“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, 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. “That permeability between reality and fiction seemed to me a truly fascinating project,” he says.

 Bunker marks return to directing four years after “The Son” and it’s 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.

My Oscar Book:

Zeller 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.

Penelope Cruz

“Bunker” arrives during unusually busy year for Cruz, who stars in Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite” and has cameo in “La Bola Negra,” the Cannes prize-winning film that Netflix acquired in May.

But it’s her lead turn in Zeller’s film — as a wife whose growing disillusionment becomes the story’s emotional core — that could put her in contention for Best Actress Oscar.

Sony Pictures Classics, which worked with Zeller on his first two films, acquired “Bunker” for America and is likely betting that Bardem and Cruz’s explosive performances will propel the film in the awards talk, in multiple categories, following run at Venice and Toronto.

My Oscar Book:

SPC previously campaigned for “The Father” which scored 6 Oscar nominations, including best picture, in 2020.

Bardem plays Miguel, a celebrated architect tempted by a morally dubious but hugely lucrative commission to build a secret survivalist bunker for a reclusive tech billionaire, Andrew (Paul Dano). That leads his wife, the more idealistic Sofia (Cruz), to question her husband’s values and the foundations of their 17-year marriage.

Zeller knows about reaching a point of professional success and wondering where ambition should take you next. Now 47, the Paris-born Sciences Po graduate was a celebrated novelist and playwright when he leaped into filmmaking. His plays, translated by Christopher Hampton, have won Tony and Olivier awards for stars including Frank Langella and Kenneth Cranham.

The most incongruous offer to come his way arrived after “The Father” screened at Sundance Fes. His agent told him major studio wanted him for huge project.

“It was the story of a man who lost his dog, adapted from a book that was said to have moved every dog owner. And I’m allergic to dogs. And in the story, the dog talked,” Zeller laughs. “It was hard to imagine anything further removed from me.”

For Zeller, who writes his own films, directing has to begin with something personal, even when the story draws on outside sources. He has never been tempted to direct a film he didn’t write.

Miguel recalls how Sofia fell for him on their first date after mistaking his allergy-induced tears — caused by her cat — for emotional response to what she was telling him. “It’s a story that resembles my story,” he says.

Bunker was inspired by the 2009 movie The Man Next Door, and soon grew beyond the central couple. While it retains the psychological intensity that is Zeller’s signature, it is also more overtly political than previous work, looking at how socioeconomic anxieties shape relationships and family dynamics.

“It takes a look at the contemporary world and explores modern fears– rampant individualism, fear of future, environmental issues, intensification of social injustice, ” Zeller says. “But rather than being commentary on the world, it’s an experience seen through the eyes of a couple.”

One of the film’s inspirations came from an article Zeller read about how Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg was building vast underground survival bunker for 30 people in Hawaii. “I was fascinated by this story. This man had made fortune connecting people with one another, yet at the same time was preparing plan B to completely cut himself off from the rest of humanity,” he says.

The anecdote became a metaphor for our era. “It addressed political issue–the folly of extreme wealth, believing that it can protect us from everything, that we can buy time, health and security.”

That tension also shaped the film’s visual language. Rather than shooting on location in London, Zeller built Miguel and Sofia’s modern home in Madrid studio (where Cruz and Bardem live with their children). “I wanted to build  house that would allow me to work on the viewer’s perception. At first, you think it’s a very open house with glass. But the further you get into the story, the more it begins to resemble a bunker.”

Studio became its own psychological experiment

“We experienced that bunker ourselves, in a studio without any light for several weeks.” The environment pushed the cast and crew toward the same isolation and paranoia that permeates the film

Zeller describes filmmaking as composing “set of codes” that are not immediately perceptible to the audience but quietly work to create meaning and poetry. Color, objects, books, costumes, music all become part of that hidden architecture.

References to Nolan’s epic The Odyssey run throughout the film, from  sculpture of Odysseus in Miguel’s office to Sofia reading Milan Kundera’s “Ignorance,” another story of homecoming.

When Miguel is seduced by the bunker project, Zeller and composer Volker Bertelmann weave voices resembling the Sirens into the score. “It’s through poetic codes that you create a universe, and that’s what is most powerful about a film.”

Attention to detail

The attention to detail extended to his cast. Andrew and Miguel never meet in person in the film, but Zeller ensured that Dano and Bardem never crossed paths during production.

“We never see Paul Dano in full because he’s on screen. There were long discussions about what shoes he should wear; the shoes inform his character,” sand Dano was able to create an “archetypal tech billionaire.”

Stephen Graham

The role of Miguel’s neighbor was written by Zeller specifically for Stephen Graham, the British actor and co-creator of Adolescence.

“It’s the story of neighbor who instills fear in Bardem. Usually, it’s Bardem who scares others.” And although physically much smaller than Bardem, Graham possessed what Zeller calls both “menacing power” and “incredible humanity,” making him the perfect foil.

The backbone of Bunker is Cruz and Bardem. Cruz was the first to read the scrip, and she asked Zeller if he would still offer her the role if Bardem turned him down. “This was really very important to them — to be seen as independent artists,” the director says. But had either actor declined, he probably would not have made the movie 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 interested in stripping away some the distance Bardem often creates between himself and his roles. “Javier has played characters very far removed from who he is, and he does that incredibly well,” Zeller says. “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.”

Sexual Ambiguity

There’s ambiguity inSofia’s relationship with an American writer played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, who auditioned for the part, was far more interesting than conventional affair.

“It could have been a story about infidelit, but that story has been told thousand times. Here, it’s a deeper, more subtle destabilization within a couple. It’s the type of encounter that throws us off course, and we’re no longer quite sure who we are or what we think,” Zeller says.

The uncertainty prompted Cruz to press him for answers. “She said to me, ‘I need you to tell me — what happened between them?’ And Javier was standing right there, ‘I don’t want to hear it!’ So she whispered in my ear what she thought had happened between them.”

The script’s political dimension also struck chord with Cruz and Bardem, both activists. Cruz identified with Sofia’s anger toward tech billionaire at the center of the story. “For Penélope, those scenes came fairly easily, because she could really relate to her. She has genuine anger toward the world embodied by the new masters, the tech billionaires.  For her, there was opportunity to express  rage that is her own.”

For all the political anxieties, the essence of the story is hopeful: “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.”

“That’s what allowed the actors to really go all in, 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.”