Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy discusses his characters, their inspirations, and the film’s hopeful ending.
While Bugonia seems perfectly steeped in the world of director Yorgos Lanthimos, its eccentric twists and turns actually stem from the beautifully warped mind of screenwriter Will Tracy. Tracy’s creative legacy stems from a variety of sources: The Onion, HBO’s Emmy-winning sensation Succession, and the critically acclaimed film The Menu. Take the themes explored in those works of art, add a plot loosely adapted from the South Korean film Save the Green Planet, and you have Bugonia.
So, from where does that blend of political serif-comedy originate? It all stems from characters.
“I do try to take on stories that feature very extreme or extremely tense or heightened situations to put characters in. Once I’m in that, then I do try to get to know the characters really well, put them inside of that extreme space, and really do try to imagine how they would really react and interact and navigate within that context,” Tracy explained. “And that’s going to be funny when they bounce off each other. I’m not thinking about jokes or how to adjust the dial between comedy and drama. I’m just trying to write it as honestly as I can.”
Starring Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, Bugonia pits kidnapper Teddy (Plemons) against pharma CEO Michelle (Stone) as he tries to unmask her as an alien. The screenplay nearly completely circumvents the “Is she or isn’t she?” narrative in favor of a much more compelling exploration of our current national obsessions. Online conspiracies. Misinformation. MAGA. Antifa. Many topical hot-button subjects can be read into the narrative without being explicitly mentioned.
Through his screenplay written during the early waves of the COVID pandemic, Tracy holds a mirror up to the audience and shows them the danger of, in a way, extremism on either side of the political divide. The kind of extremism that gives birth to Luigi Mangione or Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s assassin.
“It does start from that thing that we hear a lot of people say, ‘I do my own research.’ He starts online and then he does, eventually, his own research in the field. It was crucial to me that his methods are unsound, he has very strong emotional biases, and he does some terrible things. Yet, he’s not that kind of boogeyman that the media has created over this conspiracy addled, crazy, stupid right-wing incel male,” Tracy said. “People are not one thing. We’re complicated and contradictory and figuring things out. He’s just an extreme version of that.”
With Stone’s Michelle, Tracy absolutely nailed her fluidly corporate-speak dialogue.
Examples (Not in order of appearance within the film):
Michelle: Right. Could we have a dialogue about this, please? Because what you’re asking me to do is not quite clear to me.
Michelle: Let’s just unpack the problem here.
Michelle: I hear where you’re coming from. I do. And I respectfully disagree.
Michelle: I-I’m not privy to what their methods might be under extreme duress, or yours for that matter, but I can assure you that there is no possible scenario where you benefit from this incident, unless you cooperate with me right now and negotiate a deal that’s fair and advantageous to us both.
Sure, Tracy penned hours of corporate dialogue for Succession, but as Tracy agrees, the Roy clan isn’t Stone’s Michelle. They’re very different corporate animals indeed.
“She’s something a little bit different. She’s someone who, I think, uses her place as a kind of ostensibly liberal or progressive leaning, younger, female corporate figure. She kind of weaponizes that,” Tracy posits. “She knows all the ways to use that to her advantage. A lot of it’s bluff, and a lot of it’s a lie she’s telling herself. Maybe some of it, though, is based in some actual guilt or feelings of altruism. She’s complicated in that way.”
Complicated indeed as those who have seen the film are well aware. Michelle’s actions as the film climaxes may seem dark or bleak to some, but Tracy doesn’t necessarily see it that way himself. Sure, he’s not going to tell people how they should interpret the ending — that’s for audiences to decide and the beauty of film as an art form.
But he has different thoughts as to how the film impacts an audience.
*** Spoilers Ahead ***
“I don’t see it as bleak. To me, a bleak ending for a movie is a movie that purports to show you the world as it really is. That kind of ending says that’s the world as it is, and there’s nothing we can do about it,” Tracy explained. “That’s not what I think the ending of Bugonia does. It allows you to see a kind of vision of the planet without us yet also a vision of the planet still with us. There we are in this tableau at the end, and you get to see us in all our kind of weirdness and our humor and our beauty and our ugliness and everything. It’s a whole range of the human experience, so you see what we’d be missing without us. That allows us to ask what would we miss about us? Who are we? What do we want? How do we want to communicate with each other?”
Bugonia is now available to stream at multiple outlets.
