What We Become: Indie Filmmaker Kyle Kimlick on Bringing the Apocalypse to Michigan

By Russ Burlingame

In the early days of the pandemic, a group of friends in suburban Michigan decided to found their own production company, and make a movie. With a tiny budget, filmmaker Kyle Kimlick and his fellow members of Four Horsemen & Co. set out to tell a character-driven apocalypse story, which would resonate with audiences, while taking advantage of the diverse and often beautiful settings available in and around them in Michigan. The result is an indie film that is set to premiere tonight at the MJR theater in Westland, Michigan -- and it was a crazy experience. But that hasn't stopped them from already mapping out their next film together.

With What We Become, no relation to the critically-panned Danish film of the same name from 2016, Four Horsemen & Co. asked themselves how they could make a post-apocalyptic movie that didn't feel just like every other post-apocalyptic movie ever made. It's a genre that can feel really stale, and part of the goal was to recapture the feeling of excitement you get when somebody finds a way to reinvigorate a stagnant archetype.

"It was 9 months of hard for shooting," Kimlick told ComicBook.com. "We were out there in the boonies of Michigan. We all work full time jobs, and then Friday evening it's like, 'get in the truck, we're going. We're filming all weekend. You don't have time to rest.' And then we get back, and it's Sunday night, and you roll right back into work. It pushed us all to the limit -- everybody who was working on it, but it was also really fascinating and inspiring to see the dedication to getting this thing done, and making it the best it could be."

You can see the film's trailer below.

The shoot took a toll, physical, mental, and emotional. So much so that the next movie -- which begins production in the fall -- is going to be a romantic comedy. That way, Kimlick explains, you can just shoot on practical locations without them having to be abandoned, and if there's a plane going overhead, everything doesn't have to grind to a halt. Also, people are going to be able to dress normally and take regular showers. All things that "the end of the world" doesn't really allow for.

"We weren't even speaking after certain shoots," Kimlick recalled. "We also fired up, but the commitment to getting it done never wavered. So this premiere is just going to be this this wave of release for for everything. Our friends, our family, everybody's been looking at us like we're crazy. I quit my full time job to chase this company with everything I've got, and everyone's looking at me like I'm crazy. And I think with this premiere, it's It's going to be a wave of relief and satisfaction for everybody involved to be able to see what it was all for. And I think the final product is going to is going to blow everyone away."

After the movie's premiere tonight, Four Horsemen will be doing follow-up showings every two weeks until tickets stop selling because the all of the interested locals have seen it. Then they plan to submit the film to festivals in the upcoming rotation, while beginning work on Love Story, which they describe as "a modern day rom-com told for the millennial age." 

"There hasn't been a lot of really good like relatable romcoms for millennials that are dealing with dating, where there's dating apps and texting and other social media, and how all of that plays a part in trying to make a relationship work," Kimlick explained. "It will be fully 50% male perspective, 50% female perspective, both of the these stories happening from them. The perspective is these characters telling it to their therapist, so we're going to drop you into scenes where the the character will be talking to the camera
like sort of like Ferris Bueller something because they're talking to their therapist."

You can find contact information for the MJR Westland theatre here.

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