AFI Dallas: Beings Q&A Focuses on Alien Encounters

Kim Voynar and I watched one of the AFI Dallas midnight movies together, Beings, and it was one of the more unusual moviegoing experiences I've had. I don't just mean that the film itself was strange, either -- read Kim's review to find out about the movie. First of all, it was the only screening I've ever attended where the theater door was guarded by some serious men in black with sunglasses, looking very CIA-esque (or MiB as the case may be). Second of all, the filmmakers decided to bring in some help for the Q&A session. Normally, post-movie Q&As include the filmmaker and maybe some of the cast and crew talking about the filmmaking process, and maybe that hilarious practical joke that such-and-such actress played on everyone. This time, however, the Q&A addressed the movie's theme of alien abduction, and included input not only from writer/director Fredrick Wolcott but from Alien Agenda author Jim Marrs and the Texas director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), Ken Cherry.

Before diving into the subject of alien abduction, Wolcott talked a little about the filmmaking process for Beings. He intended from the start to make a science-fiction film of some kind, he wasn't sure of what his focus would be. "I watched every sci-fi movie I could, and then sat down and wondered, what can I do that would work with a low budget? Maybe an alien movie ... but shot from the point of view of the aliens."

Wolcott interviewed a lot of self-professed alien abductees as research for Beings. Most of them told him they felt discombobulated and confused during their alien experiences, and he wanted to elicit as much of that response as possible in the film so that audience members would feel as though they themselves were experiencing alien abduction.Beings was shot in Dallas and nearby Denton and Arlington, although you'd barely know from watching the film. It is primarily set in the alien's spaceship, which you only see from the outside. The ship has a very organic feel to it -- one room seems to be constructed from the inside of an animal, complete with scary rib bones. Wolcott said that most spaceships seen in movies are very sterile-looking and he wanted to try something different. He also insisted that the sounds on the spaceship come from organic sources, like birds and fish, to make the organic setting believable. The spaceship was a single large set, which Wolcott said was about the size of half a football field.

Wolcott was asked what he meant the aliens' intentions to be in Beings -- good or evil. He smiled and told us, "That's what you're supposed to go to the coffeeshop afterwards to talk about." But he felt they were not evil aliens necessarily, "They're just experimenting. When a scientist experiments on a rat, is that wrong?"

The Q&A was expanded to include Marrs' and Cherry's thoughts on alien abduction. Marrs objected to the use of the word "abduction" in describing the experiences people claim to have had with aliens, because it implies negativity. "Many people don't feel traumatized or negative about these experiments." He said that "the people who have a positive experience rarely come forward, but there's definitely another side to these experiences."

Cherry agreed. "You don't know that these people weren't experimented on for positive purposes. Not all alien experiences are negative." Cherry also said that he'd never heard of an alien experience in which the person had not been returned to Earth afterwards. "They always bring us back."

Although the characters in Beings did not seem to have a positive alien experience, Marrs said he found the film "cinematically compelling" and felt it accurately reflected the feelings of disorientation that people say they have felt during alien encounters.

Beings is very ambiguous about the passage of time, and Marrs also felt that was accurate. He noted that when people talk about alien abductions from their cars, they say that the engine stops before the experience and afterwards, resumes running without anyone's hearing ignition sounds. He feels this is because time has stopped, and "the energy field that cancels out gravity also cancels out time." Cherry added that he felt aliens performing abductions "can bend time and space as well."

Cinematical's Kim Voynar asked Marrs and Cherry if they felt the aliens that humans encounter are all from the same place, or if they're different creatures in different experiences. Marrs noted that "in the 1950s, the big question was, do they come from Mars or Venus? Today we're questioning, do they come from another dimension? Another time? And my answer is yes, all of the above."