How Oscar Contender Will Tracy Pulled Off That Crazy ‘Bugonia’ Script

[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Bugonia.”]

It has never happened that Yorgos Lanthimos liked a screenplay developed by someone else (in this case, Ari Aster) enough to want to direct it. That script was Will Tracy‘s contemporary adaptation of the 2003 Korean movie “Save the Green Planet!” And it was Lanthimos who came up with the title “Bugonia,” which Tracy loved.

“It’s a Greek myth of a colony of beasts spontaneously arising from the corpse of a dead ox or cow,” said Tracy on Zoom. “We liked the idea of new life beginning from the death of this big, lumbering beast that seemed to be thematically close to what was in the story, and also it sounded like a bug, it sounded like a flower, it sounded a bit like an alien planet or a foreign country. It sounded a little bit like a mental disorder you might come down with.”

About six years ago, Aster brought the project to Tracy after admiring his writing on the series “Succession” and the movie “The Menu.” “I didn’t have high hopes for whatever this project was,” said Tracy, “because he was asking me to adapt a movie I hadn’t seen before. I wasn’t interested in adapting anything at that moment. I’d never written an adaptation before. I thought, ‘OK, I’ll watch this thing.’ I figured it would probably lead to something else down the road that we’d find that we could do together.”

However, as Tracy watched a Vimeo link for the original film, he responded with some ideas and took a few notes. “All I’m looking for is something that feels writable to me,” he said, “and if it feels writable, then I go for it. I felt within the first five minutes, ‘I know how to do this.'”

Indeed, he did. “Bugonia” resonates with critics and audiences because it expertly portrays the anxiety of our time. The timely comedy has grossed $40 million worldwide, and Tracy has been nominated for the Critics Choice, BAFTA, and Writers Guild awards as well as the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

That was the last time Tracy watched the original movie. “I don’t want any of the scenes or dialogue to be moving around in my head,” Tracy said. “I want to take a few of the major plot turns and beats, and basically the premise, the setup. And then try to make something new out of it. Hopefully, that will honor the original film by not trying to ape it. There’s no point in remaking something unless you’re going to take a free hand.”

Aster didn’t micromanage as Tracy labored over the script and suffered a bout of COVID during lockdown. “He was letting me find it,” he said. “He kept pushing me to make it my own, make it feel contemporary and American. I was trying to fold as much of that [pandemic] feeling, that atmosphere, and maybe a few of those political or socioeconomic or cultural preoccupations or problems of the moment into the material.”

‘Bugonia’©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

Given that Tracy wrote the script five years ago, it resonates in ways that he did not anticipate. “It was an incredibly anxious time for everybody,” he said. “And something broke. Maybe it was already breaking, but it fully broke during the first year of COVID. That feeling of a mass disassociation from reality, an inability to collectively agree upon a story or a truth that means something to us, that motivates us collectively, as a society, as a community, as the project of American democracy, that we all agree that this is why it needs to exist, and this is where we’re going, and this is how we take care of each other. All that stuff seems to have been dismantled for various reasons. I think we know one big reason.”

The first big change in the script was to alter the gender of the lead character (Emma Stone), who is kidnapped by conspiracy theorists (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis). “Sometimes as a writer, you flip the pancake over and see what it looks like on the other side,” he said. “‘Let’s try writing a little bit with a woman, not a man.’ You get interesting stuff out of the configuration if it’s two young men who kidnap a female CEO and keep her chained to a bed in the basement. All of a sudden, there’s a totally new danger and feeling there, right? But then how do you complicate that without making it too gross or exploitative, or making that the theme of the movie? So I have them in the first 10 pages chemically castrating themselves, so that adds a new element to it as well.”

‘Bugonia’©Focus Features/Courtesy Everett Collection

Astrer and Tracy sent the script to Lanthimos, their first choice for director. “The week we sent it to him, he got back to me,” said Tracy. “And the day he decided ‘I like this,’ he sent it to Emma [Stone]. So it all happened quite quickly.”

Lanthimos is a known script tinkerer who often co-writes his films, such as with frequent collaborator Efthimis Filippou (“Kinds of Kindness,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”). “When he worked with Tony McNamara,” said Tracy, “they developed their scripts together from page one. And this was an unusual circumstance where he was coming into a script that was already developed. His tinkering was more than cosmetic, but it was not a full teardown of the architecture. To make it a little bit more shootable for him specifically, he had a few thoughts. For me as a writer, they were clear. It took me a few days to execute.”

One big change was not to mention the word “alien” until about 20 minutes into the film. The other was to slightly alter how the human population drops dead at the film’s end. “We have this tableau of human beings around the world,” said Tracy. “The way that I had written it, it was banal shots of people in different places around the world. You see the moment where they lose consciousness, where they die, and someone would be at a sink doing dishes, and then, as if a light switch was flipped, they just dropped to the ground. And Yorgos suggested we lose the part where we see them drop. ‘Let’s just do still lives. They’ll already be in those positions.’ Filming that as still life, rather than seeing the moment of death, has a particular strange calm and beauty to it that is helpful for the end of the film.”

Many moviegoers will initially assume that kidnapper/beekeeper Teddy (Plemons) is a conspiracy theorist. In researching him, Tracy said, “I went far enough down the rabbit hole that by the time I was writing Teddy, he didn’t feel particularly crazy to me. Maybe that says more about me. I tried to write him with empathy. Obviously he does bad things, and his methods are unsound, but I tried to write him as someone who had pretty legitimate grievances, with that feeling of isolation and atomization and feeling that he and his community, his family have been exploited, and that there’s something that’s happening to us, and we’re not being told what it is, or what the official story is. The official story that we’re hearing doesn’t feel convincing, and it feels like it’s being given to us by people who are acting in bad faith. So you have to create your own story.”

‘Bugonia’Focus Features

It was important to Tracy not to write Teddy as “the internet-addled, toxic male incel guy, the boogeyman that you read about in articles in The Atlantic or whatever,” said Tracy. “I didn’t want him to feel like that. I wanted him to feel like, actually, he’s got a pretty good point. He’s been legitimately abused by the system: big pharma, big tech, the police, capitalism generally.”

The film’s centerpieces are the face-offs between Plemons’ Teddy and Stone’s CEO. “To make the scenes with him and Emma interesting, you have to give her a pretty good argument, too,” said Tracy. “Obviously, right from the get-go, you are on her side, because you imagine yourself in that scenario, and at that point, you don’t know much about her. You haven’t seen her being particularly pleasant, but at the same time, she’s chained to a basement with her head shaved, and it’s pretty awful and visceral. I’m trying to use a little bit of the convention of a hostage film. And you’re thinking, ‘how does she get out of here?'”

The more they debate and converse, the more is revealed about their emotional agendas and biases. “It’s mainly verbal fireworks,” said Tracy. “That’s what I wanted the film to be about, which is not really the tenor of the original film.”

Finally, Tracy was writing a comedy. “The key to most good comedy is: the actors are playing the emotional reality of it straight, and the situation is absurd by its nature. That’s mainly what people are laughing about. They’re not trying to be funny. All of Yorgos’ films, in some way or another, are comedies. He knows exactly how to play it straight and to play it sad and relevant and urgent and tense, but also knows how to preserve the comedy.”

‘Bugonia’Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.

“Bugonia” also brings some uber-violence. “Probably Yorgos went for it more than the script is going for,” said Tracy. “The film, in some ways, is more violent than what I had on the page. He was quite expert at doing what I couldn’t write on my own.”

Next up: Tracy has experience in both movies and television. He tried showrunning “The Regime” at the same time he was writing for “Succession,” but it wasn’t the usual set-up, as a limited series starring Kate Winslet, mostly directed by Stephen Frears, who brought his film crew with him. “It was done like a film,” said Tracy. “I was less a calling-the-shots, running-the-show showrunner. I felt like a writer on a film would.”

He figured out that if he did a television show again, “I would be a showrunner in the more traditional sense, with more time and resources, and devote myself.”

Tracy has a few things in the hopper he can’t discuss, including a film that he would like to direct. Some of his scripts are sitting with directors. “Maybe I’m waiting in line for them,” said Tracy. “I had to wait for Yorgos to finish two movies before he had time for ‘Bugonia.'”