When outrageous genre cinema collides with a deeply personal experience, the result can be both shocking and unexpectedly honest. That’s certainly true with the new body-horror comedy, ‘Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant.’

The feature takes one of life’s most profound experiences – pregnancy – and bends it through science fiction, grotesque humor and emotional honesty. What begins as an absurd premise quickly reveals itself as a story grounded in lived experience, as it explores autonomy, generational pressure and the complicated realities of motherhood.

Creative partners Jordan Windsor and Sean Wallace wrote, directed and edited the project together as the filmmaking duo THUNDERLIPS. Before making ‘Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant,’ the New Zealand-based duo most recently penned and helmed the short film, ‘Help, I’m Alien Pregnant,’ together. The short served as a proof of concept to help them make the new project, which marks their feature directorial debuts.

Hannah Lynch, Yvette Parsons, Arlo Green and Jackie van Beek star in ‘Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant.’ Lynch returns to the universe to reprise her role of the pregnant mother.

‘Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant’ follows Mary and Boo (Lynch and Green), who are both 20-something shut-ins living with their mums. The duo is both into tentacles – or rather, she’s into tentacles, and he has tentacles for testicles. Mary’s dreams of moving out are put on hold by a projectile-insemination situation that escalates into an unwanted alien pregnancy.

Both mums get involved but fail to untangle the red tape around abortion before nature takes its course and Mary goes into labor. She survives, and declines to care for the alien baby, leaving the task to its father. Boo develops a new level of appreciation for, and dependence on, his mum as he learns to care for the otherworldly baby

‘Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant’ had its World Premiere on Friday, January 23 in the Midnight section of the Sundance Film Festival. In honor of the movie’s debut, Windsor, Wallace, Lynch, Parsons and Green generously took the time in the afternoon of its premiere screening to talk about making the horror comedy. Among other things, the filmmakers and cast discussed the horror comedy’s unlikely origins, the challenge of balancing horror and comedy, and why the most outrageous genre ideas sometimes grow from the most personal places imaginable.

Sean and Jordan, you co-wrote the script for the new feature, ‘Mum, I‘m Alien Pregnant,‘ which is based on the short of the same name. What was your inspiration in turning the short into the feature? How did you approach penning the screenplay for the feature together?

Sean Wallace (SW): Well, we actually wrote the feature first, and made the short just to prove that we could make something with actors, as no one believed us. So, the short was like a proof of concept.

But the place it really came from, I suppose, was that my baby mama was pregnant. I was kind of surprised, as a white man, how little doctors paid attention to her. They totally ignored her intuitions, feelings and

concerns. I was kind of shocked by that. So I think that was really the starting point.

For the actors, what aspects of your characters, as well as the overall script, inspired you to star in the feature?

Hannah Lynch (HL): Well, I got the audition for the short, and I read the script and liked it. I thought, wow, this is so kooky, weird and strange.

I had also seen a music video that THUNDERLIPS had done maybe eight years prior that I loved.

Jordan Windsor (JW): Which one?

HL: It’s the Sheep Dog and Wolf music video for ‘Glare.’ It’s one of the best music videos. So when I realized that was them, I was like, “I have to audition.”

JW: Oh, great.

HL: As soon as I met them, I was so down to clown.

SW: In her audition, she was vaping furiously the whole time. We were like, “That’s such a great choice.”

HL: I’ve had to quit since then, but I loved it. (Lynch laughs.)

JW: Amazing. What about you guys?

Yvette Parsons (YP): Well, I really love the story. I heard about the story online. It’s my kind of thing, so I loved auditioning for it, especially with Hannah. It was just a really fun story that appealed to me.

AG: I’d met them at some sort of writers’ camp, but I don’t know what it was called. They just pitched the best idea I’ve ever heard. It’s not this film, but this film is the second-best idea I’ve ever heard. (Group laughs.) Wait

until their best idea ever!

No, but I just fell in love. I was like, “These guys are geniuses.” I wanted to grab on to them and ride with them all the way to the top.

They’re so visionary, exciting and uncompromising/ I just really believed in THUNDERLIPS, and I’m going all in. So if you guys bust and give up, I’ve got nowhere to go. (Group laughs.)

SW: We know we can’t let them down.

AG: Please keep making movies!

Jordan and Sean, after the screenplay was completed, you also directed the comedy together. How did you approach helming the film together?

JW: We’ve had about 12 or 13 years of practice working together. So it felt very natural. There was a little bit of anxiety – for me, anyway. I was like, “This is a movie and we’re showing up and we have to do it.” But as soon as we took the first take of the first shot, I was like, “Oh, this is great. We just have to like do good work now.”

SW: These guys made it work. We were like, “What’s the tone going to be?”

JW: Yes, they were the missing piece. We sort of knew everything else was there and we could do it. But we also wanted to know how they would feel together as a quartet because that first morning of the shoot, the four core cast were there.

Once you started working together, how did you build the characters and the story? Did you have any rehearsal time together?

HL: We did heaps of rehearsal, which was amazing and something that I now always want to do forever. I never

want to shoot a film without rehearsing. It was so amazing.

So we had about three weeks of rehearsal together. Was that how much? Maybe we had less.

JW: I think it was a little longer but it wasn’t every day.

So it was about three weeks overall, but we kind of touched every scene in the film.

HL: That meant that we all became really good friends before we stepped on set, which was so beautiful.

JW: They taped up the floor and did the whole blueprint of the house, but we kept walking through walls. (Group laughs.) I kept complaining, “There’s a wall there!”

AG: But it was really fun. I think we assembled the whole thing together, and I pulled everyone aside and asked, “Oh, is this voice too weird?” We had to have voice meetings. I was pulled into side rooms and be told, “I don’t think that’s how he sounds.”

JW: But it was really fun. Everything was built by committee. I really cherish those times we had together. Before we’d even work on the scene, we just started talking about the characters or what personal experience we could compared to that situation.

I remember you guys constantly throwing out this philosophical stuff. In response, I was like, “Wow, we got to try to capture all of this somehow in the movie because everyone brought themselves to the story.” It’s cool.

Once you began filming on set, did you all stick to what was written in the script, or did you do any improv?

SW: I wish we’ done more improv, actually.

JW: So do I.

HL: We did a bit of improv on set, as we pushed to do so. It was fun because we kind of got stuck, so we started improvising.

YP: It was in some of the early stuff driving.

HL: We sat in the trailer and improvise with each other. We were finding it so funny.

SW: There’s a moment in the movie where Yvette is improvising and Hannah actually cracks up. It’s so authentic.

HL: It’s in the pharmacy, but I don’t want to say what it is.

SW: Yes, no spoilers – it’s crass. The whole thing’s crass. It’s a bit of a crass movie.

JMW: Arlo would usually push for more. He’d say, “Let me try one thing in the last take.” Sometimes it would be just wildly weird and wouldn’t make it into the movie.

But there were definitely times we did, and we called those moments Arlo’s curtsies. He did little curtsies.

AG: I wanted the character to curtsy. I just felt like he was so like a knight.

SW: He does curtsy at one point.

JW: Really?

SW: Yes, he does.

JMW: I missed that.

SW: Yes, in the spewing scene when he comes over, he’s like, “Oh, thank you,” and does a little curtsy. It’s in a wide shot, so that you can tell it’s a curtsy. We had to put it in.

So I wish we would improvise more, but we didn’t do a lot. We didn’t do as much as we wish we did.

For the actors, how did you create the physicality for your characters?

YP: My process is to just be the character and go and do it. I just fell into it naturally by connecting with the other actors. In the end you just forget what you’re doing and you just make it come alive.

SW: You also said she was a lot like your mom.

YP: She was in some respects a lot like my mother. She can be quite sarcastic but also really lovable. She gets away with being quite brutal at times because she’s quite funny. I just think drawing on the people who you’ve known in your life helps us in what we do.

JW: When we wrapped the movie, I went to the cast and crew and was like, “Who is this person?” Arlo had adopted the physicality of Boo, who I realized is very far from him. But he really inhabited this striking physicality of the character.

SM: Yes, he’s very small, and he sort of shrinks. It’s quite amazing. How did you do that?

AG: I was like a little kid. I was just testing things out. Whatever everyone else responded to, I’d keep doing that. I was trying to just get everyone’s validation.

I just watched a lot of videos online. They connect people in more of a solitary way, which levels out self-consciousness. But it was really fun

They were so sweet. They gave me a lot of freedom to do what I wanted to do.

What about you, Hannah?

HP: I feel like the costume and the prosthetics were really helpful. Having the belly also made a big difference. Having a wig and being in a giant hoodie were also very helpful.

Also having the pressure of it was nice. Gaving things that were a little bit uncomfortable really assisted the pain that the character was going through.

AG: That’s interesting because we found it quite hard to act pain. So we had that little system at the start where we would try to pinch each other off camera. (Group laughs.)

The actual reaction is brutal, but we were still pinching ourselves the whole time. We were just so desperate to make this as real as possible because so much of what THUNDERLIPS was doing was real. So it wouldn’t look good if we came in with a lot of falseness. So we had to meet them halfway and be as real as we could.

SW: Yes. But it’s only fun because you guys don’t preempt it. Everyone’s acting very normal around very unusual things, which I love. It’s so good.

‘Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant’ is having its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. What does it mean to you all to bring the movie to the festival?

SW: Well, we teased ourselves that we would never say it’s a dream come true because it’s such a troupe thing to say. But it’s really hard not to…

JMW: Don’t say dream come true!

SW: Okay! So I’ll say it’s like a fantasy that has become realized. I still haven’t quite caught up with the fact that we’re here (at the festival in Park City).

I have a lot of gratitude to the audience who’s coming to see a movie that I don’t think we really thought was for them. We were just making our weird little alien movie in New Zealand with New Zealand accents. So it feels like a shock and a privilege that it’s connecting with people further away from our home.