Maxance Vincent
Bugonia marks composer Jerskin Fendrix‘s third collaboration with director Yorgos Lanthimos, and his second Academy Award nomination, his first being 2023’s Poor Things. With each score the two have worked on together, they all have their distinct sounds, which, as Fendrix explains to Awards Radar on Zoom, “is kind of an unspoken thing. It’s never been dictated by Yorgos that every score has to sound very different.
I think he knows that I’m going to do that. Even within the same album or score, I’m usually very hyperactive about genre or instrumentation. The discipline it takes me to stick to one set of sounds for a whole score is already pretty Herculean. By the end of it, I’ve squeezed so much juice out, and these scores take quite a while to conceive and come up with, and then record, I feel like I’ve basically done everything I want to do with that set of sounds, and do something pretty much that’s the exact opposite of that.”
When approaching Bugonia, Fendrix states that, while he was aware the movie was based on a prior South Korean film (Save the Green Planet!), Lanthimos did not give him a screenplay and only told him to base the music on three words: bees, basement, spaceship.
“I was told, basically, not to look up anything, which I think, even without being told, I wouldn’t have done. I’ve still not seen the original version, but I want to now. If I’d known any of the music from the original version, then I would have been shackled. You work so hard to make it not like the original; that becomes a huge impediment. This was really an exercise in information deficit.”
In trying to figure out how to differentiate the sounds of the “bees,” “basement,” and “spaceship,” the composer explains that “one was covered by orchestral pieces. Another was covered by synth pieces, which, in the final film, only made it to the spaceship’s final transport sequence. Then some of those pieces were a mix of orchestral elements with synths underneath, kind of bubbling away.
I focused more on thinking about the connective tissue between these three kinds of ideas. So a lot of stuff was about altitude, like subterranean versus very high in the sky, a contrast between big, very high-pitched instruments and very low-pitched instruments. A lot had to do with geometric systems, organizational systems within the bee industry, how spaceships were attached to one another, and the geometry of these three things. Most basements tend to be quadrilateral, with a slight curve.
Spaceships have this really interesting geometry. A lot of weird intersecting shapes that are kind of like scrunched-up pieces of paper. A lot of spaceships look like bells. It was a unifying concept between these three things that ended up being the main features I was trying to write from.”
Of course, there was so much more to talk about for such an incredible score, and you’ll be able to listen to our full conversation below:
[Some of the quotes in this article have been edited for length and clarity]
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