SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points and reveals the ending for “Bugonia,” currently playing in theaters.
Yorgos Lanthimos and his go-to composer, Jerskin Fendrix, began discussing “Bugonia,” back in 2023.
But Lanthimos had one request. “He said he’d like me not to read the script and not know anything about it,” Fendrix says. Additionally, Lanthimos directed him not to watch the original film it is based on, the 2003 South Korean film “Save the Green Planet!“ by Jang Joon-hwan.
The approach marked a new chapter for their collaboration. On “Poor Things,” Fendrix had access to the script and a lot of concept art. For “Kinds of Kindness, he had the script. This time around, Lanthimos only shared three words with Fendrix: bees, basement and spaceship.
“If you’ve seen the film, it makes sense. However, without having seen the film, it was quite challenging to identify the commonalities between those three concepts. If anything, it was unconventional,” Fendrix admits, though he agreed it was a fun approach.
“Bugonia” stars Emma Stone as Michelle, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. She’s kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis), who keep Michelle in a basement as they press her to confess she is an alien. Teddy also lives in a remote ranch house where he keeps bees.
Fendrix says he spent months researching those three words and the concepts around them. “I looked into the different meanings and applications they could have and then tried to see what kind of connective tissue I could find between them before actually writing the music.”
In finding the score behind the bees, he says, “Bees have an interesting and familiar sound which is employed a great deal in the film.”
He goes on to say he was interested in systems, “I was interested in geometric ideas. Honeycomb is such a big part of imagery around bees. That’s very representative of how uniform and equal, and also how complicated they are as a social structure. I saw a lot of things coming up through designs and systems in basements and other architectural theories to do with that. And also spaceships. There are literally spaceships that have honeycomb patterns on the side of them, because they tessellate in a way that seems conducive to their purpose.”
On reflection, Fendrix reveals, “If I’d known what the film was about, I would have written in a very different way, which is a testament to Yorgos’ direction.”
For the film’s basement sequences, Fendrix says, “You’ve got this conspiracy theory guy who’s gone way too far down this internet rabbit hole. It’s just a very sad story about him and his cousin. In reality, he’s fighting for the fate of the world, like this is an apocalypse film. … The score is basically there in the background, saying, the stakes are high.”
That’s because the third act reveals that Teddy was right all along, and Michelle is an alien. She’s an Andromeda, an ancient species that has been watching over humanity since the dawn of time.
“The spaceship music I wrote was purely orchestral, the basement music I wrote was purely synthesizer, and then the bees’ stuff was a combination of the two.”
But Lanthimos didn’t use the music Fendrix assumed he would. “The synthesizer is the only bit that made it into the film for the final scene of the spaceship. The music isn’t this big final fanfare. The spaceship music is quite ambient and peaceful in a certain way, but also alien in a sense.”
