When he set out to make his third film, “Bunker,” about a slow-burning conflict between two married people who have grown apart, Oscar-winning French director Florian Zeller had Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” in mind.
Like Kubrick, who cast then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a couple whose relationship is unraveling, Zeller wanted to exploit the permeability between fiction and reality by putting Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem — partners for nearly two decades — on-screen as husband and wife.
“I loved ‘Eyes Wide Shut,’ this ambivalent proposition presented to the audience where you’re not quite sure what you’re being invited to watch,” Zeller says. With Cruz and Bardem, he says, he wanted to use “what they are to touch on something more authentic and more unsettling for the audience.”
“Is it fiction? Is it another version of fiction? Where is the line between reality and fiction?” With Cruz and Bardem, he says, he wanted to use “what they are, in the noblest sense of the term, to touch on something more authentic and more unsettling for the audience.”
In fact, the prospect of bringing Cruz and Bardem together on screen came before the story. Zeller says he began “daydreaming about the idea of seeing them together on screen,” rather than writing two characters and then wondering who might play them. Although the actors had appeared together before, Zeller was intrigued that they had never played a married couple. “That permeability between reality and fiction seemed to me a truly fascinating project,” he says.
Nursing sparkling water at Paris’ posh Royal Monceau hotel, Zeller is discussing “Bunker” for the first time, and there is plenty riding on the film. It marks his return to directing four years after “The Son” and it’s also his comeback to Venice, where that film received a far cooler reception than “The Father” which had opened at Sundance and went on to win two Oscars (for actor Anthony Hopkins and screenplay shared by Zeller and Christopher Hampton). Both films were based on successful stage productions.
So “Bunker” represents a reset. It’s Zeller’s first solo screenplay, written for Cruz and Bardem, and a film that feels personal, yet broadens Zeller’s canvas beyond the intimate family dramas of his past two features. It’s also the first film he’s produced, with Federica Sainte-Rose, through his Mediawan-owned vehicle Blue Morning Pictures.
Zeller, whom I’ve interviewed several times in recent years, is usually inquisitive, peppering me with thoughtful questions about my professional life and my son. This time, he seems more reserved, even nervous, as we sit down. Looking casually chic in a navy blue Zegna cotton jacket over a blue tee shirt, he speaks French with unusual precision and at one point stops to apologize for what he considers a meandering response: “I’m answering in a roundabout way — forgive me. I haven’t slept much, so it’s a little difficult.” The apology is almost comical — even when Zeller thinks he is speaking in zigzags, his answers are lucid, each digression eventually finding its way back to the point.
And he does warm up. Somewhere around the midpoint of our conversation, he begins discreetly snacking on cashews, and the guardedness falls away.
“Bunker” arrives during an unusually busy year for Cruz, who stars in Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” and has a cameo in “La Bola Negra,” the Cannes prize-winning film that Netflix acquired in May. But it’s her leading turn in Zeller’s film — as a wife whose growing disillusionment becomes the story’s emotional core — that could put her firmly in contention for a best actress Oscar. Sony Pictures Classics, which worked with Zeller on his first two films, acquired “Bunker” for North America and is likely betting that Bardem and Cruz’s explosive performances will propel the film in the awards conversation, in multiple categories, following its run at Venice and Toronto. SPC previously campaigned for “The Father” which scored six Oscar nominations, including best picture, in 2020.
Bardem plays Miguel, a celebrated architect tempted by a morally dubious but hugely lucrative commission to build a secret survivalist bunker for a reclusive tech billionaire, Andrew (Paul Dano). That leads his wife, the more idealistic Sofia (Cruz), to question her husband’s values and the foundations of their 17-year marriage.
Like Miguel, Zeller knows something about reaching a point of professional success and wondering where ambition should take you next. Now 47, the Paris-born Sciences Po graduate was a celebrated novelist and playwright when he leaped into filmmaking. His plays, translated by Christopher Hampton, have won Tony and Olivier awards for stars including Frank Langella and Kenneth Cranham.
He jokes that the most incongruous offer to come his way arrived after “The Father” screened at Sundance. His agent told him a major studio wanted him for a huge project.
“It was the story of a man who lost his dog. It was adapted from a book that was said to have moved every dog owner. And I’m allergic to dogs. And in the story, the dog talked,” Zeller says, laughing. “It was hard to imagine anything further removed from me.”
He turned it down. For Zeller, who writes his own films, directing has to begin with something that feels personal, even when the story draws on outside sources. He says he has never been tempted to direct a film he didn’t write.
The dog story has an echo in “Bunker.” Miguel recalls how Sofia fell for him on their first date after mistaking his allergy-induced tears — caused by her cat — for an emotional response to what she was telling him. When I ask Zeller whether the scene came from personal experience, he laughs. “It’s a story that resembles my story,” he says.
But the story of “Bunker,” which was inspired by the 2009 movie “The Man Next Door,” soon grew beyond the central couple. While “Bunker” retains the psychological intensity that has become Zeller’s signature, it is also more overtly political than his previous work, looking at how socioeconomic anxieties shape relationships and family dynamics.
“It takes a look at the contemporary world and explores all these modern fears — about rampant individualism, fear of the future and environmental issues, the intensification of social injustice, and so on,” Zeller says. “But rather than simply being a commentary on the world, it’s an experience seen through the eyes of a couple.”
One of the inspirations for the film came from an article Zeller read about how Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg was building a vast underground survival bunker for 30 people in Hawaii. “I was fascinated by this story. This man had made his fortune connecting people with one another, yet at the same time was preparing a plan B to completely cut himself off from the rest of humanity,” he says.
The anecdote became, for Zeller, a metaphor for our era. “It addressed a political issue — namely, the folly of extreme wealth, which consists in believing that it can protect us from everything, that we can buy time, health and security.”
That tension also shaped the film’s visual language. Rather than shooting on location in London, Zeller built Miguel and Sofia’s modern home in a studio in Madrid (where Cruz and Bardem live with their children). “I wanted to build a house that would allow me to work on the viewer’s perception,” he says. “At first, you think it’s a very open house with lots of glass. But the further you get into the story, the more it begins to resemble a bunker.”
The studio became its own psychological experiment. “We experienced that bunker ourselves, in a studio without any light for several weeks,” Zeller says, describing how the environment pushed the cast and crew toward the same sense of isolation and paranoia that permeates the film.
That meticulous approach extends to details viewers probably wouldn’t register. Zeller describes filmmaking as composing “a set of codes” that are not immediately perceptible to the audience but quietly work to create meaning and poetry. Color, objects, books, costumes and music all become part of that hidden architecture.
References to “The Odyssey,” for instance, run throughout the film, from a sculpture of Odysseus in Miguel’s office to Sofia reading Milan Kundera’s “Ignorance,” another story of homecoming. When Miguel is being seduced by the bunker project, Zeller and composer Volker Bertelmann even weave voices resembling the Sirens into the score. “It’s through poetic codes like these that you create a universe,” Zeller says, “and I think that’s what is most powerful about a film.”
The attention to detail extended to his cast. Because Andrew and Miguel never meet in person in the film, Zeller ensured that Dano and Bardem never crossed paths during production.
“We never see Paul Dano in full because he’s on a screen. I remember there were long discussions about what shoes he should wear. Something about the shoes was going to inform his character,” says Zeller, adding that Dano was able to create an “archetypal tech billionaire.”
Another secondary, yet crucial role in the film is Miguel’s neighbor, which Zeller says he wrote specifically for Stephen Graham, the British actor and co-creator of “Adolescence.”
“It’s the story of a neighbor who instills fear in Javier Bardem,” Zeller says. “Usually, it’s Javier Bardem who scares others.” And although physically much smaller than Bardem, Graham possessed what Zeller calls both “a menacing power” and “an incredible humanity,” making him the perfect foil.
The backbone of “Bunker,” however, is Cruz and Bardem. Cruz was the first to read the screenplay, and before agreeing to star, she asked Zeller if he would still offer her the role if Bardem turned him down. “I understood that this was really very important to them — to always be seen as independent artists,” the director says. But had either actor declined, Zeller adds, he probably would not have made the movie at all. “The DNA of the film was the fact that it was them and the fact that they were a real couple.”
Zeller was particularly interested in stripping away some of the distance Bardem often creates between himself and his roles. “Javier has played characters who are sometimes very, very far removed from who he is, and he does that incredibly well,” Zeller says. “But here, what interested me was trying to move silently closer to them — not toward their biographical truth, but toward the truth of their emotions.”
Although “Bunker” isn’t sexually charged, Zeller says the ambiguity surrounding Sofia’s relationship with an American writer played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, who auditioned for the part in London, was far more interesting than a conventional affair.
“It could have been a story about infidelity… But that story has already been told a thousand times. Here, it’s a deeper, more subtle destabilization within a couple. It’s the type of encounter that throws us off course, and we’re no longer quite sure who we are or what we think,” Zeller says.
The uncertainty even prompted Cruz to press him for answers. “She said to me, ‘I need you to tell me — what happened between them?’ And Javier was standing right there, saying, ‘I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it!’ So she whispered in my ear what she thought had happened between them.”
On some level, the story of this couple facing a reckoning also mirrored Zeller’s own life. He wrote the script after spending two years in Los Angeles with his wife, the French actress Marine Delterme, and their 14-year-old son. “Los Angeles was a lot of fun. But at some point, there wasn’t much room for her to thrive, and I had to ask myself: What are my priorities? What matters most to me?” he says. “We came back to France so that she could continue to build her own professional life. From that perspective, the movie tells a similar story.”
The script’s political dimension also struck a chord with Cruz and Bardem, both activists. Cruz strongly identified with Sofia’s anger toward the tech billionaire at the center of the story. “For Penélope, those scenes came fairly easily, because she could really relate to her. She has a genuine anger toward the world embodied by these new masters, the tech billionaires. In fact, for her, there was an opportunity to express a rage that is her own.”
For all the political anxieties running through “Bunker,” Zeller says the essence of the story is hopeful. “It’s not about solving the problems of the modern world but figuring out how to find one’s place as a family or as a couple in that world,” he says.
“That’s what allowed my actors to really go all in, especially during the disputes, and to dare to say things to each other that were sometimes incredibly harsh, because they both knew that the destination was reconciliation.”
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