5 Questions with Joseph Sackett
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I watched a lot of movies as a kid. There was a video store by my house that had a 2-for-1 Tuesday deal. I had favorites like “The Craft” and “Welcome To The Dollhouse” that I probably checked out a dozen times. I think I was 12 or so when I made my first short. It starred my little sister and was about a girl who is ritually sacrificed on a fictional island called Phantolia.
2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?
I had recently seen “Beau Travail” and I loved this idea of watching a group of people doing things together. I had this image in my head of a bunch of people sitting at a table learning how to eat. And I thought, ‘Why would a group of adults be learning how to eat?’ From there, I came to the idea that they were aliens in human host bodies. It was only after I wrote the first draft that I realized it was about queerness, and more specifically about my experience growing up as a young queer person.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?!
The biggest challenge was casting. I needed 10 actors who could convince me they were inhabited by aliens who had never operated a human body before. As part of the audition process, I asked everyone to pretend that they were being possessed by an alien and then show me what the first few minutes of that alien’s experience in a human body looked like. There were some pretty brilliant interpretations of that prompt. One guy couldn’t get off the floor because he couldn’t figure out how to coordinate his arms and legs. Another guy was “discovering his vocal cords” and just started screaming at the top of his lungs. I thought it was awesome, but it probably freaked out the other actors waiting outside for their turn.
I ended up feeling very lucky with the cast I got. In rehearsal, we developed what we called the Alien Scale. It ran from 0-10 with 0 being an infant-level ability to operate this human body and 10 being the ability to walk into any public place and pass as human. Having that collectively understood scale was really helpful for me while we were shooting. When there are 10 people in almost every frame it’s difficult to keep a close eye on every actor in every take. So it was a big help to have everyone on the same page about what it meant when I asked for a take at Alien Scale 5 and then a second take at Alien Scale 3.
The easiest part was probably locations. Save for the last four shots, the whole movie takes place in one big studio/training facility. So moving from one scene to the next was incredibly smooth. As soon as we finished a scene, my cinematographer, Mia, could just turn the camera around and we’d immediately go into blocking the next scene a couple of feet away. That said, having every scene take place on a bare stage created a challenge for my production designer, Yu-Hsuan. I don’t think there was a single minute during the week we were shooting when she wasn’t running some piece of furniture or a shopping cart or a lamp into or out of frame.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I just rewatched “Kramer vs. Kramer” and was totally blown away. It’s simple, funny, very well-acted, and unapologetically emotional. I watched it right after “Tootsie”. They make an interesting pairing since in both movies Dustin Hoffman plays a man taking on a societally feminized role (an actress, a mother).
5) What’s next for you?
I’m in post-production on my first feature, which is called “Homebody”. It’s a gender-queer body-transfer fantasy about a little boy who gets to live as a woman for a day when he sends his spirit into his babysitter’s body. I’ve also spent a lot of the quarantine developing a script that I hope will be my next feature. It inhabits a similar world to “Dominant Species” since it’s a queer sci-fi about an alien in a human host body. But the feature version has a lot more sex and violence and is more of a rom-com.
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http://josephsackett.com
@joseph_sackett