‘Bugonia’ Writer Will Tracy Says The Film Became More Topical Than He Intended

According to Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy, the film ended up being more topical than he intended, MovieWeb reports.

A remake of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet, and starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, Bugonia follows two conspiracy theorists who kidnap the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, believing she is a member of an alien race intent on destroying Earth..

Having previously worked on projects considered timely, such as The Menu, Succession, and The Regime, Tracy was asked in an interview about how he is able to keep finding projects that are appropriately relevant to what’s going on in the real world.

Surprisingly, the writer replied that he doesn’t, saying,

“If you try to chase what’s next to try to be incredibly relevant or topical, I think you find yourself in big trouble because you almost always, because most movies take so long to get made. Most anything, any art, takes a long time to get made.”

Rather, Tracy believes it is better to aim for a story with timeless themes so that it will feel relevant at all times:

“Even in this film, right? There’s no mention of who’s in the White House. There’s not really any mention of anything specific. It feels like it’s atmospherically, it’s catching something. We just got, I guess, we got lucky in that way. Even since I wrote the film, it was just an example of something, again, becoming more relevant than I intended.”

An element that Tracy did have a full intention of including in the story, however, was to

“…Get people in a room from opposite ends of an extreme cultural divide and just examine the emotional biases…Ideas about what they think the world is, the idea of reality that they’ve created, and how we’ve all been left alone a little bit to create our own realities — maybe because what’s being told to us by the powers that be often isn’t very inspiring or convincing.”

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia is currently playing in theaters.