‘Bugonia’ Director Yorgos Lanthimos Says “Humanity is Facing a Reckoning”

Yorgos Lanthimos is making a triumphant return to the Venice Film Festival this year with Bugonia, his first appearance since picking up a Golden Lion two years ago for his film, Poor Things, which went on to win four Academy Awards.

The new film, from Focus Features, stars his muse and frequent collaborator Emma Stone, who describes their latest collaboration like this: A “really fascinating and moving, funny and fucked up, and alive” film. It’s an endorsement that is sure to please the many fans of Lanthimos, an auteur whose films often shift from the funny and absurd to disturbing and provocative in a matter of two hours.

Bugonia is inspired by the 2003 Korean sci-fi film Save The Green Planet! from director Jang Joon-hwan. Screenwriter Will Tracy came up with a fresh take that Lanthimos was immediately taken by when he read the script three years ago. It casts Stone as a high-powered CEO of a major company who is kidnapped by two rogue conspiracy theorists who believe her to be an alien intent on destroying planet Earth. It was originally developed by filmmaker Ari Aster and producer Lars Knudsen, and Lanthimos said the project marks one of the first times he had directed something that he hasn’t been involved in from “an early stage.”

And while the source material is more than 20 years old, and Tracy’s script was in the works for several years, Lanthimos said the themes and plot feel incredibly timely. “I was immediately blown away,” he said of his reaction upon reading it. “I felt it was so funny and entertaining but also extremely impactful and made you really think about things deeply. I immediately was interested in making it. It felt relevant then, three years ago, and even more relevant now, unfortunately.”

The unfortunately part got a lot of attention during Thursday’s press conference, as Lanthimos didn’t mince words when describing the current state of affairs.

“Again, unfortunately, not much of the dystopia in this film is very fictional. A lot of it is very reflective of the real world,” he said, adding that when one hears the word dystopia, people often think of an image of the future and whatever event has happened to civilization. “If anything, this film says this is happening now. Actually, it became more relevant as time went by. Humanity is facing a reckoning very soon. People need to choose the right path, otherwise, I don’t know how much time [left] with everything that’s happening in the world, with technology, AI, with wars, climate change, the denial of all these things and how desensitized we’ve become to all of these things. [The movie] is more of a reflection of our times and hopefully it will trigger people to think about what’s happening today, all around the world.”

Jesse Plemons, who stars as one of the kidnappers and reunites with Lanthimos after starring in his most recent film Kinds of Kindness, was asked about playing challenging characters like in Bugonia and Civil War and whether or not he struggles with characters that leave such a mark, positively or negatively.

“My personal belief is, yeah, for some people it might not be the right thing for them to see. Some people that don’t like violence shouldn’t see these things, but I also think we have an instinct in general to really close the book on things that are scary, that are hard to look at, hard to examine, hard to understand,” he explained. “For me as an actor, it is a way that I can try to make sense of some of these things and some of these people who are very difficult to understand. There’s a risk in writing them off as being non-human, because they are and they exist.”

Bugonia, which has its world premiere tonight at Sala Grande, is one of the more hotly anticipated titles here at the Venice Film Festival, which runs Aug. 27-Sept. 6.