On a March evening in Austin, Texas, Fergus Campbell and Lola Lafia were stuck in traffic on their way to the world premiere of their debut feature film, “Sparks,” at the 2026 South by Southwest Film Festival. But they weren’t the only ones running late. The film’s co-stars Thomas Deen Baker and Charlie B. Foster, who uses they/he pronouns, burst through the front doors just 10 minutes before start time. Mr. Baker, who wasn’t able to catch a ride to the theater, had to drive the three miles on a Lime scooter in his three-piece brown velvet suit, with Mx. Foster on the back.
“Hold me tight like Jack and Rose from ‘Titanic,’” Mr. Baker said.
“Sparks,” whose charm is distinctly Gen Z in its whimsical pessimism and innocent irreverence, follows a group of teenage friends, nicknamed “the Crop,” who live outside Reno, Nev., and spend lazy afternoons driving around in clouds of vape smoke and partying at a desolate drive-in movie theater. The Crop believes that a local reservoir can transport them to any time and place they desire. When a new friend, Cleo, portrayed by Elsie Fisher — the star of the 2018 film “Eighth Grade” — decides to travel to 1960s Paris, relationships shift as the teenagers wrestle with the fact that life may not be better in other locations and eras.
The morning of the premiere, the largely New York City-based cast reunited with Mr. Campbell, the film’s writer and director, and Ms. Lafia, a producer, for a photo shoot at a pool in South Austin, taken aback by the bracing 55-degree temperature. It had been over a year since they had all been together. Now, they were helping one another figure out what to wear.
Denny McAuliffe, who plays Max, was the last to arrive — and when he finally showed up, his large suitcase exploded all over the place. Mr. Campbell wiggled into several different pairs of ill-fitting skinny jeans while his friends laughed. Mx. Foster, a child of the acclaimed actress Jodie Foster, traipsed around the room, picking tropical print swim trunks, a leather jacket and a fur trapper hat to wear. Mx. Foster giggled every time they were directed by the photographer to look serious. “Pretend Rome is under attack,” said Simon Downes Toney, who plays Trip in the film, in a failed attempt to help them pull it together.
What sparked “Sparks”?
The idea for the film dates to August 2018, when Ms. Lafia, 25, and Mr. Campbell, 26, met during their freshman orientation at Columbia University in New York City. “We both identified each other as people who were making things,” Ms. Lafia said of Mr. Campbell, who came from the Bay Area with filmmaking ambitions. In college, Mr. Campbell wrote and directed “Sankyo Stream,” an experimental web series that followed two college students trying to meet the director Paul Thomas Anderson. The series set the stage for “Sparks,” in which Cleo travels back in time to seek a part in a Jean-Luc Godard film.
“I want to engage with the entire body of cinema around me,” Mr. Campbell said. “And that’s where the anxiety comes in. ‘Sparks’ channels that anxiety.”
In the meantime, Ms. Lafia took a gap year after her sophomore year that brought her to Fly Ranch in Nevada, outside the Black Rock Desert, with a group of architects and engineers she’d met, to help work on a land development project. She invited Mr. Campbell to document the experience, and that’s when the two discovered the landscape for “Sparks.”
They worked on the script during their school breaks, taking road trips between Nevada and the Bay Area, scouting locations and talking to teenagers at skate parks who helped inspire the seven-character friend group.
After three weeks of rehearsal, the crew packed for a 23-day shoot in October 2024 in the Nevada desert. The average age on set was 24, which proved to be an asset. “Set felt very democratic in a lot of ways,” said Ms. Fisher, who explained that smaller age gaps minimized the hierarchies that could impede collaboration.
The first screening
Peter Hall, a senior programmer for SXSW who was part of the team that accepted “Sparks” into the festival, was preparing for the Q&A with the cast that would follow the screening.
“It’s unusual for a film that is this distinct to be this realized from a filmmaker this early in their career,” he said.
Mr. Downes Toney and Mr. McAuliffe guided their parents into the audience, while Mx. Foster, still windswept from the scooter ride, grabbed a chair at the end of the row for their famous mother. Even though Mx. Foster was no stranger to show business, they were still feeling nervous about their film debut.
As the lights dimmed, Mr. Campbell and Ms. Lafia’s names flashed across the screen, and the theater erupted in cheers. Lula Georgiadis, a Brooklyn-based painter and longtime friend of Mr. Campbell’s, took out her phone to film the title cards she created for “Sparks.”
After the screening, everyone headed to the Golden Goose, a bar in Austin, for an after-party to mingle and dance under the deep red lighting and feast on cocktails and sizzling barbecue. Mr. Baker, slouched in his chair, reminisced about shooting an intimate scene with Mr. McAuliffe in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s red bathroom.
“Queer youth can identify in many ways with him,” said Mr. McAuliffe about his character, Max, who is gay. “He’s got this certainty about him, but everything is very much up in the air in his environment. It can feel really isolating sometimes to have a sense of self that’s not necessarily validated.”
Two days later, the cast jumped in the back of an old Chevy pickup truck, taking in the Austin sun that had finally warmed the city, and headed to a bar with air conditioning.
Ms. Fisher and Mx. Foster scrounged up quarters from Mr. Campbell, loading up the jukebox with songs by Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys. Mr. Downes Toney danced alongside a fellow cast member, Madison Hu, while Mx. Foster and Mr. McAuliffe sat down to arm-wrestle.
“I’m not being nice!” Mx. Foster exclaimed, eking out a victory.
The ragtag group came to the project through friends of friends. Though Ms. Hu, a former star of the Disney Channel show “Bizaardvark,” and Ms. Fisher had backgrounds on big productions, they valued working alongside Mr. Downes Toney, a first-time actor scouted by Ms. Lafia. (She had promised him pizza on the first test shoot — there was no pizza.)
Many of them discovered the importance not only of indie filmmaking but also of the work they had created with “Sparks” when they were approached by a young festivalgoer after their Friday night screening and Q&A.
Mack Budd, 19, came up to Mr. Campbell and Ms. Lafia wearing a suit jacket decorated with sparkly pink letters across his back spelling out the film’s title and credits. Mr. Budd’s hands were shaking as gushed about his new favorite film and asked Mx. Foster if they could take a photograph together. He was profoundly moved by “Sparks” — as a recent high school graduate, he said, he appreciated the film’s sense of whimsy and Zoomer queer representation.
“Tyler, Texas, doesn’t get films like this,” Mr. Budd told them. Within the first 15 minutes of watching “Sparks,” he said, “this was one of the movies I was looking for.”
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