David and Nathan Zellner have been making weird movies together out of Austin, Texas since they were kids with a VHS camera and no budget. Two decades later, they're shooting with Cate Blanchett, Chris Pine, and Dave Bautista. The weird part hasn't changed.
Who They Are
David Zellner (born 1973, Greeley, Colorado; based Austin) writes and directs. Nathan Zellner produces, co-directs, edits, and acts in nearly every film they make. They've been operating as ZBi — their production company — out of Austin for years, making films that occupy a very specific lane: deadpan, dark, formally strange, and utterly committed to their own logic.
They are AFS Grant alumni. They are the kind of filmmakers the Austin Film Society program was built for.
The Work
Their feature filmography spans two decades of progressively wider releases without any loss of identity:
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014) — Rinko Kikuchi plays a lonely Japanese office worker obsessed with Fargo, convinced the buried ransom money is real. She flies to Minnesota to find it. Won the Tony Cox Award for Best Screenwriting at the Nantucket Film Festival. David was nominated for Best Director at the Film Independent Spirit Awards. A genuinely haunting film.
_Damsel_ (2018) — Robert Pattinson in a black comedy Western that pulls the genre inside out. Co-written and co-directed by both brothers. Mia Wasikowska co-stars. Premiered at Sundance.
_Sasquatch Sunset_ (2024) — Sundance premiere, Berlinale Special, theatrical release via Bleecker Street. Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Nathan Zellner in full Bigfoot prosthetics, no dialogue, one year in the life of a Sasquatch family. $1M box office. 5.4 on IMDb, which either means you hated it or tells you nothing about whether you'll love it.
The score was by The Octopus Project, an Austin band. Cinematography by Mike Gioulakis, who shot It Follows and Us. The film also screened at SXSW 2024 — a Texas filmmaker bringing a Sundance film back to Austin.
What's Next: Alpha Gang
Their next feature is the biggest swing of their careers.
_Alpha Gang_ — sci-fi comedy written by David Zellner — follows humanoid aliens who arrive on Earth to destroy it and find themselves compromised by human emotions. It went into production in Budapest, Hungary in June 2025, then moved to Podgarić, Croatia for exterior shooting.
The cast: Cate Blanchett (as Alpha One), Chris Pine, Dave Bautista, Léa Seydoux, Lily-Rose Depp, Adria Arjona, Doona Bae, Kelvin Harrison Jr. Produced with Blanchett and Coco Francini's Dirty Films. Cinematography again by Mike Gioulakis.
The original 2020 version had Jon Hamm, Andrea Riseborough, Nicholas Hoult. The project went dormant, re-emerged in 2024 with Blanchett attached, completely reconstituted. Welcome to development.
The Austin connection: the Zellners' ZBi is a producing company. The Budapest shoot was driven by European production incentives. No release date yet.
Why This Matters for Texas
Alpha Gang isn't shooting in Texas — Budapest got it. That's the competitive reality of production incentives in 2025: a Texas-based filmmaker with an international cast went to Hungary.
That's not a failure of Texas film policy; it's a data point. The state's $1.5 billion incentive expansion targets productions with $250K+ in Texas spend and at least 60% of the work done in-state. International co-productions with European cast and complex locations won't always fit that mold.
What Alpha Gang represents for Texas: Austin-based filmmakers are now operating at the level where Cate Blanchett calls them. The Zellners have built that from the ground up, in Austin, with AFS support, over 20+ years. The next generation of Texas filmmakers is watching.
When Alpha Gang premieres — Cannes? TIFF? Sundance 2027? — it'll be two guys from Austin up there. That counts.
Recommended Watch List
If you haven't seen their work:
1. Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2014) — Start here 2. Sasquatch Sunset (2024) — Best on big screen, alone, no preconceptions 3. Damsel (2018) — For the Robert Pattinson completists and Western genre skeptics
ZBi (Zellner Brothers): zbi.tv AFS Grants: austinfilm.org/grants
Texas Filmmaker Profiles: texas.film/filmmakers