By George & Josh Bate
Most people, while growing up, have yearned for an experience far more lively and cultured than their own. Whether it be Luke Skywalker looking out to the horizon of Tatooine or the kids in Stand by Me seeking adventure away from their small town, the desire to flee one’s current surroundings in pursuit of something grander and more glamorous consistently emerges in cinema and real-life. In his feature directorial debut, filmmaker Fergus Campbell explores this daydream with novelty and purpose.
Making its world premiere at SXSW 2026, Sparks stars Elsie Fisher (Eighth Grade) as Cleo, a newcomer to the desolate desert town of Sparks, Nevada. When Cleo stumbles upon a cigarette vending machine that perplexingly generates a book about French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, she becomes consumed by the idea of moving to Paris and embarking on a more adventurous and fulfilling life. The newly forged cinephile then encounters and befriends a group of teens collectively known as the Crop, who make regular visits to a reservoir they believe is a time portal. Obsessed with the idea of using the portal to travel to 60s Paris, Cleo inserts herself in the friend group, rattling the members’ dynamics and materializing a variety of unexpected adventures.
The HoloFiles recently had the opportunity to speak with Sparks writer/director Fergus Campbell about his new film, its focus on teendom, time travel, the desire to flee one’s home in pursuit of something greater, and his approach to crafting a “queer movie where no one’s going to say they’re gay.’”
Sparks hones in on a group of teenagers aimlessly floating through life. The seven of them don’t have much to do, spending much of their time hanging out in a dilapidated parking lot and in an old school bus. Campbell chose to center his directorial debut around this age group in an effort to immortalize his own experiences as a teen. “I think that, early on in my experience of filmmaking, I realized that I want to contain periods of recent life, just so I can remember them better and have a perspective on them,” Campbell reflected. “So that was definitely the biggest reason for focusing on Teendom – just the desire to encapsulate it and memorialize or revisit really important learning experiences or discoveries or adventures that shaped the rest of my life and the lives of the people that I was surrounded by when I was in high school.”
Focusing on a group of teens also allowed Campbell to explore characters who don’t have a clear sense of the world yet and, as such, are more open to the idea of time travel being a possibility. “It’s easy to write about people who are young, because they don’t know much,” Campbell said. “They’re impressionable. And everything can be explained as something they’re not necessarily an expert on or super familiar with. You can get away with a lot.”
The story begins as a new teen named Cleo enters the group and uproots their dynamics. Played by Elsie Fisher (Despicable Me, Barry, The Summer I Turned Pretty), Cleo develops a sudden interest in French cinema after a random cigarette vending machine she discovers spits a book about filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard out. “We hadn’t always had that scene written in the film,” Campbell revealed. “It was added pretty far into the process of making Sparks, because we were starting to understand we needed a better entry point to Cleo. She couldn’t just pop up and be sympathetic and investable as a character if we didn’t have some sense of where she was coming from or what she was fighting or what she was trying to escape. I was just like, ‘Well, how can she find something that makes her love Godard?’ The book was obviously super important. And we were like, ‘How could the book present itself?’ And Reno is full of those vending machines.”
The book about Godard imbues Cleo with a sudden, strong interest in visiting 1960s Paris, in part as a means to escape the mundanity of her reality in Sparks. Campbell resonated with Cleo’s desire to journey to France when he was an adolescent. “I think that is one of the very omnipresent feelings that I had growing up,” reflected Campbell. “I constantly had this feeling of boredom and that I was destined to be somewhere bigger and more exciting and cosmopolitan. I always wanted to live in a city. So I think that there’s this kind of exaggeration of that contrast, because Sparks is so much further away from anything than most cities.”
Campbell continued by discussing why Paris was such an interest to him and, in turn, Cleo. “Paris especially has been an obsession of mine for my whole life,” Campbell remarked. “I think because I love French movies, I love French cinema. There’s just something that’s inherently romantic about the city itself, as most people feel. I think the broad, high-level comprehensibility of that contrast was fun to then make granular and more detailed.”
Cleo wishes to capitalize on this obsession with Paris by using a supposed time portal in a nearby Nevada reservoir to travel back in time to 1960s Paris. Campbell discussed how the film begins by shrouding the time travel element in ambiguity, before unraveling its details as the story progresses. “The opening scene apart from Cleo is this first visit by the Crop to the reservoir,” stated Campbell. “It’s not abstract, but it’s like, ‘What are they talking about? What’s going on? Is this magical? Is this just fun? Do they really believe in this?’ And I think really honing the precision and clarity of the magical realist elements felt very important.”
Cleo and the other teens that comprise the Crop stand out, not only for their belief in time travel, but for their acceptance of one another’s sexual orientations. Campbell explained his film’s unique approach to queer characters during our interview. “[Producer Lola Lafia and] I felt that so many gay movies, and not that there’s anything wrong with this, but so many gay texts in contemporary cinema or television are pretty adamant about making that queerness an issue for the characters or making it the center of their lives,” said Campbell. “And, our privileged experience being in New York and in places where queer people are really accepted without hesitation, we wanted to conceptualize what we called, in pitch materials, ‘This is, matter of fact, a queer movie, [but] no one’s going to say they’re gay. Everyone’s just going to be kind of gay.’ And I think that was amazing.”
While not making the sexuality of its characters a focal point, Campbell remained cognizant of portraying the different ways in which gay people have been accepted by society across American history. In part, the filmmaker achieves this with a scene in the middle of the movie in which the Crop come across a group of older gay men enjoying a barbeque. “We need to understand where we sit in this lineage of gay history,” Campbell said. “That’s kind of what [the barbeque scene] is meant to do – make clear a lineage and also make an understanding of the future and past more textured for the characters. They should or we should have a sense of the luck and the fortune that a lot of young gay people today are afforded versus the gay communities of America’s past.”
With Sparks, Fergus Campbell announces his talents as a director and writer by crafting a film that explores the complexities of Teendom through a surrealist lens. His film is likely to resonate with audiences as who hasn’t dreamed, whether in childhood or in adulthood, of leaving their life behind in search of something more adventurous.