Bugonia is a movie that, once you see it, you’ll want to watch it again almost immediately. The films of director Yorgos Lanthimos are often like that—weird, rewatchable, immaculate—but Bugonia is different. It’s more pertinent. More intense. And more surprising than maybe all of his previous work combined. Which is saying something.
In the film, Jesse Plemons is Teddy, a man who, along with his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnaps Michelle Fuller, a powerful CEO played by Emma Stone. They do this because Teddy and Don believe Michelle is an alien who is leading a plan to destroy life on Earth. And so, the film unfolds with the audience stuck in the middle. Could Michelle actually be an alien? Is Teddy just a crazy conspiracy theorist? What’s right, what’s wrong, and what the hell is going on?
Based on a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet!, Bugonia was written by Will Tracy, who previously wrote The Menu and was part of the hit HBO show Succession. He’s also worked on HBO’s Last Week Tonight and was an editor at the Onion, so he’s got a very unique perspective on news, modern politics, and uncomfortable tension.
Earlier this week, io9 spoke to both Lanthimos and Tracy about their work on Bugonia. It’s a spoiler-free chat about how each of them made a film that keeps its audience guessing and on the edge of their seat. Check it out.
Germain Lussier, io9: Yorgos, with this, The Lobster, andPoor Things, you find a really interesting way to tell a story that has sci-fi roots without making it feel sci-fi at all. So what is it about the genre that draws you to it, but also that balance about not veering too far into traditional sci-fi?
Yorgos Lanthimos: I think it’s because I don’t think of it this way. I guess I have a certain approach to the stories that I’m interested in and how I make decisions around how, thematically, to approach them. Tonally. Visually. And it’s quite unconscious and instinctual how you achieve that kind of balance. It’s hard to put a finger on it because I don’t think it feels the same for everyone anyway, because every person has their own sensibility and perception when they’re watching something. And you can never say that I found the perfect balance that everybody will perceive the same way. [That’s] also the interesting thing about making films and making them in a way that allows people to engage more with their personality, instead of making something rigid that is so specific about one thing or one genre or anything like that.
io9: And this movie seriously speaks to that. Will, the story has a different feel, I think, released in America in 2025, than it probably did in South Korea in 2003. So I’m wondering, how do you think your background in news from Last Week Tonight and the Onion may have helped your kind of approach to the material?
Will Tracy: Yeah, I mean, it probably goes back to the Onion, really. That was my first real writing job. And the conceit, the joke, of the Onion is putting some quite heightened or absurd situations and running them through the filter of the editorial voice, which is very straight and very grounded and unemotional. And that maybe is a little bit of a current through some of the things that I write, I guess. Extreme situations, but played straight. That’s the way I like comedy. And that’s certainly one of the things I love about some of Yorgos’ work. I think a lot of directors and actors who don’t have a lot of experience with comedy or don’t feel very comfortable with comedy, they over-egg the custard and go too much for the joke, because “We have to be funny. I have to prove that I’m funny.” Rather than just, if you play it straight and treat it with an emotional reality, it’s gonna be funnier and more interesting. And so I guess that’s the main lesson from the Onion going forward.
In terms of the news style. I don’t know. Carrying forward from there, there was always quite a bit of research with the Onion and obviously a lot of research with Last Week Tonight. Too much for my tastes, because I really, I think, just wanted to make things up. Succession was the next job I had, which was sort of the perfect mixture of you bring a lot of research in your head and then at a certain point, you have to let it go and make things up and not be too beholden to the research. But yeah, I guess that feeling of wanting things to feel real, but also having the freedom to go to someplace very heightened and extreme [is the answer].
io9: Now, after watching the movie, I talked to my wife and realized we both watched it in completely different ways. I went back and forth about whether Emma Stone’s character is an alien or not and she was like, “She’s not an alien” the whole time. For both of you, I’m wondering, how do you build and consider who may or not be telling the truth scene to scene, and how to calibrate it, both in the writing and in directing?
Tracy: Yeah, in the writing, I mean, I think that they both come into that house, to that basement, with a pretty well-defined, perhaps too well-defined, unhealthily well-defined, sense of who they are and what they believe and what they believe reality is. And then the two of them, I think, because they’re both smart and perceptive and have good arguments, are able to, a little bit, dismantle each other’s facades and reveal kind of the emotional and practical agendas underneath that really explained what they call their beliefs.
io9: Yorgos, what about in the editing and the performances? How do you deal with that?
Lanthimos: Well, I mean, again, a lot of it is in the script, and then the actors come in, and I try to allow some distance between me and the actors. Like I try not to analyze it too much with them so I can be a clean audience without any bias into what I understand being projected from them. In order to be able to help when I think something is too obvious or doesn’t come through, or just to help in little ways. And then in the editing, because we worked with these great actors, you realize and discover all these nuances in their performance that you might have missed on the day and during production, which is quite chaotic and stressful. So you find those nuances that can tweak the dynamic and relationship. But again, as we said in the beginning, I do that according to my perception of how it works. Then, as you said, you thought one way and your wife another way, and that’s the interesting part, especially about this film. It’s a film where people go between things or certain people wanna enforce their opinion on the film and what it is, and it’s quite interesting.
io9: Oh, absolutely. And I think a lot of what makes the movie work so well, too, is the music, the Jerskin Fendrix score. It’s eerie at times. Other times, I thought it was watching Star Wars, it’s so big and bombastic. So talk about calibrating that and your discussions with him about how you wanted it to influence your film.
Lanthimos: Well, I knew one thing that I wanted the music to mostly juxtapose the claustrophobic feel that the movie had and the contained space aspect of it. So the first thing I told him was that [he] would not read the script for this film. We’ve worked together with Jerskin on two other films, so [I didn’t want him to] read the script. “I’ll give you four keywords to work on. And then you’ll compose music and I’ll instinctually guide you here and there.” And then I told him, “I think you should write big. Think of an orchestra. Make it big. Don’t hold back.” Because I wanted the music, as you said, to be at times so bombastic, it’s out of this world. And it worked really well. I mean, that’s how I’ve worked with Jerskin before. He always composes the music before I start editing. So I can use a library of music that he made for the specific film.
The previous times he had read the script, [so] I thought we should take it a step further and just let him know less this time. And I think it worked even better. And he himself says that he wouldn’t have composed this music if he had read the script beforehand. So we’ve figured out this way of working, which is great. I mean, I have all this beautiful music that I can use while editing. We do have to roughly cut it in order to fit the scenes, and then Jerskin goes back and fixes it properly.
io9: A movie like this has to work on multiple levels, right? You watch it, you enjoy it, you think about it, but there’s also the mystery. And after you know the answer to the mystery, it’s different. So how much do you think, in the writing and the directing, about watching this on multiple viewings? Putting things in that people can pick out earlier on, be it a line of dialogue, or a visual clue that’ll reward them on another viewing?
Tracy: Yeah, in the writing, I think there are a few moments in there that reward people who are interested in going back and seeing [again]. Are there other moments where we could have maybe seen some of these turns coming? Moments where the characters maybe emotionally show their hand a bit? And, on first viewing, you might not be aware that their hand is being shown. You think that they’re obtuse or obscure in some way, but on rewatch, you realize, “Oh, that was actually the real them kind of flashing itself for a moment.” And yeah, hopefully that makes the movie interesting to rewatch, especially because I don’t think, or I hope that at least, the film is not just a sort of toy that’s engineered to do that [ending].
io9: No, definitely not.
Tracy: The pleasure of the movie, hopefully, should be just watching those characters interact in that space and the humor and the confrontation and the tension that comes out of their interactions.
io9: Yes, for sure. And Yorgos, what about visual clues? Are there things you put in there to reward people on the second viewing?
Lanthimos: I also never thought of it as this being the important part of the film. Emma talks about it a lot. For the first time, she thought of her performance, how it would come across on a second viewing, because of the things that you know. So it’s mostly on the actors, again, to fine-tune those kinds of things. But on a visual level, I think, you just play it straight basically. The script is so particularly structured that you just try and be truthful to that. And then, again, according to your understanding of it, try and withhold certain things or show others. Then, on a second viewing, maybe you do see more or you do notice the performances more when you have more information, and you realize, “Oh, that’s why she blinked that moment,” which you couldn’t have noticed on the first viewing. And I think that’s why it’s interesting to watch this film multiple times, and not just because of reveals or anything like that. It’s actually one of my films that I’ve been able to view easier during post-production again and again.
Bugonia is certainly a film we’ll be watching again and again. It opens in limited release this weekend before going wide on October 31.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
