A Conversation With The Zucheros, The Married Writing-Directing Duo Behind Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun’s Love Me

In February 2025, I watched Love Me in theaters with my boyfriend and soon after interviewed the filmmakers, Andy and Sam Zuchero.

It was compulsory. I had to know more about this film and the people who made it, Love Me was that compelling.

It isn’t for the narrow-minded or someone looking for an easy watch. It’s not for those who don’t ask themselves "Who am I?" when they post on Instagram. Love Me will make you think and feel—and, yes, feel like you need to know more about the people who made it.

In the film, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yuen star as a buoy (“Me”) and satellite (“Iam”), respectively, who fall in love over the course of billions of years in an hour-and-a-half runtime. See? It’s an ambitious piece of media.

“Honestly, when I read the script, 

I had no idea we were going to do any of the things

 that we ended up doing,” Steven Yeun tells Inverse about filming Love Me.

“It was just a shock every day."

​​The following slightly edited Q&A transcript is a time capsule from that day. (For instance, my “boyfriend” and I are now engaged!) It’s been months since I last talked to The Zucheros or saw Love Me, but I still think about this completely original, novel, and thoroughly well-made film where AI discovers what it means to be human.

A detail that opens and closes the movie in the credits sequence is the very personal touch of handwriting. True to Love Me and how much I love this detail, this Q&A will feature our handwritten names below.

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After reading the New York Times review, I immediately watched Love Me with my boyfriend, and we loved it. We were so impressed with the film and have been talking about our interpretations of it and the themes we’ve taken away from it.

That’s how we found you two—the Zucheros, the writers and directors of the film. From what I’ve been able to uncover about you guys: you are based in California, you’re a married couple, and you’ve been filmmaking since your early teens. There’s not that much about you online, so bravo on maintaining this wonderfully light digital footprint. I’d love to know more about how you got your start in filmmaking and how you guys met.

We met at NYU. I was there for acting at the Stella Adler Studio and was in the film program. Andy and I started off working together. I was acting in commercials he was doing or little projects and things like that. Then I got tired of acting for a little bit, and I started doing production design and wardrobe. I would work on his projects doing that as well. I would write my own stuff, and then we would read and edit each other’s things. Eventually we decided to write together.

We’ve written so many things individually that didn’t get made. And then this one, Love Me, we wrote and our agents sent it to Kristen Stewart. She said, “I want to do it.” So, voila, we have a career together, as well as a life, a house, and a child who has an eye infection. 

How long had you guys been writing before coming together and doing this project, Love Me, together?

We started writing this in 2018, but there was another movie that we had written a little bit together before. This was sort of the first full screenplay we wrote together in 2018 and then sent it to Kristen 2019 and then found lovely producers and financiers to help us with the film, ShivHans, 2am and AGX. And then the pandemic hit, so we couldn’t really move forward for another year or so. Then in 2021, we shot the live action stuff with Kristen and Steven in Vancouver. In 2022, we shot the buoy satellite in California and Alberta.

How did the original germination of the story come to be? Who thought of it first? Was there, like an image or some kind of spectacle that kicked off the entire script?

There’s a little buoy that’s off the coast of Topanga where we live, and it just was such a sad, lonely image that we started writing a science fiction movie about a buoy and a satellite communicating across impossible distances. 

It didn’t really become the movie that it is, until Sam suggested it become a love story about identity and finding yourself. 

We have a lot of ideas that are concepts like a buoy and a satellite talking to each other. Just a lot of funny little ideas that we play with for a while and see if we can find a story in and so that was one of them.

This was also a really interesting experiment to realize how a concept is a concept, but until it becomes emotional, primal, or visceral, nobody’s going to really care. It was a struggle taking something that was very high concept.

We succeeded in areas and failed in other areas. When you come up with a concept, you really do have to find the drama forward.

All the motivations, they can’t be conceptual. You know, it’s like… What did we just watch with our son?

Groundhog Day? 

Groundhog Day, which is a high concept film. He’s like Sisyphus or something, doomed to repeat the same action again and again, but he really just wants to fall in love with Andie MacDowell.

What was the physical process of you guys collaborating on this together? What is that like being both partners professionally, and as a married couple, partners in that sense as well?

You have to be really sensitive with each other, and if we’re not, it can become explosive.

It’s like when you’re on set with your DP (Director of Photography). Our DP is Germain McMicking. He is a really beautiful Australian man with long hair, and if we get into a fight, we both go home separately. The DP has never kicked me to the couch. So if you can’t manage it, you’re completely screwed because it is 24 hours a day. That’s tough, too.

When you’re with your boyfriend, I’m sure you guys have individual successes or failures. And maybe when something doesn’t go right for you, he’s objective and can be like, “Hey, you know, Cathleen, it’s okay, this will all come out tomorrow” kind of thing. When he asks me for encouragement and something’s gone wrong, what am I gonna say?

That’s really tough. But sharing the successes is really great. We have a really fun time just imagining together and coming up with ideas and different ways the story could go. It keeps us playing around.

I imagine you’re out and about doing mundane things like grocery shopping, and you’re coming up with ideas as you go along, right?

Yeah. And fighting with our son to let us keep following that idea and not go into his idea.

He’s eight years old, and he feels left out often, because sometimes when you’re writing something, if you have a breakthrough or a problem that you can’t figure out, you’re constantly talking about it. And he’s in the back seat, and he’s like, “I’m writing a movie, too! It’s about monsters.” And we’re like, “Oh, we’re being awful.” It’s hard to not let it consume everything, right? It’s also like, we’ve got to pay our bills with it, too. 

Well, that’s the funny thing about it, because it never paid our bills before, and now it pays our bills. We did acting commercials and making commercials and things like that that would pay our bills, editing all that, but now this is paying our bills, so it’s a new way to look at it, and it’s also something that has to be really protected because of that. We don’t have the answer for how to do that. It’s a work in progress. 

Brady Courbet just said yesterday on Marc Maron’s show that he made $0 for directing The Brutalist.

It’s a choice to keep making things.

I love your professional name of “The Zucheros.” It’s such a family-oriented way of identifying yourselves. If your son ever wants to get into the family business, he can just slide right in as a Zuchero. Did you guys have a conversation about that when you were trying to figure out what your name was going to be as a unit?

We played around with a bunch of different graphic ideas because that’s kind of where we decide things. 

Everybody calls us Sam and Andy on set. "Sandy." We felt like "The Zucheros" would just be simple. When I was a kid, there was a really terrific video store called Kim’s Video in New York, and they had all the directors lined up by their last name, and I always dreamed of having a little section at the end: “Zuchero” after “Zemeckis.” But Kim’s is gone. There’s no more video. So again, reality doesn’t match expectations.

It can still work on Netflix when you do the A to Z scroll, but you’re right. It’s not quite the same. Are you guys from New York City?

We’re both from Pennsylvania, actually different parts of Pennsylvania. I grew up in the Poconos, and he was around Philly, Bordertown area. 

My dad is from Harrisburg! With Love Me, walk me through the journey of first conceiving the story back in 2018 to having it be released in theaters in 2025.

We started with the buoy out in the ocean and the concept, and then we turned it into a story, and then we wrote the script, sent it out to Kristen. She said yes, and then we got financing and wonderful producers, producers who agreed with our vision, because we really wanted to shoot it practically. We wanted to build the buoy and the satellite, and so we had to find somebody who agreed with shooting it like a documentary and going to all different places on planet Earth to shoot it and not just fight with us the whole time about doing it in post. So we did that, and then we started working on an animatic, which was an animation, a primitive type animation, to see if we could anthropomorphize the moving satellite, and if the concept would work. We did that. We worked on that for a while, while we were prepping for the movie, and then we got Steven Yeun on board, and we decided on Vancouver, went up to Vancouver, and it happened so fast. That’s the thing! When it got greenlit, it was a matter of months.

We had been working years and years. It’s like 20 years of pushing a boulder until you get a critical mass behind you, and then there’s a certain tipping point where that boulder just rolls, rolls so fast you can barely keep up and almost squashes you.

We went up to Vancouver to prep and shoot, and they built the set while we were up there. We got to start working with Zazu Myers, our amazing production designer, and Germain, our amazing DP, who showed up, and we started prepping everything, and then we shot Kristen and Steven for two weeks. Like 15 days, I think. We shot them in the Xsen suits as Deja and Liam first because we wanted to build what Me and Iam would be copying. And so we did Dejah and Liam. And then we started shooting the Xsen suits, which was them in these motion capture suits that would then inform the animation later on. And then we shot them live action. Then we took a little break, and then we went to Alberta. During that little break, we worked with this company called Laird FX.

Everybody got COVID, and we all got stuck in Canada.

He got a nice two week break. But he recovered!

I watched The Beatles documentary by Peter Jackson. 

We finished designing, and they finished building the buoy and satellite, and we went to Alberta, which was the coldest I have ever been. We had all these night shoots planned, and then at some point, we decided we can’t possibly shoot this all at night. We’re going to freeze out here! So we adjusted a little bit, and then we went down to Vancouver and shot the buoy on the ocean and the satellite and the stage. But the waves were choppy, so the buoy would look like she was head-butting the camera, and she became a very aggressive character.

The buoy in question.

We realized that we had to shoot the close-ups in a studio. So we added a couple of days. It was really fun working with the programmers from Laird FX as well, because we did rehearsals with them, too, making sure that the buoy was moving in the right direction, and that she would dilate her eye at a certain time, and lights would light up when certain words were being said. That was really fun working with this woman named Paige Sinclair. I really liked Paige. Anyway, we went to Death Valley and shot that portion, and then we started editing.

We edited it with Joseph Krings. We edited for a long time because we’re also doing animation which takes forever, and that lasted until the end of 2022.

We finished the movie like a day before giving it to Sundance.

Then we got into Sundance, and we finished it four days before we premiered at Sundance. That was the first time we had actually seen the finished product before. 

We saw it with everyone. 

And then it was picked up by Bleecker—Thank God—in the summer. 

A lot of movies don’t get picked up. We’re really lucky to get picked up.

The movie spans, you know, 13.7 billion years, and it took almost as long to make.

That’s funny about the buoy being kind of its own difficult actress.

Way harder to work with than with Kristen. Kristen was a dream. Kristen was a walk in the park. Steven was a dream. They’re very talented at their craft. They know exactly what to do. I mean, I can't find words. I am blah, but they are consummate professionals. The buoy and satellite were nascent beings.

We get the whole crew ready for the shot right and working for an hour to get the shot up on a freezing lake. The cold is coming at you from every direction, and then you’re like, “Okay, action!” And the buoy just freaks out. 

I was really nervous about the robot part because I love working with actors. I think that that’s one of the best parts of shooting a movie. I used to be one, so I gave them what I wanted when I was an actress, but the robots…

At what point did you realize you also wanted to direct Love Me?

It was always the plan.

I think of the term "auteur" in relation to Love Me. You know, the idea that the filmmaker is the author of the film, like you all as screenwriters, but then you guys take that literally with the handwriting that appears in the beginning and end of the film. What was your rationale behind using your handwriting? 

We always use our handwriting. We write notes to people, like we wrote a note to Kristen that we attached to the script we write. We just write notes to people and scan them in and send them with whatever we’ve written up. It’s a dying form. It just feels more personal. We like doing it, too.

The idea of having everybody hand-write their names is actually post-auteur. Everybody's aware that the curtain has been pulled. A film of this scope, or any film, constitutes many, many, many, many authors who are all collaborating together.

Everybody loves packaging ideas and stories and comparing it to other things that already exist. And I’m sure you guys have seen everybody compares love me to Wall-E. What are your thoughts on this comparison?

It was one of our references.

It sounded like a blast to try to make a live action Wall-E, in a way.

It’s clearly not Wall-E, and it never was intended to be, but it was the combination of sci-fi and romance that we were interested in. It’s a Wall-E or 2001: Space Odyssey meets like His Girl Friday, or like a Douglas Sirk movie, and just combining those concepts and ideas, mixing them up and playing around.

My boyfriend wanted to know this question, and I thought it was a good one, especially for this particular film. Were there any choices or themes that you have in Love Me that you haven't seen people talk about or details that maybe people haven't quite noticed?

The music doesn’t get enough attention. David Longstreth of The Dirty Projectors wrote what I think is a beautiful, beautiful score. Because we didn’t have the money for a symphony orchestra, he decided to do a piano four hands piece, which is two pianos in conversation. This seemed to mirror the buoy and satellite’s conversations. We had two incredible pianists from the LA Philharmonic, Joanne Pearce Martin and Vicki Ray, who went to the Steinway Studio, and they pushed the pianos next to each other, so the keys all lined up. They played together live, and it was recorded. That took three days of playing, and that’s the score in the film. 

Something that I’ve really found interesting about making the movie, and people’s comments about it are, is gender in our society, and how we perceive ourselves and our sexual personas. A lot of people make comments like, “Kristen shouldn’t be allowed to play straight,” or, “She should always play gay,” or the stereotypical heterosexual relationship. Things like that. I’d like people to really look into those feelings they have and explore them and question them and not be so quick to make judgments about themselves and others within the constructs we live in. I think that the confluence of genders and the working together—men and women in our society—is really important. So I love that you’re talking to your boyfriend about this work together like that, because it’s so awesome.

Thank you! I agree. Are there any screenwriting habits you have? 

We try to do what Stephen King says he does: write for the first half of every day, no matter what day it is: Sundays, birthdays, holidays, etc. Then take the second half of the day to take meetings, write emails, and do odd jobs to pay the bills between movies.

What’s next for the Zucheros? After Love Me, what do your days look like now?

We are spending time in the Santa Monica mountains watching the landscape recover, cooking dinners, playing piano, helping with homework, gardening, and writing a new script about drone warfare. It’s called OOSA and we’re writing and producing, while our good friend and brilliant filmmaker, Tawfik Alzaidi, will be directing.