Zeller wrote Bunker for Cruz and Bardem, with no Plan B
Florian Zeller wrote his new film Bunker with only two actors in mind. There was no Plan B. The writer-director told Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem as much when the three sat down for Deadline’s TIFF Studio interview, published on 20 September Deadline.
In Bunker, Bardem plays Miguel, an architect with a successful career in London, and Cruz plays his wife Sofia Deadline. Miguel accepts a lucrative offer to build a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire. Sofia is against it. The row over the job tests their relationship.
Cruz said the screen partnership rests on a long real-life history. She and Bardem have worked together seven times and have known each other for more than 30 years. Zeller said he wrote the script for them directly and had no alternative cast in mind.
Bunker has travelled a full festival route. Cruz and Bardem were due to walk the red carpet at Venice for the film Deadline. Its first TIFF screening was listed for Monday, 14 September at Roy Thomson Hall, the large festival theatre. The three then appeared together for the Day 4 session of the Deadline Studio, organised at the Bisha Hotel.
The wider cast includes Stephen Graham, Paul Dano and Patrick Schwarzenegger Deadline. Sony Pictures Classics, the company handling the cinema release, is the distributor. The film is described as a psychological thriller, a tense story driven by the characters’ states of mind, with TIFF billing it as a couple pushed into an ethical impasse by a mysterious billionaire’s proposal TIFF.
What makes this stand out is how tight the set-up sounds. A director writing for two specific performers. A married couple playing a married couple. One job offer that splits the household.
Sony Pictures Classics keeps an official page for the film, TIFF keeps a festival listing, and Variety published a review of Zeller’s film on 8 September Variety.
