Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is back in the Venice Competition with his latest feature, Bugonia, which once again stars his frequent collaborator Emma Stone.
The last time Lanthimos and Stone collaborated on a Venice competition title, it was Poor Things, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, which won the Golden Lion alongside four Oscars and two Golden Globes.
“I love working with Yorgos. I love the material that he’s drawn to and the worlds he wants to explore, and the characters that he’s been generous enough to let me try my hand at,” Stone said of her collaboration with Lanthimos.
“With the exception of Will, we have all worked with Yorgos multiple times. So what it ends up feeling like is a really comforting and safe environment to explore and feel as free as possible. I know everybody says it’s ‘like we’re a family,’ but it does really feel like that when you’ve made so many things together and you’ve sort of been in those trenches together.”
Stone described Bugonia as particularly “reflective of this point in time in our world” and a “really fascinating and moving, funny and fucked up, and alive” project.
An English-language remake of South Korean filmmaker Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet!, the film follows two conspiracy-obsessed young men who kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.
“Not much of the dystopia in this film is very fictional,” Lanthimos said of the film’s plot. “A lot of it is very reflective of the real world. So I wouldn’t necessarily call it a dystopic film, which, in my mind, is presenting an image of the future and what happened to civilization.”
Lanthimos continued to say that Bugonia instead shows what is “happening now” in society.
“Humanity is facing a reckoning very soon and people need choose the right path, otherwise, I don’t know how much time we have with everything that’s happening in the world, with technology, AI, wars, climate change and the denial of all these things,” he added.
Bugonia also stars Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Stavros Halkias, and Alicia Silverstone. Lanthimos directs from a screenplay by Will Tracy, whose recent credits include The Menu and Succession.
Plemons, who was also in attendance at this afternoon’s presser, described Lanthimos’ unique films as deeply humanistic. Plemons previously starred in the filmmaker’s Kinds of Kindness.
“His movies, however you want to classify them, I always perceive them among many other things as having a real human quality to them,” he said. “So, as absurd or dark or you know, humorous or all these other qualities. At the core, they all seem to be exploring something very human, which is interesting to me.”
The film is produced by Element Pictures’ Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe; Yorgos Lanthimos via Pith; Emma Stone via Fruit Tree; Square Peg’s Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen; and CJ ENM’s Miky Lee and Jerry Kyoungboum Ko.
Focus Features will open the film on Oct. 24 in a limited engagement ahead of a wide break on Oct. 31.
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