by James Mottram
You wouldn’t know it, watching his joyously bonkers new movie Bugonia, but Yorgos Lanthimos is tired. His latest “comes at a point where I’ve made a lot of films, and a lot of them were back-to-back, and it started becoming not as pleasant as it used to be,” he admits.
After a run of award-winning movies – The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness – the Greek-born director [below, looking through a lens on the set of Bugonia] is feeling bogged down by the mechanics of the film industry, from protracted development periods to the endless promotional carousel.
So, when he received the fully-formed script for Bugonia, he was delighted. “I just thought it was incredible from the first read. It was such an easy read and exciting and entertaining and complex, and all the things that I’m striving to do when I develop something.”
Usually, Lanthimos has worked with a writer from conception, such as Efthimis Filippou, with whom he co-wrote breakout 2009 film Dogtooth among others, or the Australian writer Tony McNamara, who was behind The Favourite and Poor Things.
This time, he was sent the script by fellow director Ari Aster (Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid), who had developed it with producing partner Lars Knudsen. Scripted by Will Tracy, one of the writers on TV phenomenon Succession, the film is a loose remake of the 2003 Korean sci-fi/comedy Save The Green Planet! “Ari Aster loved the original movie,” says Emma Stone, the 36-year-old actress who featured in Aster’s latest film Eddington and here takes the lead role as ball-busting CEO, Michelle Fuller.
Kidnapped by Jesse Plemons’ greasy-looking Teddy and his slobby relative Don (Aidan Delbis), Michelle is taken to Teddy’s mother’s basement and tied up. Her head is even shaved. But it’s not ransom money they want. Driven by Teddy, these dopey conspiracy theorists believe Michelle is an extraterrestrial, a member of the Andromedan race, whose sole intention is to destroy Earth. Taking a leap away from the original movie, Stone’s character has been gender-flipped from a man.
“I think the ambiguity of that is really fascinating,” says Stone. “Being a woman, these two men taking her and tying her up in a basement immediately becomes pretty intense and there’s obviously a lot of questions around that which are answered throughout the film. I don’t want to give anything away, but they take shots. There are all kinds of things that are going on… I mean, it’s violent, but it’s not as fraught as you might initially think it could become.”
For Stone and Lanthimos, it marks their fourth consecutive collaboration, beginning with the raucous 2017 English period piece, The Favourite. Stone won the second Oscar of her career for Poor Things, playing in this feminist Frankenstein-esque tale, and arguably some of her best work of her career has come with Lanthimos. This time, her company Fruit Tree – which she co-founded with husband Dave McCary – is one of the outfits behind Bugonia, and she and Lanthimos are clearly simpatico.
“We’ve gotten along for over a decade now. We really are drawn to similar kinds of stories and worlds,” she says. “Once we met, it felt like a person that I got along with so well and that I could trust, and then doing The Favourite together just enhanced that.”
How do they typically work together? “It’s definitely a collaboration. But I think when it comes to the script or the character, whatever that character is doing, I try to give myself over to that as much as I possibly can. But, if there’s something that I don’t agree with, we talk about it…and then I don’t do it!”
This time around, Stone figured out the character from outside in. “It was a very particular look for Michelle, because she wears the same costume throughout the entire film, basically. So, it was very specific. This could be something that would work all throughout. It took a while to nail down exactly how she would dress… and also deciding that she would have a uniform – like Steve Jobs or Elizabeth Holmes, wearing the same thing over and over. If you see in her closet, she has the same shirts, the same suits. And also, in every photo of her, she’s wearing the same thing.”
With a story that is part alien conspiracy comedy, part corporate satire, Lanthimos manages to spear the greed and malfeasance so commonplace today. “I think that’s always the intention, to ask questions about our nature or society or the political situation or the world, or whatever that is,” he says. “I mean, it has become more relevant since we started working on it, three or four years ago, and probably when Will was writing five years ago. So, yeah, it’s just like a coincidence, a bad coincidence, an unfortunate coincidence… the state of the world is truly reflected by the film.”
Unlike Jesse Plemons, who hung out at AlienCon to soak up the extraterrestrials-are-real vibes, Lanthimos held back on diving down such rabbit holes – at least until he wrapped. “I got into the alien stuff, but after the film. I didn’t want to go into it while we were making the film and get all confused. But afterwards, I started listening to a lot of these people that have all these theories about aliens, and if all the stuff that the American government is supposed to have retrieved is real or not… That whole thing, I really got into it.”
What did he learn? “The funny thing is some of them [the wild theories] are also real. People do construct lies. I mean, a lot. So, everybody… especially now with technology as AI advances and all that… it’s so difficult to tell what’s real, so you need a lot of investigation to believe in something. So, that just becomes nature. In that way, we’ll all become conspiracy theorists, because you have to do so much research and start believing in things that will just become second nature. We all have a theory about stuff.”
Stone agrees, feeling that conspiracy theories are a way to comfort each other. “We’re stranded out here on this planet alone, and we’re trying to make sense of what life is supposed to be, what it means,” she says. “Now there’s many more billions of people than there were at the dawn of mankind. Once you look at one thing, you’re fed that same thing again. And it made it so easy for you to fall down these rabbit holes. I think about teenagers all the time; if they’re being bullied, or they’re targeted… they’re falling down this rabbit hole, as if this really is the only reality. This really is the only existence.”
Bugonia is in cinemas 30 October 2025
