The Score for ‘Bugonia’ Happened in a Truly Unbelievable Way (Exclusive)

Bugoniathe new film from director Yorgos Lanthimos, is now available at home, and that’s great news for several reasons. What’s most obvious is that the film is amazing. Emma Stone plays a CEO who is kidnapped by two men (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delpis) because they think she is an alien. It’s a twisty, volatile, intense story told with the unique whimsy that only Lanthimos can deliver.

Another reason it’s great that Bugonia Now at home is that you can control the volume. And let us tell you the result Bugonia Unbelievable. It’s written by composer Gerskin Vendrix, who also directed Lanthimos’s two previous films, Types of charity and Bad thingswhich is completely strange and unexpected. For a film set largely in one location, the music soars at times like a sci-fi space opera. In others, it’s a 1970s paranoia thriller. Basically, it’s absolutely crazy, and it’s easy to understand why just by watching the clip below.

io9 has an exclusive look at a clip from Birth of Bees: The Making of Bugoniaa documentary that is included in the digital release of the film. In this clip, you’ll learn why Fendrix’s score for the film is so unique. This is because he got truly incredible guidance from Lanthimos. Here is.

As it turned out, Lanthimos didn’t want Vendrix to know anything about the film, wouldn’t let him read the script, and only gave him three keywords: “bees,” “basement,” and “spaceship.” From here, you begin to understand why the score has all these different elements.

Earlier this year, io9 spoke with Lanthimos, and in our conversation, we asked about his relationship with Fendrix and this score in particular. “Well, I knew one thing: I wanted the music to mostly combine the creepy feel of the movie with the alien aspect of it,” the director said.

“So the first thing I told him was that [he] I will not read the script for this movie. We have worked with Gerskin on two other films [I didn’t want him to] Read the script. I will give you [three] Keywords to work on. Then you will compose the music and I will instinctively guide you here and there. Then I said to him: I think you should write big. Think of an orchestra. Make it big. never back down. Because I wanted the music to be, as I said, so bombastic at times that it’s out of this world. And it worked really well. I mean, this is how I’ve worked with Gerskin before. He always composes the music before I start editing. So I can use the music library I created for the selected movie.

“The previous times he read the script, [so] Lanthimos continued: “I thought we should take it a step further and tell him less this time. And I think it worked better. He himself says he wouldn’t have composed this music if he had read the script beforehand. So we came up with this way of working, and it’s great. I mean I have all this beautiful music that I can use during editing. We have to roughly cut it down to fit the scenes, and then Gerskin comes back and fixes it right.”

Bugonia Available now wherever you rent or buy movies digitally. It’s one of the best of the year.

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