Wregas Bhanuteja Director Interview: An Internal Creative Journey to Levitating

Levitating Film Trailer

Creative Roots in Collective Trance Traditions

Shortly after the world premiere of Levitating, Bhanuteja shared more about his creative process, which involved a practice of literally meditating his film into existence.

“I[‘ve] meditate[d] every morning since two years ago,” Bhanuteja says, explaining how the 45-minute sessions became the foundation for the film’s most striking sequences. But his approach differs from meditation practices that focus on the breath or on emptying the mind; as memories, thoughts and feelings arise, he engages them in a mental dialogue.

Set in a small village, Levitating focuses on a rural community’s culture of sambetan, or trance party rooted in ritual. Bhanuteja researched the many trance rituals across Indonesia’s islands as well as more broadly throughout Asia. He discovered common tenets among them, such as an emphasis on the catharsis of collective ritual and the practice of fasting the day prior to the event.

Pulling from their research — which included interviews with people about their experiences in trance — Bhanuteja and his co-writers created a fictional trance tradition. In the film, musicians play a key role as spirit-channelers who become possessed by animal spirits, in turn playing their instruments to facilitate a collective trance experience for participants. But when a real estate company starts buying up the villagers’ land, the community decides to host a fundraising party to secure their property.

Bayu, a twenty-year-old aspiring channeler who is desperate to prove himself and to save his family’s home, sees his chance to become the lead spirit channeler. Driven by ambition and pressure, he throws himself into brutal training: fasting for days, meditating all night in hopes of attracting an animal spirit that he can channel, and generally pushing his body to its limits.

The purpose of sambetan is to create a safe space for communal elation through altered states. In his obsessive attempts to rise above his past, Bayu ends up isolating himself from everyone – including his best friend and his love interest. When the final selection of the spirit-channeler arrives, Bayu discovers that all his striving has led him somewhere unexpected: not to triumph, but to a deeper understanding of what the sambetan rituals were really about all along.

Morning Meditation as Creative Grounding

Bhanuteja’s meditation practices were important for the scripting and world-building of a story that revolves around altered-state experiences. He drew from his own experiences to create Bayu’s defining character traits of obsession and fixation on the past.

He describes a dialogic process between his conscious and unconscious mind, explaining, “If there is a disturbance in my head, for example, [such as] I got the image of my friend, rather than make him disappear, I try to ask him why [while meditating].”

This practice of engaging in deep self-reflection helps Bhanuteja uncover the roots of beliefs and past traumas. It leads him into deep self-reflection about everything from surface irritations to childhood trauma and fundamental fears about abandonment.

It was during these morning sessions, before checking social media or eating breakfast, that the film’s fantasy realms took shape.

“I try to ask myself, what is my true imagination or my true fantasy when I’m feeling tired?” he questions.

The answers can be visceral: a realm bursting with flowers because he loves fragrance, dancing in cleansing waters, enjoying a relaxing massage, relishing tasty foods. Each of these internally conjured sense worlds are present in the film’s spectacular trance scenes. The unexpected inspiration of jumping bed bugs led to the film’s titular scene: a literally transcendent moment in which many trance-induced dancers somersault high into the air.

There are also sequences that visualize Bayu’s mental landscape as he struggles to concentrate and empty his mind. These scenes unfold in a black box environment punctuated by invasive thoughts and mental distractions, and are inspired directly from Bhanuteja’s own meditation experience.

A Fictional World Designed from Real Traditions

The film draws from Indonesia’s rich tradition of possession rituals, but Bhanuteja was careful to create something entirely fictional – a choice that gave him creative freedom while respecting the cultures he researched. He interviewed trance party participants, and discovered how each person brings their unique imagination to the experience.

The trance scenes are most often depicted joyfully in the film. These aren’t horror movie possessions but rather, a cathartic way for people to “release their worries, celebrate together, and experience joy with nothing more than sunlight, dust, rhythm, and their own bodies,” as the production notes describe.

Music and film play a huge role in evoking trance by engaging the senses. The film’s dance sequences required a unique collaboration between Bhanuteja and choreographer Siko Setyanto, who specializes in movement inspired by nature and animals. The choreography process combined careful design and creative improvisation.

“He created ten animal movements based on the spirits,” Bhanuteja explains.

For each one, Setyanto would ask what the sensation of being possessed by that particular animal would feel like. A buffalo spirit brings the feeling of being sprayed by cold water, inspiring movements of an animal bathing in a shower. An ant spirit evokes the taste of delicious food, leading to gestures of eating and savoring.

Lead actress Maudy Ayunda — a megastar actress, singer, and entrepreneur with over 19 million Instagram followers — then took these base gestures and improvised.

“She tried to listen to the music, and then just let her body move unconsciously,” Bhanuteja says.

The team would record everything, review it together, and select the best moments to incorporate into the final choreography.

The choice of animals came from Bhanuteja’s childhood: watching bed bugs jump in his grandfather’s bedroom, leeches crawling through his house during the rainy season, the family’s pet turtle ambling across the floor.

“I always feel relaxed when I try to remember them,” he notes.

Yet perhaps the most remarkable creative decision involved the film’s mantras, performed by beloved Indonesian-French singer Anggun in her feature film debut. Music director Yennu Ariendra composed fifteen tracks, and Anggun was asked to respond to each one with complete freedom – no lyrics, no notation, just intuition.

The catch? Only one take per mantra.

“If they recorded it twice, Yennu felt it would no longer feel organic,” Bhanuteja says. “So Anggun came in without knowing anything beforehand. She simply listened to the music for the first time and immediately responded with her voice, her singing, her gestures. And those became the mantra that we used in the film.”

This creative commitment to prioritizing organic improvisation over controlled design reflects the key themes of the film.

Tying in Personal Stakes

At its core, Levitating is about Bhanuteja’s own struggles with obsession and the past — the two things that always surface when he tries to meditate.
“Obsession looks like when I try too hard to be the best at what I do. I get so focused that I forget everything else: friends, family, my own well-being,” he writes in the director’s statement.

Bayu embodies this pattern, pushing himself relentlessly to become the strongest perasuk while alienating everyone around him.

The film also draws on Bhanuteja’s childhood jealousy of his younger brother, who claimed to see spirits everywhere: a white cat the size of a cow on their roof, a dwarf with flaming hair in the garden. While Bhanuteja stared into the garden concentrating as hard as he could, seeing nothing, his brother played happily with his “spirit pets.”
“He never had to wait for something new because his imagination already gave him everything he needed,” Bhanuteja says in the director’s statement. Years later, his brother, who’s now studying medicine, wonders if he had a sixth sense or schizophrenia.

“He still does not really know. What he does know is that the spirits made his childhood feel warm and magical,” he adds.

The film’s ultimate message emerged from Bhanuteja’s research into possession rituals. He notes, “The key is surrender. You stop forcing, stop overthinking, and let yourself drift.”

It’s a philosophy that extends beyond the trance sequences to life itself.

“We can’t control everything. Things won’t always go the way we want,” Bhanuteja says in his statement. “But if we can make peace with our past, ourselves, and focus more on caring for the people around us, I believe life becomes a lot more manageable, and maybe even more harmonious.”

One of the film’s greatest strengths is its ability to weave this message of communal connection across different states of consciousness, creating harmony between inner and outer, the personal and the collective.