‘Bugonia’s’ Production Designer on Building the House and Hiding Clues

SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points and reveals the ending for “Bugonia,” currently playing in theaters.

In “Bugonia,” Emma Stone plays Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company who is kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his cousin Don (Aidan Delbis). Teddy is a conspiracy theorist who believes Michelle is an alien hellbent on destroying Earth. After kidnapping her, Teddy and Don keep Michelle in a basement as they interrogate her, hoping to get her to confess.

Production designer James Price knew he had to create contrasting spaces: Michelle’s corporate world, her ultra-modern home, and Teddy and Don’s time-trapped house that felt old and rancid. At the same time, in creating those spaces, he knew he could hide all the clues that spoke to the characters and their respective storylines in plain sight.

Don and Teddy’s House

The film reunites Price with “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos. Price knew when he read the script, he knew the house would need to be remote and isolated.

Teddy’s lives with his cousin Don. Through flashbacks, audiences learn he once lived in the house with his mother, Sandy (Alicia Silverstone) who is now hospitalized in a coma after using drugs produced by Michelle’s pharmaceutical company.

Price ended up building the house from the ground up, to create a world that was completely immersive. “I wanted to create a living, breathing set, so it’s no longer a set — it’s a place,” he explains.

Price also knew he would need to build a basement since that’s where Teddy and Don keep Michelle. “I’d spent enough time in the United States to realize that the landscape is not too different from the U.K. I said, ‘I think we can do this in the U.K. We can build it here. We can tailor the house to fit our needs, and you can make the film the way you want.’”

Price designed the house with cinematographer Robbie Ryan in mind. “We could wire and light it like a real house, so everything can be naturally lit,” he realized.

Price also gave the house a backstory. “There was a bit of money once, but it had fallen into bad repair. The family had been in it a long time.” He continued, “The last refit was maybe the late 1990s.”

He set the house in that time warp. In scenes that show Teddy’s mom, the idea was to depict that she hadn’t been around for some time and that Teddy has to look after his cousin. “He finds solace in this theory that there’s an alien conspiracy. We looked at a lot of realtor houses and found reference from real life and eBay. We looked at photojournalism from the early part of the noughties.”

Another influence came from a real-life experience. Says Price, “I’d been to a farmer’s house in New Zealand, and their parents had died when they were teenage boys. Three brothers lived at this beautiful colonial house, and it was disgusting. There was shit everywhere. I knew I’d taken photos, but I couldn’t find any. But I had this vision of what the house should be for that.”

Price also collaborated with the film’s costume designer Jennifer Johnson. During camera tests, the two started talking about clothes, patterns and aging. They discussed how Teddy would have a feeling of grime and unwashed textures. It was a process of finding how far to go to make it believable. “That house tells Teddy’s story.”

When it came to the basement, the plan was to build it on a stage, but during scouting, someone suggested building the basement underneath the house. “We were lucky that the ground we dug on was clay, so we could excavate.”

Within the basement, there is a secret room that Michelle finds. It reveals “the inner sanctum of where this whole conspiracy has been borne out,” Price explains. Teddy keeps his research – dismembered body parts, heads in jars and photo after photo of people he believed were aliens.

In the script, it was written that there was a wardrobe in front of the door, and she sees a light and pushes it. But Price admitted, “It was a shit idea.” He suggested that the secret room should be insulated and hidden behind the stairs. Price looked for more ideas and decided a chalk face had been carved out within the basement.

Within the secret room comes Michelle’s discovery: Teddy is a serial killer with wall-to-wall research on aliens. “Maybe there are heads vacuum-packed — the whole tinfoil conspiracy.”

As for Teddy’s idea of what a spaceship looks like, Price decided he would have a 3D printer to create something fantastical yet believable.

Michelle’s World

Is she an alien? Is she not an alien? That’s the question audiences ask when watching “Bugonia.”

However, the answer is right there in Price’s production design. “It was tricky to navigate,” he admitted. “But I wanted it to be obvious, if you’re looking at it, that she’s an alien. She lives in a spaceship, her office is a spaceship, in a kind of modernist sense of spaceship.”

In contrast, everything the character says is the opposite. “She’s telling you, and she’s so convincing, she’s not an alien.”

Price leaned into Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” for inspiration on what a spaceship looks like, applying it to the office and the house.

Price says, “No one’s going to believe it.” He drew on his experience as a production designer from the TV adaptation of “The Ipcress File.” In that, he gave away all the signs in his work. “When you meet Master Dalby, he’s the baddie, but you don’t think he’s the baddie. He’s in a baddie’s lair because he’s got black floors, and everything about the set production and design tells you that guy’s the baddie. But because everything he’s saying is so patriotic and on point, you believe that he’s not the baddie.”

Price put the clues there. He chose a spaceship-like house for Michelle, and her office was minimalist. He said, “This dark carpet leads to this glass box office.”

The Spaceship

As it turns out, Teddy isn’t quite as crazed as he seems. He was right all along, Michelle Fuller is indeed an alien.

Aside from the clues hidden in her house and office, Price now had to design and build the spaceship itself. Interestingly, the designs Teddy had imagined were remarkably close to what is eventually revealed in the film. Michelle is an Andromeda, an ancient species that has been watching over humanity since the dawn of time. Humans are a science project dating back to the origins of mankind.

In the script, Price knew he wasn’t going to design a traditional spaceship; this was a Yorgos Lanthimos world. The idea was that when the spaceship is revealed, audiences would see Michelle’s throne room. Price explains, “I always had this instinct that it should be organic. I had the idea that the throne room should be a sacred temple, like Stonehenge with some water.”

Visually, Price was inspired by the idea of birth and rebirth, a concept he kept returning to throughout the design process. His backstory for the spaceship included a sacred pool at its center. “Everything about this thing comes from this water. I thought it should be a womb-shaped pool, and then everything around it is skeletal.” Price continues, “All the buildings that evolve [from it] are based on human organs like the liver or kidneys. So there’s a lot of human anatomy.”

While reading the script, Price also came across the concept of a Dyson sphere, a structure that harnesses power from the sun. “I thought, what if this thing is powered by the sun?”

Building the spaceship was Price’s next challenge. “We had this 50-foot-high thing, and there’s this liquid which is the same color as strawberry milkshake.” While he doesn’t disclose full details, Price says he had fun creating the set. He teases, “The throne room seats became like worn-down teeth. Everything was based on anatomy.”