: one scene in the movie because the actor recast off
Speaker 1: of Backstage dot Com was not up to snuff. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Certainly. I think in even the way
Speaker 1: we're recording this right now, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff is going remote. But yeah, I do think
Speaker 1: a little something has been lost in the audition process
Speaker 1: and not being able to be in the room with somebody,
Speaker 1: because someone's presence and physicality does matter, and it is
Speaker 1: much easier to suss that out and also just suss
Speaker 1: out a general sort of like how well I get
Speaker 1: along with this person vibe? What were they like when
Speaker 1: they arrived, what were they like when they were waiting
Speaker 1: to come into the you know, like that stuff alls
Speaker 1: informs what it's like to work with someone in that capacity.
Speaker 1: But much like other things post COVID, I don't necessarily
Speaker 1: see that coming back super soon.
Speaker 5: How many pairs of sunglasses do you think you went
Speaker 5: through for this production?
Speaker 1: This movie had no money. I believe a pair of
Speaker 1: sunglasses on every single person in the movie is the
Speaker 1: pair of sunglasses.
Speaker 5: That's pretty impressive that they didn't break or get lost.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think one of the very last scenes we shot
Speaker 1: is the scene where they drop onto the which is
Speaker 1: like the first scene in the movie, but it's what
Speaker 1: we ended up doing at the very end. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's I'm pretty sure maybe there was a
Speaker 1: second pair for backup. Maybe, but I don't necessarily remember
Speaker 1: their being was.
Speaker 5: And then you said this was a pretty quick process
Speaker 5: as far as shooting goes. How was the post process
Speaker 5: and can you tell me a little bit about your editing?
Speaker 1: The post process was very long. This is opposite of
Speaker 1: how production went on my last movie. Usually you go
Speaker 1: through this sort of lengthy process of writing a script
Speaker 1: and showing it to people and sitting with it working
Speaker 1: on it developed, and you find the money, and the
Speaker 1: people who give you the money they have thoughts and
Speaker 1: stuff about that, and you get to live in it
Speaker 1: and by the time you get around to it, you
Speaker 1: really feel like you've like you can hold it all
Speaker 1: in your head. I had to read the scenes every
Speaker 1: morning before we shot them so that I could remember
Speaker 1: what I The sort of rush of going through production
Speaker 1: meant that there was just a lot more unpacking to
Speaker 1: do in the editing process. You know, it's a in
Speaker 1: some ways Chandre is straightforward from an editing standpoint, because
Speaker 1: you can't really like, I can't take a scene from
Speaker 1: later in this movie and move it to earlier. It
Speaker 1: just does it. You can't rearrange stuff as freely, and
Speaker 1: so you're sort of locked into the timeline, into the
Speaker 1: narrative progression that you set out for yourself at the
Speaker 1: beginning of it. And so it all just comes about
Speaker 1: tone and making sure every moment is as potent as
Speaker 1: it can be. And I will say that we shot
Speaker 1: and then for about a year I was working on
Speaker 1: a cut of this movie. But it was very difficult
Speaker 1: because we had shot so quickly the first time that
Speaker 1: we had screwed a bunch of things up. So at
Speaker 1: the end of that year process, I sort of got
Speaker 1: to a place where I was like, we need to
Speaker 1: do some pickup. Three shoots came back about a year later.
Speaker 1: The original shoot was fourteen days, and we came back
Speaker 1: about a year later and shot for six more days,
Speaker 1: and those six days were almost all reshoots of scenes
Speaker 1: we had already shot. We reshot about a third of
Speaker 1: the movie.
Speaker 5: In those sixties, that sounds really difficult, especially just to
Speaker 5: regroup with that cast or any of the people that
Speaker 5: weren't involved. That sounds like it might have been a
Speaker 5: little nightmarish.
Speaker 1: The logistics actually weren't that bad because everybody still lived
Speaker 1: in Chicago. It was the summer, so I think as
Speaker 1: soon as we knew that we needed to do it,
Speaker 1: we checked in with everybody and said, what's the ven
Speaker 1: diagram of everyone's availability. Okay, it looks like this week works,
Speaker 1: let's do it this week. And then it was also
Speaker 1: nice because again, we shot an entire ninety minute movie
Speaker 1: in fourteen days the first time through, so having six
Speaker 1: days to shoot to reshoot basically twenty thirty minutes of
Speaker 1: stuff was felt like luxurious by comparison. Oh, we got
Speaker 1: to live in stuff a little bit more, and things
Speaker 1: work is rushed, and we got to take the time
Speaker 1: that we maybe didn't have for stuff the first time through.
Speaker 1: It made the movie a movie. Basically. I don't know
Speaker 1: what would have become of it were it not for
Speaker 1: those six days. It really did transform it. And then
Speaker 1: once we had that, we cut that together. This movie
Speaker 1: has voiceover in it, but the script that I wrote
Speaker 1: did not. And I always knew. I knew when I
Speaker 1: wrote the script, and I knew even when we shot
Speaker 1: that first shoot that this was a movie bad. I
Speaker 1: probably wanted to have voiceover in it at some point,
Speaker 1: but voiceover wasn't even written until all of that stuff
Speaker 1: from the second shoot had been cut in and we
Speaker 1: could take a look at it. And then I figured, well,
Speaker 1: if I'm going to try to put voiceover in this movie,
Speaker 1: I might as well give it a shot. And so
Speaker 1: I just wrote some stuff, recorded it myself, and put
Speaker 1: it in. And then that did a whole new thing
Speaker 1: to the movie. And so it became a process of
Speaker 1: n doing that. And then once all that was done,
Speaker 1: this movie has over one hundred v effect shots in it,
Speaker 1: and so then it became a process of wrangling all
Speaker 1: of that stuff and wrapping our heads around all of
Speaker 1: that stuff. So Little Fister we worked on for three
Speaker 1: years and wrote the script and tried to find money,
Speaker 1: and I had a round of trying to find money
Speaker 1: and that not really working, and then regrouping and saying,
Speaker 1: here's a sort of tighter budget. Was trying to find
Speaker 1: money for that. Okay, now we found money. So Little
Speaker 1: Sister had a traditional We spent three years trying to
Speaker 1: get to make it, and then that post process was
Speaker 1: almost instantaneous. We shot in like October November of twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen and premiered in March of twenty sixteen. And this
Speaker 1: was the opposite. It was like the writing and making
Speaker 1: and financing process was three months and then everything after
Speaker 1: that process was another two Yeah, it was another two years.
Speaker 5: Wow, had you ever done a film with this many
Speaker 5: special effects?
Speaker 8: No?
Speaker 1: I mean Little Sister. They all have some sort of
Speaker 1: version of special effects in them, and all the other
Speaker 1: effects in the other movies are all practical, they're all
Speaker 1: in camera. The biggest one is Keith Poulsen and Little
Speaker 1: Sisters and Burn Victim makeup for the entire movie, and
Speaker 1: the artists who did that, Brian Spears and Pete Gerder
Speaker 1: also designed the adult alien looks for this movie, but
Speaker 1: that was the most involved thing on the previous thing.
Speaker 1: But that Keith looked like that the entire time, and
Speaker 1: so he was stating with our special effects makeup artist
Speaker 1: in the same airbnb, and he would literally just cut
Speaker 1: arrive on set looking like that and then at the
Speaker 1: end because they would just do it all in their
Speaker 1: Airbnb and then they would take it all off back
Speaker 1: of the Airbnb. The couple weeks that Keith was there.
Speaker 1: That's just what he looked like to everybody, because that's
Speaker 1: how he showed up in the morning and that's how
Speaker 1: he left in the evening. On the weekend, you'd see
Speaker 1: when you'd be like, oh, that's regular Keith. But so
Speaker 1: the practical effects in this were done while we were
Speaker 1: doing other things, and we would have to shoot some
Speaker 1: stuff with an actor, release them to get their makeup
Speaker 1: put on while we shot stuff with a different actor
Speaker 1: and then released that. It was real frantic, send this
Speaker 1: person over, bring this person out in a way that
Speaker 1: like in the end product means that we do have
Speaker 1: a kind of a lot effects in this movie. But
Speaker 1: it was the result of some hectic sort of planning
Speaker 1: and scheduling during the shoots to get at all, to
Speaker 1: get at all to be ready for camera on time.
Speaker 1: And then I'd never done anything with post v effects
Speaker 1: on my own work before, I've done other stuff I've
Speaker 1: worked as an editor on stuff that post VFCS, never
Speaker 1: on my lind.
Speaker 5: Just a ton of coordination for the VFX stuff.
Speaker 1: We really just didn't even plan for any of it.
Speaker 1: We knew we were going to do all the work,
Speaker 1: but we didn't bring the VFCS person on until after
Speaker 1: we'd already shut and so there wasn't anything done on
Speaker 1: set to make their job any easier, unfortunately. But Josh Johnson,
Speaker 1: who did all those vfcs, did an amazing job. It
Speaker 1: was a real trooper to come on board this thing
Speaker 1: and a load his talent to us.
Speaker 5: Do you have any sort of process when it comes
Speaker 5: to testing out your different cuts with people? Do you
Speaker 5: have that test audience that you sends up to or
Speaker 5: is it just all you?
Speaker 1: No, So I'm my own editor, so if it was
Speaker 1: just me, I would go insane. Already go insane a
Speaker 1: little bit editing my own movie, and so way I
Speaker 1: get through it is I constantly show it to people.
Speaker 1: I do. I think we did one actual test screening
Speaker 1: in a room with a bunch of people, but I
Speaker 1: was regularly sending cuts off the people to get opinions
Speaker 1: during the process, just because you need to hear what
Speaker 1: works and what doesn't. And then the other thing, too,
Speaker 1: is you get so close to it when you write
Speaker 1: and direct and live through the process, but edit that
Speaker 1: sometimes you need people to be like, no, that's good.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I'm sure you can be your own worst critic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I actually think that's the skill you have
Speaker 1: to have if you're going to edit your own stuff.
Speaker 1: I think if you think everything you do is great,
Speaker 1: you probably shouldn't edit your own.
Speaker 5: When did the film have its premiere.
Speaker 1: Premier last year at the Fantasia Film Festival.
Speaker 5: And what was the audience reaction for it?
Speaker 1: They seemed to do it. I always say that the
Speaker 1: world premiere of a movie is when I celebrate watching
Speaker 1: it for the last time. So I'm just always so
Speaker 1: on edge just to make sure the dckey doesn't have
Speaker 1: any dropouts in it. That's all I can think about. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people seem to into it, and this is all my
Speaker 1: work is this to a certain degree, But I think
Speaker 1: this movie is definitely more in the camp. It's for
Speaker 1: the people that it's for and not for the people
Speaker 1: that it's not for. But Fantasia has a very expansive
Speaker 1: view of genre and they have very adventurous, inviting curious audiences.
Speaker 1: So the response there was positive. Yeah, it was good.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was very surprised when I read, oh, a
Speaker 5: science fiction film from Zach Clark. I love that you
Speaker 5: go in all these different directions with your films.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, when we were getting ready to make this,
Speaker 1: I have also always said that this is a science
Speaker 1: fiction movie in the way that White Reindeer is a
Speaker 1: Christmas movie, which is that it's all the stuff is there.
Speaker 1: If you made a list of things that you would
Speaker 1: expect to see in a science fiction movie, pretty much
Speaker 1: we check all those boxes on that list. They're just
Speaker 1: all deployed for different reasons and what the movie is
Speaker 1: interested in and the sort of cumulative effect it is
Speaker 1: maybe different than a traditional science fiction movie. But you know,
Speaker 1: my ex and I during COVID watch all of Star
Speaker 1: Trek original series of all of Star Trek Next Generation,
Speaker 1: and that really was like the biggest influence on this movie.
Speaker 1: And why those two alien characters are sort of like
Speaker 1: you know, it's about these two people who have to
Speaker 1: who are stuck together against the chaos of the world,
Speaker 1: and what do they have to keep them together? This
Speaker 1: sort of weird science fiction language.
Speaker 5: So what are you working on these days?
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm writing, trying to write. I'm like an editor
Speaker 1: by trade. I've been editing stuff. I cut Calvin Lee
Speaker 1: Reader's new movie The a Frame that premiered at Tribeca
Speaker 1: this year, and I recently finished working on my friend
Speaker 1: Caroline Gollum's movie just called Revelations of Divine Love, which
Speaker 1: is micro budget movie set in the Middle Ages shot
Speaker 1: at a warehouse. Looks incredible. And yeah, I've been editing
Speaker 1: some stuff. I'm working on a documentary, which is something
Speaker 1: I've never done before that's been fun. And working on
Speaker 1: a small sort of narrative project right now, and just writing.
Speaker 1: Trying to finish a couple of scripts that are genre
Speaker 1: adjacent in a similar way. So if anyone sees this
Speaker 1: movie and thinks that guy should make one more movie
Speaker 1: like this, I'll have a project or two ready in
Speaker 1: that vein.
Speaker 5: Yeah, how many projects are you trying to get off
Speaker 5: the ground at the same time?
Speaker 1: Up until Little Sister, I had a one to one
Speaker 1: finished screenplay to completed movie ratio. But since then, since
Speaker 1: Little Sister, I tried to make some larger budgeted movies
Speaker 1: and none of them quite stuck. So I have those
Speaker 1: scripts sitting around from those bigger features, and then now
Speaker 1: trying to like this is what I've learned in the
Speaker 1: time since, to try to diversify and have a few
Speaker 1: different projects at a few different budget levels. But it's
Speaker 1: also difficult to hold old, different storylines in your brain
Speaker 1: at the same time. So I'm doing my best to
Speaker 1: try to have a few different things ready to go.
Speaker 5: Is there a place for people to keep up with
Speaker 5: you and your work online?
Speaker 1: I am recently on letterboxed, which is the only real
Speaker 1: social media that I have. I'm Zach underscore Clark there,
Speaker 1: that's not what I'm Zach.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for your time. Is always great
Speaker 5: talking with you. I was great to see new work
Speaker 5: from you, so thank you so much.
Speaker 6: Yeah, of course, of course, of course, have a great day.
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