‘Bugonia’ Writer Will Tracy On ‘Succession’ Inspiration And His ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’ Tech Bro Remake Idea

When Ari Aster saw Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s Save the Green Planet! he felt inspired to call upon Will Tracy to write a remake. Tracy’s writing credits include Succession, The Menu, The Regime and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, all of which perfectly placed him to write a screenplay about a disenfranchised man absorbed in conspiracy theories in the thick of a dystopian corporate hell. And thus, the Oscar-contending film Bugonia was born, with Aster producing and Yorgos Lanthimos at the helm.

In Bugonia, Jesse Plemons is Teddy, a blue collar guy who has met the sharp end of capitalism and in turn spiraled into an echo chamber of conspiracy theories. He fixates on Michelle (Emma Stone) — a cutthroat corporate chief, and his mom’s former boss — and decides to kidnap her with the help of his brother Don (Aidan Delbis) to prove that she is not, in fact, human.

Here, Tracy explains what pulled him into the story and how he worked with Lanthimos to bring the script to the screen.

DEADLINE: Ari Aster brought this to you. How did you two know each other?

I’m trying to remember how. We’re good friends now, so I’m trying to remember exactly how it started. I think he might’ve just gotten in touch with me because he had liked my work on Succession and had read The Menu, and we just were both living in New York at the time, so we just kind of became friendly. I usually meet him in the East Village and we get coffee or lunch and just started pretty soon working on some stuff.

DEADLINE: Did he tell you what he saw in your work that made him immediately think of you for this specifically?

Yeah. Yes, it’s a good question. I think maybe, well, probably with both projects, in particular with Succession, maybe he saw a willingness or facility with working with, for lack of a better term, contemporary themes, relevant themes in politics and culture and society, and, without hopefully preaching or being programmatic about any of those themes, being able to marry them into a story in some way. And I think probably he saw something in the premise of that original film that the original filmmakers could not have intended, that felt contemporary and American and felt in some ways germane to our moment. I can only guess that that’s what he was thinking. Maybe in The Menu he saw they’re both kind of, what’s the word people use nowadays? “Contained” narrative. It’s sort of a locked room, and how do you maintain tension and indeed escalate tension and stakes and comedy within that contained space, and when you find the moment to expand or explode the boundaries of that space a little bit. So maybe he saw that. I’m glad that he thought of me. I’ve never asked him why he picked me.

DEADLINE: Yes, I was thinking about the connection with Succession specifically because here in Bugonia you have this allegory of what happens when a society is split between disenfranchised workers and the 1%, and that to me is what the film’s about.

Yeah, that’s valid.

You have two people from extreme opposite ends of a cultural divide, people who think they know who the person on the other side of that divide is, and maybe they’ve been having the pre-argument with that person in their head for years.

DEADLINE: Can you tell me some of the ways you thought about creating this for an Anglo audience when it had been a Korean story? What are some of the key differences you wanted to employ?

I don’t know if I was thinking so much about Korean versus Anglo-American cultural differences that I could exploit. I think maybe it was more just the tone of the original film, or I suppose the preoccupation of the original film. It’s much more around the torture of the captive, which is quite brutal. And it might surprise you having seen Bugonia or some of my other work, that I somewhat of a weak stomach for that kind of thing. And also kind of interconnected between that and a police investigation. It’s happening outside the house to find the kidnapper and to find the captive, and I wasn’t really interested in either of those things. I think what the premise, when grafted onto, again, the kind of culture and political climate that I live in, what you could do, is you could have two people from extreme opposite ends of a cultural divide, people who think they know who the person on the other side of that divide is, and maybe they’ve been having the pre-argument with that person in their head for years, about who they are and what they believe and what they want and why they’re bulls–t, and they get together in a room where they actually have to do it and actually have to have the talk, but to give them both good arguments to make neither of them stupid, but also make their arguments flawed enough, both of them, where the other person can dismantle this carefully constructed facade of who they are and what they represent, and actually get at what the real emotional agenda is underneath there. So, I guess that’s what I thought was not so much Korean versus American, but how could you turn this movie into essentially what I do like to write, which is a chatty movie. It’s basically people in a room chatting, but hopefully, you find enough viscera in there where you can turn it into something tense and funny.

DEADLINE: I was really interested in the specifics of Teddy. I know you wrote this in the pandemic, the first Covid wave. And he is in an echo chamber of online conspiracies. A sort of self-affirming circular experience.

Even if you’re presented with completely contrary evidence, it’s like, “Well, I know a way to fold that into my theory!”

DEADLINE: And it’s really interesting to me because when people are disenfranchised and robbed of any kind of agency, conspiracy theories have become a way for people to feel like they have some power and knowledge.

Yes, agency and control.

DEADLINE: Did you hang out on any Reddit threads or in incel groups just to get the voice of it, that cacophony?

I did spend a little bit of time on there, and maybe not even for research for the film. I think I find myself, out of some kind of, my own weird search for knowledge and answers or something, or some confusion, or maybe a need to understand what people are saying, to feel connected to something. I kind of find myself dipping into those quarters anyway, as an observer. So I did quite a bit of that of Reddit and YouTube comments, and even a bit of 4Chan, which was quite hot at the time, but to a certain extent, I didn’t want to make Teddy into kind of a composite of those, whatever the disorders du jour were, I wanted to make a guy who felt like he had his own thing. Even “incel”, which feels culturally valid to call him that in some ways, well, he’s literally not, he’s voluntarily celibate. He’s quite purposeful in that sense.

I think the other thing I probably had in my head was, and this has been definitely reinforced since with a few recent events, but whenever there’s a thing like this, whether it’s a domestic terrorist or a shooter of some kind, or an assassin, or whatever it is, there’s now, of course, that immediate cultural reaction to sort of assign blame to the other side for that, like, “That’s one of theirs,” or, “That’s clearly a right-wing nut job,” or, “That’s a leftist loon.” And then, of course, we watch what happens. Inevitably, the cliche it seems to always happen is that the information comes in and it’s, “They’re an anti-fascist registered Republican gun-lover who identifies as non-binary.” It corresponds to no clear category at all. And so that was kind of in my head too, that this is someone who maybe cycled through a bunch of different things and didn’t find a story that appealed to them, and so they had to create their own.

DEADLINE: When I think about Emma’s character Michelle too, I think so much about Succession and about the allegory of the 1% that seem like aliens to the rest of us, it is very resonant.

Yeah. Everything you see her do in the first bit of the movie are things that many people in her socioeconomic strata will do — the oxygen mask on the treadmill and the anti-aging diet and all that stuff, but it’s all looks quite alien. I always think about Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you remade that today in San Francisco, you already have the tech people, the biomed people…

DEADLINE: Oh my god, you have to make this!

In fact, they literally have plans for interstellar domination. They all want to go to outer space, and rockets, and conquer other planets, and they all think the same, they all eat the same. So yeah, I think about that a little bit. It would then be very easy to look at someone like Michelle and convince yourself that she’s an alien.

DEADLINE: I need to watch this remake of Body Snatchers, seriously. I actually just feel like that was the best elevator pitch I’ve ever heard for anything. Tell Me about Yorgos coming on board Bugonia?

I’m never quite sure the chronology, but it was a wild it while, and also, even once he came onto the script, he was still working on Poor Things at that point, and that movie had a very long post for all those visuals and stuff. And while he was doing post on Poor Things, he went off and shot a whole other movie, Kinds of Kindness, and then did the whole festival circuit for that, and then jumped right into this.

DEADLINE: The man is a machine. No wonder he’s been talking about taking a vacation. When you were writing did you visualize Yorgos directing?

No, never. To be honest, I didn’t really know who it’s going to direct it, or really even have much of a strong sense of if it was even going to happen. I wrote it really during that Covid lockdown where I wasn’t sure there was going to be a movie industry, and the whole deal seemed a little bit kind of smoky. And I thought, well, is Ari directing? He wasn’t, I don’t think, but that was a little bit unclear to me at first. And then I think there was an original plan was that Jang Joon-hwan who directed Save the Green Planet!, the original film, that he might direct it. Even though the script was very different than his film, and the idea of someone directing a remake of their own movie is always a little bit of a tricky idea.

There was a point where there was nobody attached, and then there was a question of, well, who do we send it to? And I think Yorgos was the first that came to mind, but he was not someone I had in mind while I was writing it at all. It just so happened that once I took a look at the script again with him in mind, did I kind of realize how sympatico maybe our sensibilities were. Indeed, I think we sent it to him that week, and he said that yes that week, and he said it was a very quick yes. It was also the least amount of work had to do on a script before shooting.

It was very quick. I was kind of waited the whole time, I’m still in some weird way, waiting for the other shoe to fall. It’s not always like — look, I’m not digging ditches, I don’t want to complain — but being a screenwriter can be a little bit tricky. A lot of shoes drop on you. And it just never really happened with this one. It was fairly painless. It took a while from when I wrote it to when it was actually produced and then released, but I was kind of busy doing other things, and this was just sort of happily bubbling away in the background. And it happened. It was just the right group.

DEADLINE: Did Yorgos give you any notes? Were there man changes when it actually came time to shoot?

There were notes. It was not a tremendous amount though. I always just hate the sort of, what does it all mean kind of notes from directors where some directors who don’t write, if it’s a script they haven’t written, they still need to feel this kind of cosmic sense of authorship. And they have to kind of make the movie into a puzzle in their head, that they are then solving the puzzle that you could have solved. And you have to patiently, as a screenwriter say, “I know what it is. If you want to answer the puzzle, I can tell you.” And Yorgos just doesn’t play any of that sh-t. I mean, we didn’t even really have any conversations about what does it all mean? He doesn’t want to get into that. I think he wants to, in some sense, preserve the ambiguity and the mystery.

I think Lynch had a similar kind of thing: the movie tells you what it’s about, and if it’s not in there, then I don’t know what to tell you. And I think that’s a bit of the case for Yorgos.

If we overtalk the meaning, then that’s going to find its way inevitably into rewrites. And then you have a movie that’s kind of telling you what to think, and then you have a movie where you leave a theater and there’s not really a conversation to have, because he just had a movie that kind of told you what it is. So he just doesn’t overtalk that. And so he gave me very clear, actionable notes on a few structure, move this here, move that there, and a few little bits just to make it maybe slightly more in his visual style, I guess. But there wasn’t dialogue, nothing really, and just a few kind of little bits. And I think everything he gave me was, and this is in some ways not a credit to me, but more of a credit to how clear of a laundry list he gave me, that it was all the couple days work for everything that he ever gave me. So it was really pretty painless.

I think Lynch had a similar kind of thing: the movie tells you what it’s about, and if it’s not in there, then I don’t know what to tell you. And I think that’s a bit of the case for Yorgos, and I think maybe with this particular film, because it does seem to, in some ways, to use a word from the film, be in a dialogue with what is happening in our world right now, that he has to somehow answer for what the program of the film politically is. And I don’t think either Yorgos and I feel that it’s that kind of movie, really. I’m not any more anxious than he is, or eager than he is to answer those kind of questions.