by Gill Pringle
Working with Emma Stone six years ago on his multi award winning drama, The Favourite, director Yorgos Lanthimos knew that he wanted her to star in his next epic, Poor Things, which recently enjoyed its world premiere at Venice and walked away with the Golden Lion.
Probably Lanthimos’ most wildly inventive film – and that’s saying something from the director who brought us The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer – Poor Things is part Frankenstein and part Pygmalion.
Based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, Stone walks us – with wobbly gait and a love of sex – through her extraordinary evolution as Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by Willem Dafoe’s unorthodox and disfigured surgeon, Dr Godwin Baxter, who is both father figure and mentor.
Development on the film began as early as 2011 when Lanthimos first read Gray’s novel, visiting the late author and artist at his Scottish home, eight years prior to his death in 2019.
“He agreed to allow us to make the film, but it was a long process and when we were making The Favourite, I think we had just started writing the script with Tony McNamara,” says the Greek auteur.
“As soon as we finished, I just told Emma what it was, and she immediately got excited. We really got along making The Favourite and we knew each other a little bit before because The Favourite also took some time to make. She got on board and became a producer as well.
“Emma was very excited about the part but also the film in general and, from then on, we just started working on every aspect of it – from the design, the people that were going to work on it, the other actors, and we would discuss everything. And if you’re wondering how I pitched it to her, I didn’t!” he teases.
“I just said the basic plot of the movie. I don’t think up until this day that she’s even read the book. I told her, ‘don’t even read the book, because we’re changing it, although we’re quite loyal to the essence of the novel’. But the structure of it, in order to be made into a film, is quite different. So, I just said ‘don’t read the book; we’re finishing the script and you’ll read that’.”
It was a leap of faith for Stone, whose Bella Baxter embarks on an extraordinary journey of self -and-sexual-discovery, calling for much nudity during her many encounters.
Stone’s audacious performance – already tipped for another Oscar nomination – sees her start out playing an infant in the body of a full-grown woman, rapidly progressing to a fully-formed adult, horrified by the world’s brutality.
Talking about what originally drew him to Gray’s novel, Lanthimos says “it was really the character of Bella. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before. Because of the plot of the film that enables her to have this journey – to start from scratch; a human being with no previous fixed ideas about how things work; no conditioning that we go through. Just experiencing the world in a different way was something that attracted me immediately. And of course, it was also the Gothic aspect of it that you could use to tell this story and be able to believe in it using that form. And all the other characters as well – but mainly it was Bella that drew me into it,” he says of his fantastical science black comedy, which also features an hilarious Mark Ruffalo as a debauched lawyer and Bella’s first lover.
If some audiences have been shocked by the film’s overt sexuality, then Lanthimos says there were no surprises for Stone. “We went through everything together. She knew about everything. Although it didn’t have to do directly with her performance and how she built the character, there’s still the fact that she had this thing – the whole world – in her mind from the beginning and she saw how it was being built.
“Other than that, it’s just her being genius and brilliant and managing to do this thing that I have no idea how she did,” he adds.
Working with intimacy co-ordinator Elle McAlpine, he says of the many sex scenes that “they were there in the script and we both knew that we had to be bold and true to Bella’s character. It would be very disingenuous to not show sex like anything else in the film. So, we both knew that from the beginning.
“Emma was immediately involved in how they should be done and nearer the filming, we discussed it all, because there’s this sequence that she has a lot of men that go into her room and she has sex,” he says of the film’s Parisian brothel scenes.
“So, we just sat down and even figured out what would be the different scenes and how she would have sex, the different positions? And, what are we showing? What are we missing? What do we need to see; what don’t we need to see? So, we did that together. And then we had a wonderful intimacy coordinator who helped us tremendously, especially with the actors that would come in just for one scene – because with Mark, we had rehearsed and we all became very comfortable with each other and we’re very close, so it was much easier to do that stuff.
“But when someone came in for half a day, Elle was very helpful in creating the climate and helping us out and making the whole thing very stress free, safe and comfortable. And the other thing is that when we were filming those scenes, we were like just three people in the room – myself and Robbie [Ryan] operating the camera and Haley [Williams] our Assistant Director. And then the actors and that was it, so it was very intimate and comfortable, and people that know each other well, and just get on with it,” he says.
Filmed on fantastical, elaborate gothic sets built on a Hungarian sound stage, the cast also features Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, Ramy Youssef, Hannah Schygulla and Margaret Qualley.
In preparation for their roles, Youssef and Dafoe attended mortician school, while Stone took dance lessons and dyed her hair black.
Lamenting the fact that Gray died before Lanthimos was able to finish the film, he recollects that ”he was a very lovely man. Unfortunately, he died just a couple of years before we actually made the film, but he was very special and energetic; he was 80-something [when we met], and as soon as I got there, he had seen Dogtooth and said, ‘I think you’re a very talented, young man’.”
So intertwined has Lanthimos, 49, become with Stone, the pair have since made a short film, Bleat, with another feature film, And, in the works, again co-starring Dafoe and Qualley alongside Jesse Plemons, Joe Alwyn and Hong Chau.
Poor Things is in cinemas December 26, 2023
