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

Bugonia, the new film from director Yorgos Lanthimos, is now available at home, and that’s great news for a few reasons. The most obvious is that the movie is amazing. Emma Stone stars as a CEO who is kidnapped by two men (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) because they think she’s an alien. It’s a twisty, turny, intense tale told with a unique whimsy only Lanthimos can deliver.

Another reason it’s great that Bugonia is now at home is that you can control the volume. And, let us tell you, the score for Bugonia is incredible. It’s by composer Jerskin Fendrix, who also did Lanthimos’ previous two films, Kinds of Kindness and Poor Things, and it’s just wholly weird and unexpected. For a movie that’s largely set in a single location, the music at times soars like a sci-fi space opera. At others, it’s a 1970s paranoia thriller. Basically, it’s manic as hell, and it’s easy to understand why once you watch the clip below.

io9 has an exclusive look at a clip from The Birth of the Bees: The Making of Bugonia, a documentary that’s included on the film’s digital release. In this clip, you’ll get a sense of why Fendrix’s score for the film is so unique. And it’s because he got some truly unbelievable direction from Lanthimos. Here it is.

As it turns out, Lanthimos did not want Fendrix to know anything about the movie, didn’t let him read the script, and only gave him three keywords: “bees,” “basement,” and “spaceship.” So, from that, you start to understand why the score has all of those different elements.

Earlier this year, io9 spoke with Lanthimos, and, in our chat, we asked about his relationship with Fendrix and this score in particular. “Well, I knew one thing: that I wanted the music to mostly juxtapose the claustrophobic feel that the movie had and the contained space aspect of it,” the director said.

“So the first thing I told him was that [he] would not read the script for this film. We’ve worked together with Jerskin on two other films, so [I didn’t want him to] read the script. ‘I’ll give you [three] keywords to work on. And then you’ll compose music and I’ll instinctually guide you here and there.’ And then I told him, ‘I think you should write big. Think of an orchestra. Make it big. Don’t hold back.’ Because I wanted the music, as you said, to be at times so bombastic it’s out of this world. And it worked really well. I mean, that’s how I’ve worked with Jerskin before. He always composes the music before I start editing. So I can use a library of music that he made for the specific film.”

“The previous times he had read the script, [so] I thought we should take it a step further and just let him know less this time,” Lanthimos continued. “And I think it worked even better. And he himself says that he wouldn’t have composed this music if he had read the script beforehand. So we’ve figured out this way of working, which is great. I mean, I have all this beautiful music that I can use while editing. We do have to roughly cut it in order to fit the scenes, and then Jerskin goes back and fixes it properly.”

Bugonia is now available wherever you rent or buy films digitally. It’s one of the best of the year.

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