Cate Blanchett describes Alpha Gang, the new film premiering Friday at the Telluride Film Festival in which she stars and produces, as “alien Chekhovian” — and truthfully, there may be no more succinct way to describe the tonal stylings of David and Nathan Zellner. In this case, the term happens to apply literally, since Alpha Gang imagines the very curious, mild-mannered invasion of aliens posing as a biker gang in 1950s Eastern Europe. But the writing-directing pair, coming off of the ingeniously nonverbal Sasquatch Sunset, have made their name with absurdist, sincere, bizarrely poignant examinations of the human condition. They just have to stay weird — very weird — in the process.
“If you go back and look at all of their films, they’re not geo-locked and they’re not culturally time-coded in any sense,” Blanchett says. “It’s because they’re dealing with something really essential. There’s a strong heartbeat in their movies often, even despite how absurd and ridiculous they are. They point to how seriously we take ourselves.”
Blanchett came in to back the film with her producing partner Coco Francini (Dirty Films), buoying a project that had been in development, through many iterations, for about a decade. It’s the largest film that the Zellners have made, shooting at real, challenging historical locations in Bulgaria and Croatia, with a cast that could best be described as a grab-bag of talented stars from around the world, and across the spectrum of niches and styles.
“They were able to bring the sensibilities of two brothers making movies in their parents’ house to even this big scope,” Francini says. “We did our best to stay true to that vision and help them get there.”
Lily-Rose Depp with Nathan Zellner and David Zellner on the set of ‘Alpha Gang.’
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The Zellners had long been obsessed with the idea of honoring classic portraits of ‘50s life, from archives of biker culture to fizzy entertainment like Happy Days and Grease. David first wrote an Alpha Gang draft in 2018, after lengthy discussions with his brother — with whom he’d also written well-regarded 2010s movies Damsel and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter — that rather literally explored those interests through the lens of extraterrestrials. “We liked the idea of setting it in the ’50s and in Eastern Europe, but with everything from the point of view of the aliens,” David says. “Taking the form of these bikers, they represented the consummate outsider on this universal level with them. And we built it out from there.”
The movie finds this small group of newly arrived aliens — played by the likes of Léa Seydoux, Lily-Rose Depp, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Riley Keough, Doona Bae and Dave Bautista — working out the basics of human existence while proceeding with their vague mission of conquest. What is it to listen to music? What is this strange civil war going on just outside their lair’s walls? Is it possible one of them is falling in love? “I thought it would be funny if it’s an invasion movie all from their perspective, and they have really no idea how to accomplish that goal,” Nathan says.
Indeed, this is not the explosive thriller you might expect out of an alien-invasion plot. The action of Alpha Gang is relatively mundane, mining humor and pathos out of a random assortment of characters’ fresh exposure to the curious ways of humanity.
“For the characters themselves, this is a pretty high stakes situation — it’s very serious — and where the observation and the humor comes from is from the audience looking at it from the outside,” Nathan says. “We wanted these characters to feel grounded, even though with the setting and the scenario and the stuff that they’re going through, there’s a ridiculous aspect to it.” David adds, “We wanted to approach it with absolute sincerity, never with a wink — as absurd as the situation is, and as stylized as it is.”
Alpha Gang shot entirely at real locations. “We went to these 2,000-year-old Roman fortresses and medieval church ruins and brutalist monuments,” David says. “We discovered these locations online and picked them before we went there. None of them are easy to get to, which is why they haven’t really been filmed to death, and they’re a real pain in the ass to go shoot at — but it made it really cool because it just gives it this kind of epic mythic kind of quality on a bigger scale.”
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Alpha Gang was first announced as going into production in 2020 — with a completely different cast that included Jon Hamm, Steven Yeun, Andrea Riseborough and Nicholas Hoult. When scheduling issues led to certain folks dropping out, that damaged the entire calibration that the Zellners were going for — not just in terms of availability, but also the right, random mix of performances. “We wanted an international cast from arthouse and independent to blockbuster films — just, all across the board — and have this unique kind of combination,” David says. “It made the lead-up to making it very, very tough. We didn’t want to do it unless it was the right combination.”
This led to some holding out, sticking to their guns as to how they wanted to assemble Alpha Gang. Then, about two years ago, Blanchett met the brothers after being a fan of their work for a long time. “This idea came pouring out of them — it was like something they’d been keeping in their sock drawer, waiting for the right moment, not ever really thinking that they’d be able to make it,” Blanchett says. “As soon as I read it, they started sending me and Coco inspiration images, which they’d been compiling for 10 years or so.”
Building the ensemble was, for Blanchett and Francini, the most fun and complex aspect of developing the project — but with the former on board as both producer and star, it finally came together. “It was a real jigsaw puzzle, but everybody sort of jumped at it,” Blanchett says. The script is structured in such a way where everyone gets their moment. Blanchett was less familiar with Harrison’s past work, for instance, and was left most surprised by his endearing, heartrending approach: “There was something so incredible about Kelvin. He’s such a movie star.”
Harrison’s performance embodied the quality of the aliens that the Zellners held most closely: “There’s this kind of newness to them. They’re just born in a way. So much of it is stimulus in response: ‘What happens if I do this? Okay, now what do I do?’”
There is basic pleasure to be derived from seeing the grouping of, say, an action favorite in Bautista, an indie actress in Keough and an international star in Seydoux — who’s also hitting Telluride with provocative European dramas The Unknown and Gentle Monster. “If you see the Alpha Gang, you might be like, ‘How did all these people end up together?’” Francini says. This goes especially once Chris Pine crashes the party, in one of the film’s most memorably outrageous setpieces. “We just wanted to set up the rules for the film and then turn it on its head, where you just hopefully keep the audience on their toes,” David Zellner says. “It’s setting up these dominoes, and then as soon as he enters, it’s knocking them all down.”
Then Blanchett finally shows up in the final act, as a very thickly accented antagonist, again disrupting Alpha Gang’s chemistry. True to the spirit of this playful production, the two-time Oscar winner goes for it.
“I would’ve played any of the roles, but then the film happened when it needed to happen and it was a scheduling issue,” Blanchett says. “Yet when I stepped on set, I’d seen all of the footage. I realized how wide we could go. I understood what the boundaries were.”
And how might she expect viewers to react when she makes her grand, endearingly deranged entrance? Blanchett laughs, then says: “They’ll ask, ‘What the hell?’”
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