When he set out to make his third film, “Bunker,” about a slow-burning conflict between two married people who have grown apart, Oscar-winning French director Florian Zeller had Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” in mind. Like Kubrick, who cast then-married Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a couple whose relationship is unraveling, Zeller wanted to exploit the permeability between fiction and reality by putting Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem — partners for nearly two decades — on-screen as husband and wife. With Cruz and Bardem, he says, he wanted to use “what they are to touch on something more authentic and more unsettling for the audience.” “Is it fiction?
Is it another version of fiction? Where is the line between reality and fiction?” With Cruz and Bardem, he says, 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.”In fact, the prospect of bringing Cruz and Bardem together on screen came before the story. Zeller says he began “daydreaming about the idea of seeing them together on screen,” rather than writing two characters and then wondering who might play them.
Although the actors had appeared together before, Zeller was intrigued that they had never played a married couple. Nursing sparkling water at Paris’ posh Royal Monceau hotel, Zeller is discussing “Bunker” for the first time, and there is plenty riding on the film. It marks his return to directing four years after “The Son” and it’s also his comeback to Venice, where that film received a far cooler reception than “The Father” which had opened at Sundance and went on to win two Oscars (for actor Anthony Hopkins and screenplay shared by Zeller and Christopher Hampton).
Both films were based on successful stage productions. So “Bunker” represents a reset. It’s Zeller’s first solo screenplay, written for Cruz and Bardem, and a film that feels personal, yet broadens Zeller’s canvas beyond the intimate family dramas of his past two features.
It’s also the first film he’s produced, with Federica Sainte-Rose, through his Mediawan-owned vehicle Blue Morning Pictures. Zeller, whom I’ve interviewed several times in recent years, is usually inquisitive, peppering me with thoughtful questions about my professional life and my son. This time, he seems more reserved, even nervous, as we sit down.
Looking casually chic in a navy blue Zegna cotton jacket over a blue tee shirt, he speaks French with unusual precision and at one point stops to apologize for what he considers a meandering response: “I’m answering in a roundabout way — forgive me. I haven’t slept much, so it’s a little difficult.” The apology is almost comical — even when Zeller thinks he is speaking in zigzags, his answers are lucid, each digression eventually finding its way back to the point. Somewhere around the midpoint of our conversation, he begins discreetly snacking on cashews, and the guardedness falls away.
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