How Zach Clark Put His Spin on '50s B Sci-Fi Movies
With 'The Becomers,' Zach Clark changed up his process and channeled his core influences.
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by Graham Swon
For years, usually after an extended rant about how cinephiles should really be watching more Joe Sarno, people have told me, “You’d really get along with Zach Clark." Despite a decade of briefly crossing paths and rubbing elbows at a wide variety of (both reputable and disreputable) cinema events, somehow we had never really gotten to know one another. It wasn’t until a joint visit to Indie Memphis in 2023 that we truly connected and, over several days of thrift shopping and Elvis-related site seeing, were able to delve into our shared passions for 1960s sexploitation, cinéma fantastique, and George de Coulteray’s 1965 tome Sadism in the Movies. Clark’s cinema floats at the edges of both “American Independent” and “genre” filmmaking, never quite fitting into a simple box, and is continually surprising, hilarious and joyful.
Clark’s latest film, The Becomers, is a delirious, heartfelt sci-fi romance that traces two extraterrestrial lovers as they wander through a satirical vision of the American midwest, hopping through a succession of host-bodies as they first try to find one another, and then have to re-learn how to live in this new, hostile world. I caught up with Clark via zoom where we discussed low-budget productions, the legacy of z-grade genre cinema, and other sundry delights.
Graham Swon: I know that you made this movie with very little time and very little money. So tell me what the production was like.
Zach Clark: I've been describing this as kind of a “for hire” job, in the sense that I was asked by the producers if I had ideas that would fit into a certain box, and that box was a $100,000 budget and a 12 day shoot, all in Chicago, with all local Chicago actors, none of whom could be in SAG, plus an all Chicago crew except for a cinematographer. We didn't fully stick to that box — the budget more or less doubled, and by the time we shot pickups, we'd maybe shot for 19 or 20 days. The only other real guideline was that it had to be a genre film. I come to this through the exploitation films and cult films that made me fall in love with moviemaking in the first place. And every other movie I've made has sort of flirted with this stuff in one shape or form. So this was an opportunity to fully dive in and explore that sort of stuff.
When I saw it, especially knowing a little bit of how it was made, I was like, “Oh, Zach got to make an actual AIP movie, basically.” So I was really curious how that experience differed from your previous films. Did the production model actually resemble that process?
In a lot of ways, this production was the exact opposite of every other production I've ever done, and of the way you're told to do it. It’s truly the exact opposite of how Little Sister went, which is it took me two years to write the script, a year to finance and put money together for it, and then we shot it, and three months later it premiered at a festival. This movie, I wrote in a month. A month after that, we shot it. And then three years later, we are now premiering it to the world. A lot of the process has been sort of wrapping my head around how to fix some of the things we didn't get right the first time, adding this voiceover, and finding the shape of it. So it’s very raw in a way — it is very directly about what COVID felt like for me. I don’t know that I have all these big things to say about COVID. It was more just like, “This year was so crazy, I need to put it all in a movie somehow.”
Obviously it's a COVID movie, not just because they're wearing masks periodically, but because it just feels that way. I tend to be skeptical of COVID movies because I feel like they're trying to layer a certain gravitas onto the subject matter, because of the circumstances. But I felt like The Becomers really got the feeling of being isolated or separated from everything else. And especially, weirdly, in the sex scene. This ecstatic, joyful sex scene really stands out from the rest of the movie. It was a really COVID sex scene.
Yeah, the genre this movie is in is B science fiction. I wasn't even like, "I want to make a science fiction movie, period." I really did want to make a 1950s B sci-fi movie. We made it so quickly that I did not watch a lot to prepare for it. But the one thing I definitely remember watching was I Married a Monster from Outer Space, which is so bare in its construction and its coverage and the tools it deploys to execute this idea. That was a beacon. The camera mostly just looks at things. Sometimes it moves, sometimes it dollies. But it takes things kind of at face value in a way that those movies tend to. Largely because that's the cinematic language of the time they're from. Those movies are made largely by commercial directors and TV directors who sort of need a job for a week or something. But there's something striking about the starkness of those productions.
One of the things I always find really fascinating about those movies — the sci-fi stuff, the horror stuff, that whole realm — within the American independent film conversation is that I feel people talk about the history of independent cinema and they talk about Cassevetes, and that's actually a very slim part of the history of independent cinema. And I think those are films that were being made without money, outside the studio system, without censorship for the most part, and with very little oversight. I always feel like they're a very big part of the legacy of independent cinema that doesn't get spoken of and gets lumped in with the genre discussions.
In college, I ran a cult/exploitation film series because the school I went to had an extensive prints library. And it was also back in the day when you could just kind of email people through their websites and ask them questions and stuff. I was lucky enough to talk to Herschel Gordon Lewis, which I think I might've even done over AIM. I remember asking him if he thought that his movies were art. And he said, "Art is incidental when you're making an exploitation film." Which is a great answer because he didn't say no. He just said that's a byproduct of getting the thing done. And I think what's always been striking especially about this bottom tier of American independent science fiction horror filmmaking is that there is this power that can come from them by virtue of what they are lacking. The emptiness of them is almost saying something.
I think it's actually better to make films and think about films as a filmmaker and not reflect too much on what the critical establishment is going to say. When I was first getting into cinephilia when I was young, I never really thought of the idea of making movies. It seemed basically not doable when watching studio stuff. And then for me, the idea of filmmaking was something I got from seeing Ed Wood movies. The crudeness of them helped me understand how a movie is made in a way that a polished film could never communicate at that point. You could imagine yourself building this set. It was a really important portal for me in understanding what a film was. That's the thing I think people don't give those movies enough credit for. There's very little barrier between the act of making it and what the movie is.
Ed Wood also made me realize that I could make movies. Same thing. As a kid I knew that I loved Tim Burton movies, and I wanted to be a cartoonist. But seeing Ed Wood changed everything. For me, not only did it open up that movies didn't have to cost millions of dollars and only be done in Hollywood, but it also explained camp to me. And that you can appreciate something for reasons that are different from what its creator intended. Which certainly in my teenage years was very formative. And then you watch enough of it, and "bad movies" stop being bad. And they just become movies. What I always used to say about Ed Wood movies and these C-grade monster movies is that they ask the audience to complete the illusion. They're very inviting. What's on display in front of the camera isn't good enough by itself, so you have to meet them halfway.
Something I wanted to talk to you about is the special effects. It's not continuous, but there's quite a few. And I imagine you had to make some choices about how you're going to balance the aesthetic of how much this special effect is 'working' in a conventional sense. How did you approach doing the practical and post special effects?
On my last movie, Little Sister, there is one actor who is in special effects makeup the entire time. So there's one special effect you see a lot. And in this I was like, "Wouldn't it be fun if there were a lot of special effects you only see one or two times?” So you'll see aliens, in one shot here or one shot here. And you'll see these orifices in this scene, and it'll be teased throughout. I wanted the story to be told from the alien's point of view. And that sort of necessitates a natural rollout of information so you aren't ever explicitly being told any exposition about how they work. You sort of amalgamate what they look like and how their bodies operate over the course of the thing.
I had completely fallen in love with traditional Star Trek during COVID, and the way those effects look and feel. So I wanted the effects in this to basically feel like that. The eyes were never meant to feel spherical, they were always meant to feel a little drawn on top of the image. And the goal for the remaining practical effects was they don't need to look realistic but they should also never look bad. The one thing I loathe is Lost Skeleton of Cadavra syndrome — making something like, 'Isn't this stupid and bad?' It's so cynical. But I really was making a B science fiction movie. So I wanted the special effects to live within that tradition, so they look cool but we are asking the audience to come in and complete the illusion a little bit. And then the playful trick with this movie is a lot of where those effects would be deployed is inverted. So one of the first things you see in this movie is an alien, which is one of the last things you usually see in a traditional B science fiction movie. And the sex scene, which is the goopiest, most body-centric thing, is deployed here in the sweetest possible way, versus being a source of scariness.
It's very tender. My favorite line of the film is "I missed your orifices." I also love it when we have these narrative detours.
This movie has an intentional erosion of what you think it is. The whole movie is structured to seem like it's one kind of movie and then actually be another kind of movie and then do that again, until at the end you're left with the kind of movie that in theory it was the whole time.
One thing I love about B sci-fi stuff is the willingness to take a swing at stuff you know you can't execute. On paper a good producer would tell you, "No, we cannot do this scene." And they're like, "No, we gotta do it anyway because this is what the people want."
Indiewire just had this 2000s week, and in it there was this article recapping the mumblecore years, in which I came of age so to speak. And it got me thinking about how it's passé for movies to be cheap now. The cheap movie that wears its cheapness on its sleeve has not been in vogue for a minute. I can't really think of something that has caught the zeitgeist with that. It's almost like the difference between Trash Humpers and Aggro Dr1ft. Aggro Dr1ft is sort of this overproduced thing that, to me, lacks heart. Whereas, Trash Humpers is so deliberately poorly produced and is so full of heart and alive in this special way that couldn't be done with money.
That would be an interesting double feature. There's a similar impulse of really trying to push the image to some kind of breaking point. Having done this more true style AIP production, would you like to keep working in this model or do you want to go back to writing the script for two years?
I have gone back to the mode of writing a script for two years. I'm literally trying to finish scripts I started five years ago right now. A happy accident of this model is that we didn't have time to be like, "Wait wait wait, we're being way too ambitious with most of this stuff." Which led to us needing to find these scrappy ways to pull things off, and it necessitated coming back and fixing them. That helped sink the landing on this one. If I was given the same exact model on the next one I'd definitely do something different with it. I wouldn't want to immediately make another movie on this budget level with this exact timeline constraints and all that other stuff. But I'm close to completing my version of a Roger Corman - Edgar Allen Poe - Vincent Price movie right now. It has veered me into exploring this more — but hopefully with the opportunity of sitting with it longer. Which isn't to say one way was better, but this was hard.
I can never afford to work with sets, but I'll tell my cinematographer that I would prefer the location look like a set. And I was thinking about that while watching this, because there are a lot of real world locations that are meant to look like if you punched the wall it would be cardboard. Am I projecting?
You're projecting a little bit. Certainly that's just what a Motel 6 feels like to a certain degree. But with this kind of movie, in terms of production design and what's in front of the camera, we took away more than we put in. We got to a location and then everything that didn't make sense went, but we didn't replace too much of what we took away. And I think that leads to the sort of feeling you're describing. But it also feels appropriate. The suburban couple isn't meant to live in a house that belies their personality. They're supposed to be these ciphers of what suburban people are like and not really have things that they like.
Obviously when you're making a movie with very limited resources, you're kind of stuck with a certain amount of reality. So how did you grapple with the very unreal world you were creating in these everyday spaces?
I think a lot of it is you get presented with the space and you think about what's unique and exciting about it. And how can we use the space to our advantage? A big part of the reason to set it during COVID was that I can't control what the world looks like. But then a real gift to this movie is that when the first alien goes to a thrift store she walks through the baby section and finds this talking thing you put coins in. And there's a completely different scene that's cut from the movie that we shot in that store, and we were so gifted that the baby section and this talking fake humanoid automaton thing were in the same section. It sets the tone in this incredible way. And it evokes robots in 1950s movies. A lot of it comes down to being open.
Graham Swon is an American producer and director. He has worked with independent filmmakers such as Matías Piñeiro, Ted Fendt, Joanna Arnow, and Ricky D’Ambrose. He has written and directed the features, The World is Full of Secrets (2018) and An Evening Song (for three voices) (2023). In 2016, he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” In 2023 he won the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award for his production of The Cathedral, and in 2024 was nominated from the Independent Spirit Producers Award.
Listings
Tickets to Stand Clear of the Closing Door, a site-specific and immersive show that is tonally somewhere between A Midsummer's Night Dream and The Big Chill, are now on sale here. The show is directed by Shelby Gilberto and written by Gilberto and Mackenzie Jamieson.
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A feature film called Honeyjoon is casting for a couple of roles here.
Josh Palmer is looking for a vacation type-home with some character & surrounded by nature to both shoot and house a small production team in Fall 2024 for a micro-budget feature film. Preferably within 5 hours driving of NYC. Here are inspiration images, but open to all sorts of leads! Send leads to: luxmotustempus@gmail.com.
Josh Palmer is also casting two roles for that fall-shooting feature, with descriptions here.
Neighbors, a documentary series, is searching for unique ongoing neighbor/neighborhood disputes and interesting stories. Email HelloNeighborsTV@gmail.com.
The 48 Hour Film Project, in Montreal, is looking for teams to enter and make a film this September 20 -22. Winner goes to Filmapalooza in March 2025 and is eligible for a spot in a screening at the Canes Film Festival Short Film Corner. $99 CAD to register. Email jasen48hr@gmail.com or erin48hr@gmail.com with questions.
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enjoyed reading this on my break! thank you!!
Superb conversation!