“Bugonia’s” production designer talks about building a house and hiding clues

Spoiler Alert: This story discusses major plot points and reveals the ending of “Bugonia,” now in theaters.

In Bugonia, Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical company CEO who is kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delvis). Teddy is a conspiracy theorist who believes Michelle is an alien trying to destroy Earth. After kidnapping Michelle, Teddy and Don lock her in the basement and interrogate her to get her to confess.

Production designer James Price knew he needed to create contrasting spaces: Michelle’s corporate world, her ultra-modern home, and Teddy and Don’s old, smelly home stuck in time. At the same time, we knew that in creating these spaces, we could hide all the clues about the characters and their storylines in plain sight.

don and teddy’s house

The film reunites Price with Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos. When Price read the script, he knew the house needed to be in a secluded and isolated location.

Teddy lives with his cousin Don. Through flashbacks, the audience learns that Michelle once lived in the house with her mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone), who is currently hospitalized in a coma using drugs manufactured by Michelle’s pharmaceutical company.

Price ended up building the house from the ground up to create a fully immersive world. “We wanted to create a living, breathing set, so it’s no longer a set, it’s a location,” he explains.

Mr. Price also knew he needed to build a basement because that’s where Teddy and Don would keep Michelle. “I’d spent enough time in America to realize that the landscape wasn’t that different from England. I said, ‘I think you can do this in England. You can build it here. We can tailor the house to our needs, and you can make the movie the way you like it.’

Price designed the house with cinematographer Robbie Ryan in mind. “If you wire and light it like you would in a real house, everything will be naturally lit,” he realized.

Price also gave the house a backstory. “We used to have a little bit of money, but it was in bad repair. The family lived in that condition for a long time,” he continued, “the last time it was renovated was probably in the late 1990s.”

He placed his home in that time warp. The idea was that in the scene with Teddy’s mother, she would be gone for a while and that Teddy would have to take care of his cousin. “He finds solace in this theory that there’s an alien conspiracy. We looked at a lot of real estate agents’ houses and found references from real life and eBay. We looked at photojournalism from the early 1990s.”

Another influence came from real life experiences. “I had been to a farmhouse in New Zealand, and their parents had died when they were teenagers. There were three brothers living in this beautiful colonial house, and it was very unpleasant. There was shit everywhere. I knew I had taken pictures, but I couldn’t find any pictures. But I had a vision of what the house should look like because of it.”

Price also collaborated with the film’s costume designer, Jennifer Johnson. During the camera test, the two started talking about clothes, patterns, and aging. They discussed how Teddy expressed dirt and unwashed texture. It was a process of finding out how much to make it believable. “There’s a story about Teddy in that house.”

Regarding the basement, the plan was to build it above the stage, but during scouting, it was suggested that the basement be built under the house. “Fortunately, the ground we dug was clay, so we were able to dig.”

There’s a secret room in the basement, and Michelle finds it. It reveals “the inner sanctum that this whole conspiracy is based on,” Price explains. Teddy continues to study dismembered body parts, heads in jars, and photographs of people he believed were aliens.

The script said there was a chest of drawers in front of the door, and when you saw the light, you pushed it. But Price admitted: “It was a crappy idea.” He suggested that the secret room should be insulated and hidden behind the stairs. Price looked for more ideas and decided to carve a chalk surface in his basement.

Inside the secret room, Michelle discovers that Teddy is a serial killer who has done extensive research on aliens. “There may be a vacuum-packed head, this is the whole tinfoil conspiracy.”

Regarding Teddy’s idea of ​​what a spaceship might look like, Price decided to use a 3D printer to create something fanciful yet believable.

michelle’s world

Is she an alien? Isn’t she an alien? That is the question the audience has when watching ‘Bugonia’.

But the answer lies in Price’s product design. “It was difficult to navigate,” he admitted. “But I wanted it to be obvious to the viewer that she’s an alien. She lives in a spaceship, and her office is a spaceship. It’s a spaceship in a kind of modernist sense.”

In contrast, everything the characters say is the exact opposite. “She says this, and she’s very convincing, she’s not an alien.”

Mr. Price looked to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as inspiration for what a spaceship might look like and applied it to an office or home.

“No one will believe it,” Price says. He brought his experience as a production designer to the television version of “The Ipcress File.” In it, he abandoned all signs in his work. “When you meet Master Dalby, he’s a bad guy, but you don’t think he’s a bad guy. He has black floors and all the set direction and design, you know he’s a bad guy. But everything he says is so patriotic and to the point that you believe he’s not a bad guy.”

Price laid out a clue there. He chose a spaceship-like home for Michelle, and her office was minimalist. He said, “This dark carpet leads to this glass ticket booth.”

spaceship

As it turns out, Teddy isn’t as crazy as he seems. He was right all along, Michelle Fuller is indeed an alien.

Apart from the clues hidden in his home and office, Price now had to design and build the spaceship itself. Interestingly, the design Teddy envisioned was very close to what was ultimately revealed in the film. Michelle is an ancient Andromeda race that has watched over humanity since time immemorial. Man is a scientific project that traces back to the origins of humanity.

In the script, Price knew he wasn’t going to design a traditional spaceship. This was the world of Yorgos Lanthimos. The idea was that when the spaceship was revealed, the audience would see Michel’s throne room. “I always had this instinct that it should be organic,” Price explains. “I had this idea that the throne room should be a sacred temple, like Stonehenge, with water.”

Visually, Price was inspired by the idea of ​​birth and rebirth, a concept he kept returning to throughout the design process. The backstory about his spaceship included a sacred pool at its center. “Everything in this thing comes from this water. We thought it should be a womb-shaped pool, but everything around it is skeletons.” Price continued, “All the buildings that evolve[from it]are based on human organs, like the liver and kidneys. So there’s a lot of human anatomy.”

While reading the script, Price also came across the concept of a Dyson sphere, a structure that harnesses power from the sun. “We thought, what if this was powered by the sun?”

Building a spaceship was Price’s next challenge. “There was one that was 50 feet tall and had a liquid that was the same color as a strawberry milkshake.” Price said he had fun building the set, though he didn’t provide details. He teases, “The seats in the throne room became like worn teeth. Everything was based on anatomy.”