I asked Michael Shannon, a member of the A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago, about the challenge of delivering his own nonstop rapid-fire monologue of madness and not being able to come up for air until the end.
“You get nervous before those long takes,” he said. “The scene I have outside the bathroom door, telling her my life story, I did it once and Billy said that was it. I said I wanted to do it again. He said, ‘What are you trying to do, make Eastman Kodak rich?’ He let me do it again. That time he said, ‘You did it all with your eyes closed. Now try it with your eyes open.’ The third take was like being shot out of a cannon. After it was over, it was all a blur. You have to trust the director.”
Tracy Letts said the inspiration for the play came to him in Oklahoma, his home state. “The Oklahoma City bombing hit me hard,” he said. “I was shocked that it was done by Americans. How far out of the matrix could you slip? The more I investigated paranoia, the more I saw how the connections feed on themselves and build out of control. What happens in this movie is that Agnes is leaping to catch up with Peter.”
The film is lean, direct, unrelenting. A lot of it takes place in the motel room, which by the end has been turned into an eerie cave, a sort of psychic air raid shelter against government emissions or who knows what else? “They’re watching us,” Peter says. Friedkin is often called a master of horror, but for him most modern horror films are really just violent comedies.
“For me, ‘United 93’ is a horror film,” he said. “It puts you in a place where you don’t want to go. The horror films that appeal to me are sort of reality: ‘Psycho,' ‘Diabolique,’ ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ That Austrian director, Michael Haneke, he’s the real deal. His ‘Funny Games’ is the scariest film I’ve ever seen.”
“Me, too,” said Tracy Letts.
The thing about “Bug” is that we’re not scared for ourselves so much as for the characters in the movie. “At various times as I was reworking this play on the road,” Letts said, “the conclusion involved various paranoid linkings of every conspiracy in history, from John Wilkes Booth to Lee Harvey Oswald to aliens kidnapping people for experiments. With a certain kind of paranoia, it all connects.”
“I think that scaring people is what made me want to become a movie director,” Friedkin said. “When I was six or seven, I was sitting on our front porch in Chicago telling two girls that a murderer was killing people on our block, and our houses were next on his list. They were spellbound. When I saw I could get to them, I just kept going.”
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