Bugonia Screenwriter Will Tracy Talks Conspiracy Theories Live From Andromeda

Screenwriter Will Tracy is no stranger to satire. Although he’s most widely-known for his work on HBO’s Succession, he also wrote on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and the sharply comedic satire about restaurant culture The Menu. Most recently, he wrote the screenplay for Bugonia for visionary Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos known for oddly comedic films including The Lobster and Poor Things. Bugonia tells the story of two basement-dwelling dwellers Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) who are convinced that corporate shill Michelle (Emma Stone) is an alien determined to destroy their world.

Tracy shares his thoughts about the rise and peristence of conspiracy theories and how they informed the movie.

What conditions are conducive to creating conspiracy theories?

It has been argued that America is particularly fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Some have even argued that the entire country began with a conspiracy theory.

I think that some ideas  from the revolutionary generation weren’t necessarily hinged to a strict adherence to the truth. There’s the idea that there’s some very powerful elite cabal conspiring against you and your material existence. That seems to be somewhere at the core of American life now.

I think more recently, material existence for many Americans has become genuinely more perilous. Our civic institutions have eroded to a tremendous degree. Our faith in journalism as a robust enterprise has also eroded.

For various economic and cultural reasons, the standard of life in America  has decreased. When that happens, people go looking for a reason and someone to blame. Conspiracy theories may provide the answers.

Connecting it back to Bugonia, it was important for me to not think that anyone who has conspiracy theories is either crazy, stupid, or a right-wing or a loony left-wing nut. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t being reductive with Teddy (Jesse Plemons) by making him any of those things. I don’t think he’s stupid. I don’t think he’s crazy. I don’t think he necessarily subscribes to one clear, identifiable political program.

I think that’s true of many people who take extreme actions. Whenever there’s somebody who does something extreme in our public life, there’s this immediate rush to ascribe a clear political motive that we understand to put them in a box. It’s all over the map because people are complex and sometimes also have quite contradictory viewpoints that they are able to reconcile in their own heads.

Discuss the character triad between Teddy, Michelle and Don.

I think there’s a tendency for some to see the movie as a two-hander, simply because two of the characters in that room (Teddy and Michelle) have this great tyranny of will around them. But Don is very much a part of that because he’s caught in the middle.

It’s a trifecta of characters. I saw Don as being the emotional intelligence of the film. I think Teddy and Michelle, in their own different ways, with their own quite different dug-in cultural attitudes, both believe they’re saving the world from humans.

Will Tracy. Photo by Marion Curtis / StarPix for Focus Features

Don wants to save Teddy. He is Teddy’s only friend and family. He feels both great empathy and fear for Teddy who has lost himself to this cause.

I think Don is the one who really sees all the characters in the film. I think he sees who everyone really is, what they really want, and what’s really happening in a way that the other two can’t. He just doesn’t have that ability to articulate himself in the same way or that same force of personality.

Teddy and Michelle have pretty clear ideas of who they are within that first conversation that they have. But then, who they are, what they want and their emotional biases are slowly revealed over the course of the film.

How did you avoid character stereotypes? 

Michelle works for a kind of bio-med, bio-ag company with seemingly progressive optics. In her office, you see pictures of her with Michelle Obama and David Geffen. She’s got this seemingly humane approach to the life work balance. She’s quite aware of herself as being someone who’s thoughtful, progressive, and liberal minded and has found a way to quite effectively weaponize that. I think she’s someone that we recognize, but not in the typical CEO way.

It’s quite easy to look at Teddy from the outset and think, “Oh, one of those guys, too online, a toxic, incel male.” He’s not that. He ends up being right about quite a bit. And even if he wasn’t correct about some of the specifics of his interplanetary theory, I think he’s identified the symptoms of the human illness quite correctly.

He’s rejected a lot of the things that we might ascribe to him when we first meet him. And in that dinner scene, he even says to Michelle, “I went through all of those political and cultural proclivities. I went to the grocery store hungry, and I kind of bought everything.” And then he rejected everything because he is his own guy.

Don doesn’t go through life guided by really deeply thought out or deeply convinced political or cultural attitudes. I don’t think that’s the way he lives. He doesn’t subscribe to anything really.

[More: Seth Reiss and Will Tracy Take A Look At ‘The Menu’]

Describe your process to write conspiracy theory stories. 

I first thought about the film’s structure around big set-piece conversations. The three in my head are when Michelle first comes to the basement, and then the second being when she’s had a night to process her thoughts and Teddy comes back down, she tells him, “I’ve had a night to think, and here’s what I think is going on with you, Teddy.”

The question at the heart of the film, is whether she’s an alien or not.

You have to evolve the conversation a bit. That second conversation is not really about whether she’s an alien or not. It’s about her trying to investigate and reveal to the audience a little bit more about what is motivating Teddy emotionally. And, of course, he’s ready for that argument. He’s got his counterarguments ready.

We learn a little bit more about Teddy and the fact that he’s really thought this through. We also learn a little bit more about the liberal prejudices Michelle has picked up.

It turns into this conversation about a guy who maybe feels he’s been lied to many times over the years and finally comes face-to-face with the person who’s been lying to him. It’s not really an alien versus human conversation. It’s really more of a have and have-not conversation. That scene ends with this evelation about Teddy’s mother Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) that maybe guiding him emotionally.

I want it to be more of a conversation between two people on opposite ends of a divide and what we can learn about them.

(L to R) Director Yorgos Lanthimos and director of photography Robbie Ryan.. Photo by Atsushi Nishijima/ Focus Features

Discuss the comedic tone of Bugonia.

I don’t often think about tone so much while I’m writing.

Maybe I just have a tone to the way that I always write. I’m not thinking about modulating it. I’m not in the middle of a scene and thinking, this scene needs more humor. We’re only at 25% humor. Maybe I should put in a joke here?

I imagine scenes or scenarios that are, by their very nature, quite extreme and therefore, by their very nature, absurdly or darkly funny.

It’s just these two hapless guys. They’re not real kidnappers even if they’re coming from a well-intentioned place. This is not really what they were put on this earth to do, but they feel they have to. There’s going to be things that are extreme and funny. The tension is going to make people laugh a bit, but the characters are playing it very straight.

I think if they’re playing it in a way that’s absurd or silly, then you’re not going to have that sad or tragic dimension. The characters are pitched in an emotionally real place.

Do you think Michelle has a traditional character arc?

Yes. Michelle is coming from a place of cultivating a smooth, shiny, obsidian-like surface of corporate and political and cultural normalcy and progressivism. But, I also think she’s quite an effective front-facing person.

She has an optical front that she wants to present to the world, and she’s become quite good at excusing her actions and the actions of her company. But as the film goes on, we learn a little bit more about her guilt and the fact that she has become, ‘The type of human being I never wanted to become.” Even in her attempts to come to this planet to save us, she started to mirror the worst aspects of us, and she’s aware of that.

This is an ambiguous or interesting thing about the final decision that she makes in the film. I think some may say, “As a clear-thinking, higher species, she’s seen what we’ve done to ourselves and what we’ve done to our planet as humans.” She says, “Well, the planet would be better off without them. And so with sadness, I have to exterminate them.”

Teddy and Don don’t change much.

How would you like the audience to interpret Bugonia?

Everyyone can interpret the film any way they want. Some people find the ending to be very bleak. I know other people find the ending to be very hopeful. I don’t think either person is wrong.

I think that kind of ambiguity will create a discussion or even a disagreement. That’s how it should be.

Personally, I see it as being a film that’s supposed to make you re-evaluate our relationship to each other in a political and cultural dialogue, not to go into that basement of human discourse with such a well-defined and reductive view of that person who’s sitting across from you – your interlocutor, your opponent. Maybe don’t think of them so much of an opponent, but to reassess who that person is and what their values and their motivations are.

We also need to re-evaluate our relationship with our own planet, what we’ve done to it, and what we’ve done to ourselves. Because in the end, it’s not some alien conspiracy. At the end of that film, you see that tableau of human life – people in very banal and ordinary, but also funny, interesting, weird, romantic or warm. You see a bit of what makes us awful, a bit of the things that are cold and miserable about us, but also the things that are wonderful.

by Staff Writer

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