Plus, how Johnnie Burn created an entire language with recordings of star Emma Stone's voice. Bugonia sound designer learned the 'musical pitch' of bees to create a paranoid soundscape Plus, how Johnnie Burn created an entire language with recordings of star Emma Stone's voice. By Lauren Huff :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/PXL202501060627063092a245c0a56a194868af7b6a47af56223c.jpg) Lauren Huff Lauren Huff is an awardwinning journalist and staff writer at with over 12 years of experience covering all facets of the entertainment industry. EW's editorial guidelines December 4, 2025 10:30 a.m.

Plus, how Johnnie Burn created an entire language with recordings of star Emma Stone's voice.

Bugonia sound designer learned the 'musical pitch' of bees to create a paranoid soundscape

Plus, how Johnnie Burn created an entire language with recordings of star Emma Stone's voice.

By Lauren Huff

Lauren Huff

Lauren Huff is an award-winning journalist and staff writer at ** with over 12 years of experience covering all facets of the entertainment industry.

EW's editorial guidelines

December 4, 2025 10:30 a.m. ET

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Aidan Delbis as Don and Jesse Plemons as Teddy in director Yorgos Lanthimos' 'Bugonia'. Credit:

Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

When sound designer Johnnie Burn first learned he'd be collaborating with director Yorgos Lanthimos for a sixth time, he had just one hope: make it a sci-fi film or a musical.

"When he gave me the script, he said, 'You're in luck, it's a sci-fi movie,'" Burn — whose credits also include *Nope*, *28 Years Later*, and *The Zone of Interest*, for which he won an Oscar — recalls Lanthimos telling him. "I was imagining spaceships and all that kind of stuff. Obviously, we do get that in the end, but it's not predominantly what the film is about."**

Alas, *Bugonia* is not really sci-fi and certainly not a musical. Instead, it plays as an absurdist black comedy that follows Emma Stone as Michelle Fuller, the powerful CEO of pharmaceutical company Auxolith, who is kidnapped by Teddy (Jesse Plemons), a conspiracy theorist convinced that Michelle is really an Andromedan — an extraterrestrial sent to Earth to destroy it.

The film's small cast, long monologues, and minimal locations actually made for a rather daunting challenge, sound-wise, for him. "So many of the scenes in the film are really intimate and just dialogue-driven, and two or three people talking in a room, and [you need] to subdue the camera noise enough so that you could not have to load up the scene with lots of other sound to hide it — it was knowing that Yorgos would want a very minimalistic soundscape and how to, on a technical level, carry that off," explains Burn. "And then on a creative level, it was like, wow, there's some really long monologues in this, and what do we do with the sound in there? Because it can't be boring, but it also can't be destructively too many focal points on the background sound. So how do you convey the mood of a character without destroying their wonderful acting performance?"**

Ahead, Burn breaks down how he pulled all that off, including learning the musical pitch of bees, creating an alien language based on Stone's prior work, using sparking car batteries to mimic electrocution, and more.

The bee's knees

Bees are pretty central to the film — Teddy and his cousin and reluctant co-conspirator Don (Aidan Delbis) are beekeepers, and images of bees open the film. After tons of hours spent recording bees (as heard in the beginning of the trailer, above), Burn says he realized something very special about them.

"Bees tend to have a kind of particular musical pitch to them," he says. "Every bee buzzes at a particular frequency, and a frequency is a musical note. So there was a great challenge in making them sit in a beautiful way with [composer Jerskin Fendrix's] music, and that involved recording bees and changing the way that they resonate so that they kind of hum along with Jerskin's score basically."

Burn added an additional challenge for his team, who took every individual bee and "interrogated its musical pitch, and then adjusted it through editing software to make it become more of a musical bee."**

Emma Stone on shaving her head in one take for 'Bugonia' and the weird cream she had to wear for 'months'

Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons break down that 'really disgusting' scene at the end of 'Bugonia'

They then used that with greater effect throughout the film. "A lot of the time, the soundscape is sort of describing the subconscious of the characters," he explains. "Particularly in Jesse's case, his character Teddy, when he goes out in the real world, we have him hearing the real world, not exactly as it is, but more as his paranoia and suspicions believe the world is."

Out of this world

Emma Stone in 'Bugonia'.

Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

When it came time to — spoiler alert! — craft the alien language Stone's character speaks at the end of the film, Lanthimos opted to turn to Burn as opposed to a linguist — much to the sound designer's surprise. "During filming, Emily [Stone] texted me and was like, 'Hey, what am I saying?' And I was like, 'Well, I don't know. That's the script writer's job.' And she said, 'No, Yorgos says it's sound design, so you have to do it.' And I was like, 'Holy cow,'" Burn says, laughing at the memory.

To pull off his very first alien language (hey, he got that sci-fi experience, after all!), Burn asked Stone to send him recordings of her saying the lines in English. "I used that and other recordings that I have of her from the many projects we've done together, and basically edited lots of syllables together in order to try and make things that were really quite hard tongue twisters to say, and worked out a verb and noun and sentence structure and adjectives so that I had a grammatical language," he says. "So I basically edited together something that was approximately a very weird alien language, and then had her and the other actors in the scene learn that. It was extraordinary. It was very rewarding to see it actually played out."

***Check out more from EW's *The Awardist*, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV, movies, and more.***

Greased lightnin'

Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis, and Jesse Plemons in 'Bugonia'.

Atsushi Nishijima/Focus Features

Speaking of rewarding, Burn says, though the film is full of "really fun sequences," the one he's most proud of is where Teddy and Don electrocute Michelle over and over to test her supposed alien capabilities.

"Capturing the sounds from sparking car batteries together and making them fierce and hum, and then working that into a Dolby Atmos soundscape and playing that quite conservatively — and then sitting there with Yorgos in the mixing room when he can often be quite reserved and wants things quite subtle — and finding to my great enjoyment that he kept saying, 'Turn it up louder, louder, louder, make the speakers blow!'" Burn recalls, "that's a really fun part of the film and a really good visceral use of sound that actually makes you, to some degree, experience alongside the actors what's going on."**

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Source: Comedy

Published: December 04, 2025 at 05:38PM on Source: MARIO MAG

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