In “Bugonia,” after Teddy (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps Michelle (Emma Stone), a large percentage of the movie takes place inside the conspiracy-obsessed kidnapper’s house. Specifically, his basement, where he goes to extreme lengths to get what he wants from the powerful, cunning CEO he’s holding captive.
While a guest on this week’s episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, director Yorgos Lanthimos discussed why the limitations of the basement setting were cinematically necessary.
“Films build microcosms, and those can be of varying sizes, and this is one of the smaller ones. That creates a lot of tension and allows you to scrutinize the situation,” said Lanthimos. “It’s like looking through a microscope a little bit, if you limit things, if you go further and deeper and closer, [you ask as a viewer], ‘What is there?’ And especially if there’s an explosive dynamic, you’re so close, it’s amplified.”
Working within restricted space, Lanthimos felt the need to go big with the filmmaking, both with supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Johnnie Burn’s sound design and composer Jerskin Fendrix’s music, which is by far the biggest score in the score-adverse director’s career.
“I just felt that the juxtaposition of a really big soundtrack would be interesting,” said Lanthimos. “There’s a lot of big themes and a lot of big feelings, so I wanted that to be represented in an extreme way in the soundtrack and music and sound design. It’s a similar reason that we ended up shooting the film on VistaVision.”
That’s right, “One Battle After Another” and “The Brutalist” aren’t the only two recent films that breathed life back into the once-dead large-format and barely functioning VistaVision cameras that had spent decades on the shelf. But unlike Lathimos, Paul Thomas Anderson and Brady Corbet reached for the VistaVision to lend a big-screen grandeur to what were the directors’ most expansive and epic films to date.
While on the podcast, Lanthimos recognized how counterintuitive it was shooting his smallest (spatial speaking) film on the largest possible negative, but said that after using VistaVision to shoot the reanimation scene in “Poor Things,” the director and his cinematographer Robbie Ryan knew the format would be perfect to frame his “Bugonia” characters. “It was all about these characters, it was all about this very intense environment, photographing them in a large format, making their portraits bigger than life in a way, just added this necessary layer to express all these big ideas and feelings.”
Aesthetically, Lanthimos preferred the VistaVision over the more well-established and less cumbersome 65mm film cameras — the images weren’t as wide (he wanted “boxier”), and the tonality, depth, and richness of the image appealed to his and Ryan’s sensibilities.
“After ‘Poor Things,’ we kept thinking about the images, and Robbie [kept] asking around about the VistaVision cameras,” said Lanthimos.
On “Poor Things,” they had only been able to use VistaVision on the non-dialogue reanimation scene because the old cameras were too loud to record sync sound. Afterwards, the persistent Ryan eventually tracked down a quieter Wilcam 11 VistaVision camera.
“We discovered this one camera that exists in the world, that’s functioning, which is quieter than those cameras, but it’s huge, and temperamental, and very difficult to load, and it takes a lot of time,” said Lanthimos.
Yorgos Lanthimos, cinematographer Robbie Ryan, Emma Stone, and the Wilcam 11 on the ‘Bugonia’ set©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection
The descriptor of the Wilcam 11 as “functioning” is up for debate, as it created constant problems on the “Bugonia” set. “One Battle After Another” cinematographer Michael Bauman told IndieWire the quieter WilCam 11 was so cumbersome and temperamental (completely failing during some camera tests according to camera operator Colin Anderson), PTA deemed it “unreliable” during the testing phase. On “One Battle” they went with the louder VistaVision camera, switching to Super 35mm for interior shots where the camera was in very close proximity to the actors delivering dialogue, and testing ways to eliminate “the extremely” loud camera noise in post-production when the camera was at a certain distance or outdoors.
Lanthimos expressed “surprise” that the dialogue-heavy “One Battle” got away with the noisier camera, before acknowledging how unique his film’s needs were. “I guess we had a lot of scenes in a basement, a very enclosed space — the sound of a camera that loud was really problematic for us. We couldn’t get the camera many feet away, in order to try and dump down the sound a little bit. And so for us, there wasn’t any other solution. And in the end, it kind of became an advantage. We embraced it, we went with it, and it just became a restriction in a way that makes you more creative.”
To hear Yorgos Lanthimos’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
