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.
