The Crucial Role Ari Aster Played in Bugonia’s Alien Conspiracy Theory

Screenwriter Will Tracy is not sure if Ari Aster had any direct notions of remaking Save the Green Planet! when they sat down for lunch back in 2019. The scribe just recalls in those blissful months before the pandemic—and acrimony that would make even the 2010s seem quaint—that the Midsommar filmmaker asked Tracy what he thought of a relatively obscure 2003 South Korean film where a conspiracy theorist becomes convinced his CEO is an alien. Tracy had not seen it.

“He sent me a little link to it, a very janky kind of video file link, and I was taking a few notes immediately,” Tracy says when thinking back on that fateful meeting. Right off the bat, a storyteller who had only recently joined the Emmy-winning writer’s room of HBO’s Succession—and before that had worked on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver—recognized the deeply inherent appeal in the material. “I saw what Ari meant. There is something in this premise that these filmmakers in Korea in 2003 could not have foreseen that is quite eerily well-suited to our current climate, and our cultural political moment.”

It was the story of two people of vastly different classes and backgrounds becoming convinced they’re communicating with someone from another planet. And if it felt apt in 2019, by the time Tracy’s version reached the screen under the title Bugonia—complete with Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos and his Oscar-winning muse Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons in the key roles—it would feel like a veritable documentary.

Considering that Aster (who stayed with Bugonia the whole way as a producer) also wrote and directed Eddington in roughly the same timeframe, it is perhaps unsurprising that Tracy sees his own film as a strange product of the last five years. While it is based on Save the Green Planet!, Tray contends he only watched it the one time six years ago on Aster’s video jank. And indeed, much of the tragicomic space oddity Tracy ultimately created is informed by when he wrote the first draft in a near feverish state during a three-week gallop in spring 2020; a period when he, his wife, and their newborn child could not leave their Brooklyn studio apartment.

“The film has become more relevant, my theory being because we’re all still living downstream of those months,” Tracy considers. “We’re all kind of still in those months, feeling the anger and confusion and destabilization of those months, and the lack of trust in each other. Everyone’s inventing their own story because maybe they don’t feel they can trust the official story. Reality is sort of up for grabs.”

In this reality free-for-all, Bugonia finds its central characters in Teddy (Plemons), a deeply unhappy loner who, paradoxically, spends all his time with his equally befuddled, neurodivergent cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). It’s Teddy who convinces Don to believe that the local big pharma queen bee CEO Michelle (Stone) is an alien whom they must kidnap, shave the head of, and potentially torture if she will not willingly take them to her mothership. There are striking differences, too, between the film that Tracy wrote and Lanthimos directed, and the Korean original. In the 2003 picture, the Teddy proxy is not aided by a cousin but by his deeply naive girlfriend. The CEO he targets is also a man. Conversely, Bugonia opens with Teddy convincing his cousin that they should chemically kill their libidos in order to not be ensnared by the distraction of Michelle’s feminine wiles. It both would seem to play into the fear of the loner male of recent years and to subvert it. Tracy takes exception though at describing Teddy as an incel.

“He’s quite voluntarily celibate,” the screenwriter laughs. “He literally chemically castrates himself, so I guess he’s technically the opposite of an incel, right?” With that said, he does contend the script is intentionally playing with what have been third rails in our cultural conversations since at least 2020.

Adds Tracy, “He feels like he’s part of the thing people write trend pieces about now, the epidemic of the lonely American male. And in some ways he is that, and it’s hard to argue that he’s not. But in other ways, I wanted to make him quite smart and self-aware about the fact that think pieces like that are being written. I think when [Stone’s character] tries to pin him down and say, ‘Well, you know, I think you’re in an echo chamber,’ he’s ready for that argument. He’s heard that bullshit. He’s read all the think pieces and he’s cast around looking for a way to describe himself, and he’s cast about looking for an identity or a movement to join, or a political project to advocate.”

Ultimately Tracy wants both central characters to subvert and deconstruct preconceived notions from its audience, which in the case of Teddy meant that if Tracy was writing a movie about a conspiracy theorist, he “wanted to make sure that in a world where conspiracy theories have been so cynically co-opted by very powerful and elite forces in our world, including the White House, I wanted to make this particular conspiracy theorist not crazy, not stupid.”

Meanwhile his experience of having studied the Murdoch media empire for years in the Succession trenches prepared him for understanding the PR-perfect precision with which Michelle attempts to assuage and comfort Teddy while held prisoner in his basement. Albeit even then, there are differences that the screenwriter of The Menu enjoyed taking a satirical dig at.

“I guess what makes it different with her is what you might uncharitably or reductively call her frictionless smooth corporate-speak has a little bit more of a centrist, woke liberal optics to it, which is not the Murdochs, and not the Roys,” says Tracy. “She has a little bit more of that sheen, and framed pictures of her with David Geffen and Michelle Obama. So she’s coming from a little bit different part of the culture than the Roys. But there’s a little bit of a bullshit to that veneer too. You sense that maybe her political engagement, or even her openness to ideas—I think quite valid ideas about diversity and so forth—that she’s kind of going through the motions. She’s jumping through the hoops a bit.”

It’s an acute portrait of two characters that Tracy had formed long before he even knew who would play them. In fact, in an unusual break from how director Lanthimos developed the screenplays of The Favourite and Poor Things over years with Tony McNamara, Bugonia’s script was mostly done by the time the Greek auteur came aboard. Up to that point, Tracy was not sure if the movie would ever get made. He recalls Aster at least musing he might step in if “worst came to worst,” but that was never a serious option with Aster being a full-fledged writer-director in his own right after the success of Hereditary and Midsommar.

However, Lanthimos was apparently looking for a departure from the long development process of Poor Things, and jumped at Bugonia’s peculiar vision of humanity.

“He gave me some great actionable notes, but it was like a few days’ work,” says Tracy. “It wasn’t like a lot of stuff. The only thing that changed really was in terms of Emma’s character. Once she came on, I think I’d originally written the script in that the character would be more like mid 50s, closer to 60 in age.” Tracy contends that on one level, this made it more believable since he originally based the Michelle character on Mary Barra, the General Motors CEO, but in the biomedical/agriculture/tech space that Bugonia is set, having a younger chief executive is more common. However, it also allowed him to work with one of the best performers of her generation who dived into Michelle’s deceptively domineering personality.

“I was kind of ready for ‘the actor’s pass,’” Tracy says. “That there would be all these changes I’d have to make for the movie star, but that’s not her style, man. She’s just great. She didn’t want to do that. She trusts the script and she trusts Yorgos.”

And that trust has led to a movie that will almost assuredly achieve what it sets out to do in Tracy’s mind: start a conversation for anyone who sees the picture.

“I don’t want people walking away with any one interpretation of the theme, or to feel either too bummed out or too joyous or whatever,” Tracy considers. “I just want people to leave and feel like, ‘Oh, we can get a drink afterwards, have dinner afterwards, and there’s actually a conversation to be had because of the movie.’”

Bugonia starts its dialogue on Oct. 24 in limited release and nationwide on Oct. 31.