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?
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