‘Bugonia’ Writer on Tackling America’s Troubled Present With Thriller

Remaking a Korean cult film once known as “the cursed masterpiece” could easily have seemed like a reckless bet in today’s variously challenged movie business. But for Yorgos Lanthimos and his stars, Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, former Succession writer Will Tracy’s script was simply so good that taking a swing at the uncategorizably strange premise that would become Bugonia was a no-brainer.

“This was the first time we received a script and were like, ‘Whoa, let’s go make this right away,’ and it basically doesn’t require any process,” says Stone.

“Up until this point, I’d read scripts, but I’ve never been so excited immediately afterward that I would say, ‘This is almost ready for me to make just as it is,’” Lanthimos recalls. “To be handed something that was already so great was a tremendous gift.”

Bugonia was released this fall and has earned a modest $40 million in cinemas, but it has proved a hit on digital platforms and is considered a strong Oscars contender in several categories.

The movie is a loose adaptation of the 2003 South Korean cult oddity Save the Green Planet!, a genre-blending black comedy about a troubled young man who kidnaps a corporate CEO he believes is an alien bent on destroying Earth. The original was the debut of Jang Joon-hwan, a close early collaborator of Bong Joon Ho, but its commercial failure stalled Jang’s career for more than a decade, even as the film gained a reputation as a misunderstood classic.

The remake, co-produced by Korean studio CJ ENM and distributed by Focus Features, took shape after Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen, longtime fans of the original, signed on as producers under their Square Peg banner and brought in Tracy, fresh from penning The Menu and several episodes of season three of Succession, to craft an English-language version.

Plemons stars as Teddy, a paranoid beekeeper who, with the help of his pliant cousin Don (first-time actor Aidan Delbis), kidnaps Michelle Fuller (Stone), the steely CEO of a pharmaceutical and pesticide empire he believes is an extraterrestrial leader in disguise. Much of the film unfolds in Teddy’s basement in a tense, darkly comic standoff that pits conspiracy thinking against center-left corporate rationalism, blurring the boundaries between political grievance and cosmic delusion.

Tracy’s script skewers the hollow moral language of powerful corporate elites like Stone’s character, while also probing the anger and alienation driving Teddy and Don, treating their bonkers beliefs with both satire and unsettling flashes of emotional truth.

“Will really pulled off a magic trick,” adds Plemons. “You have two characters with totally opposing beliefs — and my character, Teddy, is preaching his beliefs nonstop through the whole movie — but the film itself somehow doesn’t feel preachy and leaves it all to the viewer to decide.”

Tracy boasts a top-shelf comedy writing pedigree. After rising from writer to editor-in-chief of The Onion, he moved into television writing on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver before becoming a key writer and executive producer on Succession, where he earned multiple Emmys. His feature screenwriting debut came with the acclaimed dark comedy The Menu, which he also executive-produced.

The Hollywood Reporter connected with Tracy over Zoom to discuss how he transformed a Korean cult film into a distinctly American fable, how isolation and paranoia seeped into his writing process, and why he believes the ambiguity of the film’s shocking ending is its most radical political gesture.

How did this project come to you?

It came to me through Ari Aster, who’s a producer on the film and a friend of mine. We had lunch in the East Village, where he lives, and he mentioned this Korean film called Save the Green Planet! from 2003. I’d never heard of it or seen it. He didn’t tell me much — just that he thought there might be something there I’d find interesting. It was hard at the time to find a properly translated copy, so he sent me what was basically a janky Vimeo link.

I watched it and immediately understood what he meant. I think he knew a bit about my work on Succession and had seen The Menu, and somehow sensed I’d connect with something in this very peculiar Korean film. It’s quite Korean in its sensibility and political preoccupations, but I also saw something in it that felt contemporary and distinctly Anglo-American. Without possibly anticipating it, those original filmmakers had created a premise that felt quite right for an American adaptation in these times.

What did you see in it? Because on one level, it’s one of those wildly original cult films where, from a distance, it’s natural to say, “How could you ever remake that?” The original is such a unique blend of tones — it’s kind of a miracle it ever worked in the first place.

Exactly. I decided very early on — within a few minutes of watching — that if I were going to adapt it, I’d take a very free hand. I’d never really written an adaptation before, and I wanted both films to stand on their own. Otherwise, what’s the point of remaking it, right?

The original is quite preoccupied with this brutal torture situation and the parallel police investigation. I decided to move away from both of those and make something more contained — a movie about a conversation. What if I could put two people who represent extreme ends of an American cultural divide in a room together and let them have it out? People who’ve only encountered each other online, who think they know what the other believes, who’ve already been having a “pre-argument” in their heads for years. I wanted to see what happens when they finally face each other and talk.

As their rhetorical facades start to fall, we begin to see who they really are, what they really want, and what’s truly motivating them.

Tell me a little about the circumstances of your writing process — in general and on this project. 

Well, as I said, I only watched the original film once — I didn’t want it living in my head. I took a few notes, then wrote a full scene-by-scene outline, down to the slug lines and key bits of dialogue. That’s usually the heavy lifting for me; once I have the outline, the script comes quickly.

When it came time to write, I had just returned from the Succession writers’ room for season three — this was March 2020. We were supposed to start shooting that spring, and then, of course, COVID hit. Suddenly, we were in full lockdown in New York. My wife and I had just had our first baby, and we were living in a tiny studio apartment in Brooklyn.

That’s when I wrote the script — actually, I wrote while I had COVID myself for part of the time. Because I was locked down and had nowhere to go, I wrote it quickly — about three weeks, which is fast for me. In hindsight, I think that atmosphere of confusion, paranoia and uncertainty helped. Not knowing what information to trust, not knowing what the world would look like on the other side — it all seeped into the script in a way that I think benefitted it.

That’s fascinating. It’s all there in the film.

Yeah, and what’s really interesting is that five years later, rather than feeling like a period piece, the story feels even more resonant. I think that’s because we’re still, in many ways, living downstream from that moment — we’re psychologically still in those COVID months, just in a different form.

When Yorgos came on board, what kind of collaboration did the two of you have? He told me recently that he loved your script and didn’t want to change much, which is very uncommon for him. 

Yeah, he told me that, usually, when he directs a script, he’s involved from very early on — helping guide the structure and development. But in this case, he came in when it was already quite close to shootable. He just had a few ideas to make it more directable for him.

One big change he suggested was structural. In my version, we began by meeting the two cousins — Jesse Plemons’ and Aiden’s characters — as they lay out their plans, then we jumped to Emma Stone’s character. Yorgos proposed intercutting the two introductions: while the cousins talk about their world and beliefs, we see Emma’s character going through her morning routine, getting ready for work, doing her anti-aging regimen, heading into the corporate office. It was a great idea. That adjustment gives the opening a great rhythm.

He also made some tweaks in the third act, but nothing major. The biggest change was the title. I still had Save the Green Planet! as a placeholder. Yorgos suggested Bugonia, which comes from an obscure Greek myth about a colony of bees that arises from the corpse of a cow. We both felt it resonated with the film’s themes. Plus, it sounds like a bug, or an alien planet — or even a flower, or a mental disorder. It has all these vague, poetic associations that felt just right. Greeks know their mythology.

What were your impressions when you heard Yorgos was going to direct? What makes him right for this kind of material?

It just felt perfect. I’d written it as a very contained film — mostly three people in a house, talking — which can be a challenge to make visually dynamic. You need a director who can make a small space feel spectacular. Shooting in VistaVision was such a brilliant choice. Even though we’re in one room, the faces of these actors become these landscapes.

And then there’s tone. Coming from a comedy background, I’m always wary of a director overplaying humor — making it too broad or satirical. I knew that wouldn’t be a problem with Yorgos. All you have to do is watch Dogtooth or The Favourite to see how he can play absurdity straight. His comedy is dry and precise, grounded in a strange realism even when the world is stylized.

When I met him and later spent time on set, I realized how lucky I was. Our sensibilities were completely simpatico.

One of the things I love about your script is how Teddy, Jesse Plemons’ character, is a conspiracy theorist but one driven by many legitimate, sympathetic grievances — which are embedded within all of these other crazy-sounding ideas. That central element of the story really feels like it captures a core challenge of our time — how do we disentangle the legitimate critiques of neoliberalism from the bonkers radicalism that they have spawned?

That’s right. And it’s only gotten harder, because in America our current government has quite purposefully and cynically co-opted a lot of conspiratorial thinking to muddy the waters to further their own cultural and political project. So people tend to paint all conspiracy-minded lines of thought with the same brush — right-wing, crazy or stupid — without investigating what’s driving that mindset, and what are the underlying causes for why they are so enraged. 

In Teddy’s case, he’s absolutely been abused by the system: big pharma, big tech, big agriculture, the government, the police — capitalism generally. He and his community have been misled and mistreated.

And then, in a larger sense, I think he, like a lot of us, feels isolated and atomized. He kind of looks around his world — or American society, at least — and he doesn’t feel like he’s connected to any community or civic project. Every once in a while he’s told to cast a vote, but what does that even mean? Does he feel like he really has any other agency? I don’t know that I do. Like a lot of people, I more feel like I’m just watching a lot of things get worse and worse. So that fundamental feeling of powerlessness in the face of larger, ominous and obscure forces doesn’t feel very crazy or conspiratorial to me. Even though I’m much more advantaged than someone like Teddy, I understand that feeling, and I have a lot of time for that way of thinking, actually. 

So it was important that his emotional, political and cultural rationales be well-founded. His methods aren’t sound, but he’s right about a lot. I wanted the audience to empathize with him — not see him as a kook, but as someone making many good arguments.

And on the flip side, how did you approach Emma Stone’s character? There’s great satire in the way she embodies the farce of a “caring corporate culture.”

I wanted the audience to be of two minds about her. On one hand, she’s in an impossible situation — she’s been violently kidnapped, she’s terrified, and trying to reason with someone who seems misinformed and unmovable. We empathize with that frustration, with wanting to be heard. And it’s kind of easy for many of us to imagine being in that situation, like, “Oh my gosh, what would I do if I were stuck in her place and had to try to reason with some nut?” 

But she’s also well practiced in a kind of smooth, frictionless corporate rhetoric, which she’s trying to leverage in this situation. So we have this feeling that she’s not a completely honest or authentic broker. Even before the kidnapping, we sense a disingenuousness to her, even though it’s Emma Stone, who is usually a presence who feels quite easy to access emotionally. She makes compelling points herself, but also some flawed ones that Teddy swats down effectively.

The goal was to put the audience in that uncomfortable space of not knowing who to side with. That’s an interesting place to be.

I had a theory about how your script aligns with Yorgos’ sensibility. His films often feel like social experiments, where the audience is positioned to observe human nature from a strangely abstracted distance. Bugonia seems to bring that ambiguity and dread right into the story itself — and it’s one of very immediate contemporary political relevance, which is somewhat unusual for him.

I think that’s right. Yorgos has always explored themes of social control — power, domination, people forcing others to live within their own constructed realities. In his earlier work, that kind of behavior felt outrageous or surreal. Now it feels almost ordinary. We’ve been encouraged, by design, to live in our own realities — through social media, politics, everything.

So even though I didn’t set out to write a “Yorgosian” film, it’s absolutely in his wheelhouse. At the same time, it’s probably the most specifically American film he’s made — it’s the only one written by an American — so it has that specific social preoccupation, while still inhabiting an emotional space that suits him perfectly.

Did you two talk about that — the meaning and themes of the film?

Not really, and that’s one of the things I loved about him. Yorgos doesn’t want to overanalyze. We never had those long, “What does it all mean?” conversations. His notes were always specific and practical.

Because he didn’t over-talk the meaning, no one else did either. He and I are both interested in preserving ambiguity — keeping the mystery alive. We don’t want to lock the film into one interpretation. I like when people leave the theater debating whether it was a happy or sad ending, or who was more sympathetic. Those are the best conversations a movie can make you have.

Where do you think the film leaves us? What does it resolve — or not resolve?

I’ve heard people call it bleak, but I’m not sure that’s right. On one level, the planet itself probably has a better shot at survival without us — that’s the practical interpretation. But at the same time, when we see that world without us at the end, we’re still there — our bodies, our traces, these funny, intimate, sad images of who we were. So maybe it’s also a reminder of what we’d be losing — who we are when we’re not shouting at each other, when we’re not reduced to categories. I’m not advocating any one reading, but there’s definitely more than one way to see it.

One thing that baffled me a little were the flashbacks. They’re so radically different, aesthetically, from everything else in the film. Was that how you wrote them? How are we supposed to read them — as abstract representations of Teddy’s trauma? 

That was one of the bigger changes Yorgos made. I’m not big on flashbacks, but they felt necessary here, and I worried they’d come off as conventional. Yorgos’ idea was to make them nonliteral — very abstract.

So they’re not “memories” in the usual sense; we don’t cut from Teddy gazing out a window into a flashback. They just appear, almost violently. They might be the film’s abstract interpretation of his trauma, or his own internal abstraction of it. That ambiguity makes them much more interesting. What could have been clunky exposition became something more poetic and impactful.

Do you have a favorite scene in Bugonia?

My favorite scenes are the long confrontations between the two of them — those lengthy, charged chats where Emma and Jesse really go at each other. I love their second chat, when he comes back down to the basement and they have it out a little, and then she says to him, “Teddy, I think I know what’s wrong with you” — and then she launches into this little liberal soliloquy cribbed from centrist liberal newspaper op-ed pages about echo chambers and rabbit holes. He’s quite ready for that, and he counters it beautifully. I’m happy with that scene in particular. The way Jesse and Emma played it is better than I could have hoped or imagined, as the writer. And I think that scene is our first really clear hint that this conversation and this film aren’t going to lead where you expect.