Screen talks to director Yorgos Lanthimos, writer Will Tracy, and producers Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe about the making of Bugonia
Early in the pandemic, screenwriter Will Tracy was stuck in his small Brooklyn flat, with his wife and newborn daughter, wondering if the film business would even survive Covid. Best known for HBO’s Succession, he had been hired in late 2019 by his friend, Midsommar director Ari Aster, and Square Peg producing partner Lars Knudsen to adapt Jang Joon-hwan’s cult South Korean environmental black comedy Save The Green Planet! into an English-language version.
“I knew nothing about it, and he didn’t tell me much. He just said, ‘You might find something in your sensibility,’” recalls Tracy of Save The Green Planet!. “I saw immediately what he meant. There was something in the premise the original filmmakers could never have foreseen. Something very contemporary, possibly very American, about a disassociation from reality, a feeling of isolation, a feeling of conspiratorial thinking.”
Released in 2003, Save The Green Planet! was the tale of a young man and his girlfriend who kidnap an older male CEO, believing him to be an alien, with the hostage drama intercut by a police investigation into his disappearance.
“It’s a tale of two halves, with a very Korean, somewhat zany tone. And the bit in the house is much more focused on torture,” says Tracy. “I wanted to ignore what was happening outside and keep it inside. And instead of a series of torture scenes, make it a series of conversations.”
While many English-language remakes use a lot of the same dialogue, tone and flavour of the source material, Tracy was determined to do his own thing.
“I watched the movie that one time,” he explains. “I took the premise and a few story beats. I made a rule for myself that if I felt stuck for answers, not sure what to do next, not sure how to keep the rope from going slack, I wouldn’t go back to the original and see how they did it. I would have to figure out the solution on my own.”
Thought process
The CEO is male in Jang’s film. Tracy, who co-wrote 2022’s horror comedy The Menu, made his exec female, basing her on several real-life examples including General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
“It was not done with a tremendous amount of forethought or intellectual care,” he admits. “Sometimes as a writer, you see something on a page and go, ‘What if we take that pancake and flip it? What if we see that word “man” and add a “w” and an “o” in front of it? What happens if it’s two young men kidnapping a young woman and keeping her in their basement?’ It’s a whole new level of danger and threat. Then you find a way to complicate that by the fact they’ve chemically castrated themselves.”
Titled Bugonia, Tracy’s take centres on smart but deluded conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz and his impressionable cousin Don, who take hostage pharma CEO Michelle Fuller believing her to be an evil alien. He started writing in March 2020, just as the world went into lockdown.
“Like a lot of us, I was feeling isolated and confused and a bit paranoid and unsure which version of which story to believe,” he remembers. “I had the internet and all this time. Some of that flavour and atmosphere found its way into the script.”
With little in the way of distractions, Tracy delivered his draft quickly. “I think Ari’s original plan was that perhaps director Jang would direct the remake; it would be his first English-language movie. In the end it turned out he wasn’t particularly interested or had other commitments. By that point, the script had been hanging around for a year-and-a-half and was on the very lowest setting on the burner. Then we had a conversation, ‘Who do we send it to?’ Yorgos was the name that came up. It was only after we sent it that I realised it was perfect for him.”
This was spring 2022, and Yorgos Lanthimos, director of The Lobster and The Favourite, read the script immediately. “It was so entertaining, funny, complex, dark,” says Lanthimos. “It dealt with themes very profound and very contemporary, but not in a too-serious, self-conscious manner because of the comedy and the absurdity of it. It felt different to what I’d done before. I got extremely excited.”
That night, the director emailed the script to Emma Stone, with whom he had worked on The Favourite and the then yet-to-be-released Poor Things, to see if she wanted to play Michelle. “It was the first time I read a script that I felt it’s almost ready to be made,” he notes. “She felt similarly so we decided to get involved.”
Lanthimos also sent it to his regular producers, Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Element Pictures, who joined the project, and he collaborated with Tracy to further develop the script – “just to do certain things to bring it more to my own sensibilities and my vision that I had for the film.”
Lanthimos’s plate was full at that stage. Poor Things had been shot but required an extended post-production period. While waiting, he had shot Kinds Of Kindness in Q4 of 2022 and needed to complete both projects, shepherding them through their respective releases, festival debuts and awards campaigns. Meanwhile, he sent the Bugonia script to Kinds Of Kindness’s Jesse Plemons to see if he wanted to play Teddy. Plemons said yes straight away.
By then, Element had started to figure out how to finance Bugonia. “It was a little complicated because of the way it came to us,” explains Lowe. “Usually we control the underlying rights in any project we’re doing with Yorgos, and we set the pace.”
In this case, South Korea’s CJ Entertainment, makers of the original film, controlled the underlying rights and had developed the remake with Square Peg. “We spent a bit of time working through what everyone’s ideal outcome was, in terms of how we would make the film.”
Private model
Ultimately, they decided to eschew the studio route and raise the money privately. “Partly to sustain our model, which is we retain final cut for Yorgos,” says Lowe, “and anytime we’ve worked with studios in the past, it’s been on a negative pickup basis.”
Element is part of the Fremantle Group, and in March 2024, Fremantle agreed to greenlight the film, joining forces with CJ to provide equity finance. “By the time we figured out a strategy,” says Lowe, “we were against it a bit, time-wise, so it allowed us to start pre-production, do our talent deals, then establish the best distribution home. That was handled by WME and CAA.”
Focus Features signed on in April 2024 to distribute Bugonia in the US, with Universal taking international and CJ South Korea. Aster, Knudsen, Stone and Miky Lee, vice chair of the CJ Group, would produce alongside Lanthimos, Guiney and Lowe, while Jang is an executive producer.
The following month, Kinds Of Kindness premiered in Cannes Competition, where Plemons picked up the best actor award. While there, he, Stone and Lanthimos used any free time to rehearse Bugonia. Joining the cast were stand-up comedian Stavros Halkias and Aidan Delbis as Don. Delbis had never acted professionally before and is autistic.
“From the beginning I was interested in casting the third part with a non-professional actor, which is something I do in all of my films,” says Lanthimos. “I chose [Delbis] because of his personality and presence.”
Filming began in July 2024 with Lanthimos reuniting with his usual team of collaborators, among them cinematographer Robbie Ryan, production designer James Price, composer Jerskin Fendrix, sound designer Johnnie Burn, colourist Greg Fisher and first assistant director Hayley Williams.
“He has built this little surrogate family, a kind of travelling circus,” says Tracy, who spent time on set, observing Lanthimos at work. “I got to join the circus for a bit. It was great.”
While Bugonia is set in the US, the bulk of the nine-week shoot would take place in the UK, followed by nine days in Atlanta. The film’s key location is Teddy’s rural home and basement, in which most of the story takes place.
“We thought we were never going to find the exact house, so it would be better to build it,” says Lanthimos. “That would also give us the opportunity to shoot in chronological order, as much as we could. Go outside, go inside, go down in the basement, all in one day if we needed. Or if the weather was not right, we could just go inside and do a different scene.”
Production designer Price constructed the house as a composite set on an estate in Henley-on-Thames, west of London, with a fully decorated interior and basement. “The only cheating was excavating the basement and dropping in shipping containers,” says Lowe. “Other than that, it was a proper two-storey house for which we had to get planning permission, including going to speak at a local concerned residents’ meeting and reassure everyone we would put it all back the way it was when we were finished. It was a big production investment, but it gave us a lot of value.”
“When you opened the drawers, there was years of Teddy’s family history and paraphernalia, sourced carefully by the set dressing team,” says Guiney. “It was incredibly helpful for Jesse, because as soon as he walked onto that set, it made him feel like he was in a real place. It had a useful creative function as well as being a very flexible location.”
Camera ready
Lanthimos and Ryan had shot some of Poor Things in VistaVision, a high-resolution 35mm film format that runs horizontally through the camera to create a larger negative.
“There’s a clarity to it, without it being annoyingly sharp,” says Lanthimos. “Working in those tight spaces and focusing on actors and their performances and their conflict, I felt it elevated that claustrophobic environment into something larger and made the characters almost iconic.”
They had not found a VistaVision camera reliable and quiet enough for dialogue scenes in Poor Things. But on Bugonia, Ryan sourced a “one‑of-a-kind” Wilcam W11.
“It is fairly quiet,” says Lanthimos. “You can still hear it, but you can shoot dialogue, even in small spaces. We did tests with Emma, Jesse and Aidan to make sure the sound wouldn’t throw them off. I remember them telling me it’s comforting to hear this purring sound rather than dead silence [with digital cameras].”
Nevertheless, the Wilcam proved challenging – at least initially. “Emma likes to joke [about the camera] and say, ‘She was the star in the room, she’s gorgeous and she knows it, and sometimes she just doesn’t want to perform,’” says Lanthimos with a laugh. “That happened quite a bit in the beginning, but we had a technician there all the time. She became less temperamental when we got the hang of it.”
After filming wrapped, Lanthimos went to Greece to work with his regular editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, although the rest of post-production took place in the UK, with Fendrix initially composing the score based on just five words: bees, basement, spaceship and Emma bald.
“The previous times he read the script, talked to the actors, maybe visited the set, saw references of what the film would look like,” says Lanthimos. “I thought I should take it a step further and see what he would come up with without even knowing what the story was. The other thing I told him was, ‘Go big on this one. Think of an orchestra.’”
In the summer of 2025, Lanthimos filmed two extra days on the Aegean island of Milos for Bugonia’s climax. He had wanted to film at the Acropolis in Athens but was refused.
“We were all surprised,” says Guiney. “He’s a national treasure. Surely, they should have been sprinting at him. We got a lot of sympathy from Greeks about that, a lot of people outraged that he hadn’t got [permission], so it sounded like it fell foul of the bureaucracy.”
Bugonia premiered at Venice Film Festival this year before its theatrical release in the US and UK in late October, and South Korea in early November. At time of writing, the film’s global box-office take was $37.4m. It has been a productive if intense few years for Lanthimos and his collaborators, both in front and behind the camera. But Bugonia’s awards run means their work is not over just yet.
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