When French director Florian Zeller set out to make his third feature film, "Bunker," he had Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" on his mind. The Oscar-winning filmmaker wanted to explore the unsettling space between fiction and reality by casting a real-life married couple — Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem — as husband and wife whose relationship slowly unravels. The result is a psychological drama that examines ambition, wealth, and the silent fractures within a long marriage.

A Fascination with Real-Life Couples

Zeller has long admired how Kubrick used Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's real marriage to add a layer of ambiguity to "Eyes Wide Shut." That film, released in 1999, featured the then-married actors as a couple confronting jealousy and desire. Zeller wanted to replicate that tension in "Bunker."

"I loved 'Eyes Wide Shut,' this ambivalent proposition presented to the audience where you're not quite sure what you're being invited to watch," Zeller explained during an interview. With Cruz and Bardem, he said, he wanted to use "what they are, in the noblest sense of the term, to touch on something more authentic and more unsettling for the audience."

The idea of pairing Cruz and Bardem actually came before the story itself. Zeller said he began "daydreaming about the idea of seeing them together on screen" rather than writing characters and later searching for actors. Although Cruz and Bardem had appeared in films together before, they had never played a married couple. "That permeability between reality and fiction seemed to me a truly fascinating project," Zeller said.

A New Chapter for Zeller

"Bunker" marks a significant reset for Zeller, who burst onto the international film scene with "The Father" in 2020. That film, adapted from his stage play, earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won two Oscars — Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins and Best Adapted Screenplay for Zeller and Christopher Hampton. He followed it with "The Son" in 2022, which received a mixed response at its Venice Film Festival premiere.

With "Bunker," Zeller steps into new territory. It is his first solo screenplay, written specifically for Cruz and Bardem. It is also the first film he has produced through Blue Morning Pictures, his Mediawan-owned production company, alongside Federica Sainte-Rose. After the intimate family dramas of his previous two films, "Bunker" broadens his canvas to include overt political themes, while still retaining the psychological intensity that has become his signature.

The film's plot centers on Miguel, a celebrated architect played by Bardem, who is tempted by a lucrative but morally dubious commission: building a secret survivalist bunker for a reclusive tech billionaire named Andrew, played by Paul Dano. Miguel's wife, Sofia — played by Cruz — becomes increasingly disillusioned as she watches her husband's values erode. The story is inspired by the 2009 Argentine film "The Man Next Door," but Zeller expanded it to address contemporary anxieties.

"It takes a look at the contemporary world and explores all these modern fears — about rampant individualism, fear of the future and environmental issues, the intensification of social injustice, and so on," Zeller said. "But rather than simply being a commentary on the world, it's an experience seen through the eyes of a couple."

The Zuckerberg Inspiration

One key inspiration for the film came from a news article Zeller read about Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg building a vast underground bunker for 30 people in Hawaii. Zeller was struck by the irony. "This man had made his fortune connecting people with one another, yet at the same time was preparing a plan B to completely cut himself off from the rest of humanity," he said.

The anecdote became a metaphor for what Zeller sees as the folly of extreme wealth. "It addressed a political issue — namely, the folly of extreme wealth, which consists in believing that it can protect us from everything, that we can buy time, health and security," he explained.

This tension shaped the film's visual language. Instead of shooting on location in London, Zeller built Miguel and Sofia's modernist home in a studio in Madrid, where Cruz and Bardem live with their children. "I wanted to build a house that would allow me to work on the viewer's perception," Zeller said. "At first, you think it's a very open house with lots of glass. But the further you get into the story, the more it begins to resemble a bunker."

Shooting in a windowless studio for weeks created a psychological effect on the cast and crew. "We experienced that bunker ourselves, in a studio without any light for several weeks," Zeller recalled, describing how the environment pushed everyone toward the same sense of isolation and paranoia that permeates the film.

Hidden Codes and Poetic Details

Zeller is known for embedding subtle details into his films that viewers may not consciously register but that nonetheless shape their experience. For "Bunker," he filled the frame with references to "The Odyssey." A sculpture of Odysseus appears in Miguel's office, and Sofia reads Milan Kundera's "Ignorance," a novel about homecoming. When Miguel is seduced by the bunker project, composer Volker Bertelmann weaves voices resembling the Sirens into the score.

"It's through poetic codes like these that you create a universe," Zeller said, "and I think that's what is most powerful about a film."

The director applied the same attention to detail to his cast. Since the tech billionaire Andrew and architect Miguel never meet in person in the film, Zeller deliberately ensured that Paul Dano and Javier Bardem never crossed paths during production. "We never see Paul Dano in full because he's on a screen. I remember there were long discussions about what shoes he should wear," Zeller said. "Something about the shoes was going to inform his character."

Another key supporting role is Miguel's neighbor, a character Zeller wrote specifically for Stephen Graham, the British actor known for his intense performances. "It's the story of a neighbor who instills fear in Javier Bardem," Zeller said. "Usually, it's Javier Bardem who scares others." Even though Graham is physically smaller than Bardem, Zeller saw in him both "a menacing power" and "an incredible humanity."

Cruz and Bardem as Independent Artists

Cruz was the first actor to read the screenplay. Before agreeing to star, she asked Zeller whether he would still offer her the role if Bardem turned him down. "I understood that this was really very important to them — to always be seen as independent artists," Zeller said. In truth, if either actor had declined, Zeller doubted he would have made the film at all. "The DNA of the film was the fact that it was them and the fact that they were a real couple."

Zeller was particularly interested in getting beyond the usual distance Bardem creates between himself and his characters. "Javier has played characters who are sometimes very, very far removed from who he is, and he does that incredibly well," Zeller said. "But here, what interested me was trying to move silently closer to them — not toward their biographical truth, but toward the truth of their emotions."

Unlike some of Bardem's darker roles, "Bunker" is not sexually charged. Zeller said the ambiguity around Sofia's relationship with an American writer, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, felt more compelling than a conventional affair storyline. "It could have been a story about infidelity… But that story has already been told a thousand times. Here, it's a deeper, more subtle destabilization within a couple," he explained.

Cruz pressed Zeller for a definitive answer about what happened between her character and the writer. "She said to me, 'I need you to tell me — what happened between them?' And Javier was standing right there, saying, 'I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it!'", Zeller recalled with a laugh. "So she whispered in my ear what she thought had happened between them."

A Story That Mirrors Zeller's Own Life

On a personal level, "Bunker" reflects a period of transition for Zeller. He wrote the script after spending two years in Los Angeles with his wife, French actress Marine Delterme, and their son. While he enjoyed aspects of life in LA, he realized his wife was not able to thrive professionally there. "I had to ask myself: What are my priorities? What matters most to me?" he said. "We came back to France so that she could continue to build her own professional life. From that perspective, the movie tells a similar story."

The film's political themes resonated strongly with Cruz and Bardem, both of whom are politically active. Cruz, in particular, connected with Sofia's anger toward the tech billionaire. "For Penélope, those scenes came fairly easily, because she could really relate to her," Zeller said. "She has a genuine anger toward the world embodied by these new masters, the tech billionaires."

Despite the film's dark themes and the harsh confrontations between its central couple, Zeller says "Bunker" is ultimately a hopeful story. "It's not about solving the problems of the modern world but figuring out how to find one's place as a family or as a couple in that world," he explained. "That's what allowed my actors to really go all in, especially during the disputes, and to dare to say things to each other that were sometimes incredibly harsh, because they both knew that the destination was reconciliation."

"Bunker" premiered at the Venice Film Festival and later screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics, which also distributed "The Father" and "The Son," acquired North American rights. Given the festival buzz and the performances from Cruz and Bardem, the film is expected to be a major player in the awards season conversation.

For Zeller, the experience of making "Bunker" was a return to a more personal form of filmmaking. After several years navigating Hollywood's big-budget landscape, he chose to anchor his film in the emotional complexity of two people who know each other intimately — and who, in real life, share a bond that deepens every scene they inhabit together.

Source: MSN News