Jake Van Wagoner’s second feature film, Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Kinda Feel Left Out, made its debut at Sundance this year, and introduced festival-goers to Itsy (played by Emma Tremblay), a teen girl starting the school year in a new town. Harboring big dreams to one day work for the New York Times, Itsy believes this new start in a small town may be the end of her world as she knows it. When a friend suggests she enter a writing contest, Itsy's world does change, but for the better.
Based on a screenplay by Austin Everett, Aliens Abducted My Parents doesn’t maintain the typical coming-of-age tropes for long. Hoping to cement her escape to NYC, Itsy decides to do an exposé on the town’s oddball, Calvin (Jacob Buster), whose fixation on outer space weirds out his peers. As it turns out, Calvin believes his parents, played by Elizabeth Mitchell and Will Forte, were abducted by aliens when he was a child, and he’s holding onto the hope that he’ll reconnect with them again someday.
For the film's world premiere at Sundance, Collider's Steve Weintraub was able to sit down with the writer, Austin Everett, director Wagoner, and cast members Forte, Mitchell, Tremblay, and Buster at the Collider Studio presented by Saratoga Spring Water in Park City. During their interview, Wagoner justifies the movie's lengthy title, the cast share what drew them to this family-friendly project, and Forte and Mitchell discuss how they got involved. They share the film's surprisingly short film schedule, how they pulled off a Sundance film on a budget, and what it was like getting those calls. Forte reveals details about his upcoming movie, Coyote vs. Acme, with John Cena, Tremblay recalls her childhood roles alongside stars like Academy Award-winner Meryl Steep and Robert Downey Jr., and Buster shares what it was like moving to New York for his role in Let the Right One In.
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