How Cinematographer Robbie Ryan Used VistaVision To Capture the Claustrophobic Terror of “Bugonia”

A good deal of Yorgos Lanthimos‘ new psychological thriller, Bugonia, is set in a cellar. Teddy (Jesse Plemons), alone in the world except for his cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), and their belief that Earth is under the thumb of an alien race called the Andromedans, kidnaps Michelle (Emma Stone), whom he believes to be the aliens’ local representative and an architect of a plan to destroy Earth via colony collapse disorder. Teddy is desperate to coerce Michelle into admitting as much, but despite torture and incessant arguing, his captive is steely and resistant.

What plays out in the cellar is bleak. Teddy shaves Michelle’s head and coats her in antihistamine cream, efforts he thinks will prevent her from communicating with other Andromedans. Michelle implores Teddy and Don, who seem less convinced and more morally sound than his cousin, to believe that she is not an alien and that they cannot keep her in this basement much longer. The cellar, sharply lit under the bright lights of Teddy’s torture set-up, is vividly creepy. When Michelle is eventually released to the house’s ground floor, the lighting eases, but the full sense of the woebegone conditions in which Teddy and Don live comes fully into view. It’s a far cry from the sterile office park where Michelle presided as CEO, and the modern, manicured home from which Teddy and Don stole her. For the film’s cinematographer, Robbie Ryan, the sets provided the contrast between the characters, freeing him to shoot the film entirely in the high-resolution, widescreen VistaVision format.

We had the chance to speak with Ryan about this and more, who previously photographed Lanthimos’s Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and The Favourite, and has worked extensively with the director on other projects.

So much takes place in a basement. How did you handle lighting that space?

The production designer, James Price, made this amazing set for us to film on. James laid out where we would put all the lights, and we added some extra lights —what you’d find in a basement: an LED work light versus an older Tungsten work light. I would like to thank James for lighting the set for us [laughs]. Yorgos told me early on that we should have a lighting plan, since we’re in the basement for so long. I’m not very good on computers and drawing, so I tried, and we did endeavor to stick with it. The start of it is quite moody. Michelle’s character is first waking up on her cot in the basement, and the lights turn on a bit. The story starts taking it over, so the lighting plan went out the door. But the production design is so beautiful in that space that it photographs well from every angle. When you put those amazing faces in there, it was all good. But basements are not the nicest environments to hang around in, so I was glad to get out of there at the end.

Given that the house was built from scratch, did you have any input there to make it work so well?

James is a really open production designer. He’s all about collaboration, and Yorgos works really closely with him. I have a prep period, which was about four or five weeks, so I’d go into the office each day and hang out with the art department more than anybody else because it was always the most creative space in the office. When you have great, enthusiastic people like James and Jennifer [Johnson], the costume designer, then you always have interesting chats.

There’s something about the way Emma Stone is lit when she’s locked in the basement that does make her appear otherworldly. Is that just her, or was that intentional?

Yorgos has been working with Emma on four feature films now, and I think their relationship pushes each of them in each film. It’s all about her eyes. The camera, obviously, is just drawn toward Emma’s face. I think Yorgos always had that in mind, to challenge Emma into a character like Michelle Fuller, with a shaved head and antihistamine cream.

What was your approach to get a very different feeling in Michelle’s offices versus Teddy’s house via the cinematography?

We kind of filmed the same approach for everything. Yorgos’ camera aesthetic is that if something’s moving, we move, or if not, the camera’s quite still. Both of their environments are so opposite. She’s very austere, powerful, and confident. The Teddy-Don world is very ramshackle, clumsy, just messy. The two really contrast each other, anyway.

What were you primarily using to shoot?

We shot on a format that’s now become extremely popular —ironically, it’s called VistaVision. We shot with it on Poor Things, and nobody was talking about it back then. Yorgos was very astute in trying that format out. It’s a very noisy camera, so you can’t really do sound with it, but we shot a bit of Poor Things on it, and we both really loved the results from that. That planted a bit of a seed to try and do a whole film with VistaVision. To endeavor to shoot on VistaVision is a challenge. From a production point of view, it’s more pressure trying to achieve something and makes life more difficult, but for a great, beneficial end. The film looks that much better because we shot on VistaVision.

To that end, did you have a shorthand with Yorgos Lanthimos going into this project?

I like to think I know what he doesn’t like nowadays, which is a bit of a shorthand. It’s great fun trying to figure out what Yorgos is going to do next, and he won’t tell you until he’s doing it. He enjoys the environment of leaving it until quite a late time before going ahead. I personally like that, too. It means there’s an energy and spontaneity to the film set. You concentrate very hard at that moment to see what the actors are going to do. He really doesn’t want to constrain anything, performance-wise. He wants to see where they’re sitting, what feels right, not necessarily rehearse it with them a lot, but see what the environment is giving them on that day or scene, and then make decisions. And then have a whole team around him, including the camera and lighting departments, to manage and adjust whatever we need to do. I absolutely love that. You don’t worry about what’s going to happen today. I would have been more nervous if I’d known that some of the things we had to do were coming up. He eased us into it.

Featured image: Emma Stone stars as Michelle in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ BUGONIA, a Focus Features release. Credit: Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features © 2025 All Rights Reserved.