in “Bugonia,” after Teddy (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps Michelle (Emma Stone), a large part of the film 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, wily CEO he’s holding captive.
While he was a guest on this week’s episode of Filmmaker Toolkit podcastdirector Yorgos Lanthimos discussed why the limitations of the basement setting were cinematically necessary.
“Movies build microcosms, and they can be of varying sizes, and this is one of the smaller ones. It creates a lot of tension and allows you to scrutinize the situation,” Lanthimos said. “It’s like looking through a microscope a little bit, if you narrow things down, if you go further and deeper and closer, (you ask as a viewer), ‘What’s there?’ And especially if there’s an explosive dynamic, you’re so close that it’s amplified.”
Working within limited space, Lanthimos felt the need to go big with the filmmaking, both with supervising sound editor/rerecording mixer Johnnie Burns’ sound design and composer Jerskin Fendrix’s musicwhich is by far the biggest score of the director’s career with negative points.
“I just felt that the combination of a really big soundtrack would be interesting,” Lanthimos said. “There’s a lot of big themes and a lot of big emotions, so I wanted that to be represented in an extreme way in the soundtrack and the music and the sound design. It’s a similar reason why we stopped recording 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 cameras and barely functional VistaVision cameras that had been shelved for decades. But unlike Lathimos, Paul Thomas Anderson and Brady Corbet reached out to VistaVision to bring big-screen grandeur to what were the directors’ most expansive and epic films to date.
While on the podcast, Lanthimos realized how counterintuitive it was to shoot his smallest (spatially speaking) film on the largest possible negative, but said that after using VistaVision to shoot the re-animation 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, shooting them in a large format, making their portraits larger than life in a way, just adding this necessary layer to express all these big ideas and emotions.”
Aesthetically, Lanthimos preferred the VistaVision to the more established and less cumbersome 65mm film cameras – the images were not 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 footage and Robbie (kept) asking around about the VistaVision cameras,” Lanthimos says.
On “Poor Things” they had only been able to use VistaVision on stage for non-dialogue reanimation because the old cameras were too high to record synchronized audio. Afterwards, the persistent Ryan eventually found a quieter Wilcam 11 VistaVision camera.
“We discovered this camera that’s out there in the world, that works, that’s quieter than those cameras, but it’s huge and temperamental and very difficult to load and takes a lot of time,” Lanthimos said.
The description of Wilcam 11 as “working” is up for debate, as it created constant problems on the “Bugonia” set. “One Battle After Another” cinematographer Michael Bauman told IndieWire that the quieter WilCam 11 was so awkward and temperamental (failing completely during some camera tests according to camera operator Colin Anderson), the PTA deemed it “unreliable” during the testing phase. On “One Battle” they joined the higher VistaVision cameraswitched to Super 35mm for interior shots where the camera was in very close proximity to the actors delivering dialogue, and tested 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 closed space – the sound from a camera that was loud was really problematic for us. We couldn’t get the camera many feet away, to try to lower the sound a little bit. And so for us there was no other solution. And in the end it kind of became an advantage, it became a limitation, we just became a limitation, it became a limitation. more creative.”
To hear Yorgos Lanthimos’ full interview, subscribe to The Filmmaker’s Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotifyor your favorite podcast platform.
