‘FEMINIST FRANKENSTEIN’?
The rehearsals for the Oscar contender Poor Things were ‘transformative’, say the cast. When Kevin Maher asked star Emma Stone and her director to explain, he got a surprise.
What is the secret of Poor Things? What is the essence of a movie in which Emma Stone plays a Victorian woman with a transplanted baby brain who bounces and bonks her way round Europe into selfactualisation? What drives a film that has been nominated for 11 Oscars, yet is castigated as an anti-feminist perversion and creepy male fantasy? The answer, I suspect, can be found by going back to the summer of 2021 when, in a studio in Hungary, the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) and Stone gathered a cast that included Willem Dafoe, Mark Ruffalo, Ramy Youssef (from the TV series Mr Robot) and Christopher Abbott (First Man). And there, for three weeks before shooting began, they did what?
It’s hard to tell. Possibly theatre games. But everyone involved talks rapturously, and evasively, about a transformative time. Dafoe says what happened was “beautiful” and Lanthimos “knew how to push our buttons”. Abbott claims: “We got being embarrassed out of the way.” Youssef has gone the furthest, saying: “We spent three weeks rolling around on the floor together.”
So naturally, when I meet Stone and Lanthimos, side by side in a central London hotel suite, one of my first questions is: what happened in Hungary that summer? Again, more evasion. “It’s not really interesting to talk about, it’s more interesting to do,” Stone says. “It’s like exercises I come up with,” Lanthimos says. “A lot of physicality and interaction between the actors. ʤuite silly and funny.”
Look, I say, that’s great, but I’m still not hearing anything about the practicality of what went on over those three weeks (and, frankly, I don’t add, I’m getting suspicious). Stone suddenly grins. “OK, do you wanna stand up?”
Sure, I lie. I stand up. Stone stands and turns to Lanthimos and, in producer mode, orders him into action. “Gos!” she says. “Do something!” “Oh,” he says, half shaken awake. “I’m directing?” “Yes,” she says, then turns to me, beaming, “So this is what it’s like.”
We are, it seems, about to execute an original Lanthimos-and-Stone-designed improvisation that will provide insight into the conceptual process behind Poor Things. Lanthimos directs Stone to walk towards the wall, then bounce against it, reversing backwards, at speed. I am to walk closely behind Stone, shadowing her movements. I am not to make contact. “Try to have your legs behind her legs so that you’re synchronised,” says Lanthimos, directing me. “But avoid her. And now, ask her a question.”
And so an ad hoc interview begins, mid nutty shadow-march, repeatedly, to the wall and back. I ask
Stone about the look of her character, Bella Baxter, and the extraordinary outfits of the Oscar-nominated costume designer Holly Waddington. “We did fittings every single day, because Holly had to ...” She catches herself, hoots with laughter, then, still marching, continues.
“We did fittings every day because ...” She turns to Lanthimos, without breaking stride and asks: “Do you want me to speed it up?” “Yes!” he says, excitedly. Her pace becomes slightly manic, but I do my best to follow. “Holly had fittings with me for ...”
She senses that I’m not matching her rhythm and half turns, warning me: “You have to stay on me.” I try, but it’s less marching now, more crazed scuttling. “I had fittings with Holly for two hours every day because ...” Thwack! With our rhythm completely off I kick her in the heel or, as she claims apologetically, she stamps backwards on my toes. Lanthimos says that this is the point. I’m wondering if he means that the point exists in the difference between my perception of the forward heel kick and Stone’s perception of the backwards toe stamp when Stone says: “And that’s just one little example. In Hungary we did it for hours and hours.”
Other things that happened in Hungary in summer 2021? The production designers Shona Heath and James Price (both also Oscarnominated for their work on the film) arrived at Origo Studios in Budapest with a US$35 million shooting budget and very specific orders from Lanthimos. “He said it had to look like nothing that’s ever been done before,” Price says with a chuckle over Zoom, sharing a screen with Heath. “Which is always a worry. Because you end up thinking, ‘Well, how are we supposed to do that?’”
Lanthimos had been nurturing the project since meeting the author of Poor Things, Alasdair Gray, in 2012. There the untested director, known for the festival favourite Dogtooth, received the blessing of the veteran novelist and “force of nature” (according to Lanthimos) for an adaptation. Lanthimos subsequently became an awards season darling, with The Lobster and the 10-time Oscar nominated The Favourite. He returned to Poor Things with Stone on board as producer and an idea to foreground the fairytale aspects of Gray’s story and tell it from Bella’s perspective.
“I knew that I wanted it to be Bella’s story, and I knew that it couldn’t be realistic,” Lanthimos says, adding that the tale’s more outlandish details – everything from sci-fi surgery in London to Bella’s keen appraisal of bordello life in Paris – would only work if the viewer had an extra sense of “This is fantasy”.
For the film’s “never-done-before” aesthetic, Heath and Price were inspired by the French illustrator Albert Robida, the British architect John Soane and early Keanu Reeves. Yes, the glossy Coppola horror Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a vital touchstone.
Stone, meanwhile, faced a prodigious challenge in Bella. How to evolve, credibly, over the course of 142 minutes, from babbling woman-child to sophisticated and empowered intellectual? The plan was to split the performance into stages. Lanthimos says: “We divided the script like that, so it was ‘stage one’ for scenes 1 to 27, then scenes 28 to 34 are ‘stage two’, and so on.” Stone adds, “It was my job to delineate the stages and I came
“I knew that I wanted it to be Bella’s story, andI knew that it couldn’t be realistic, This is fantasy. This is a fairytale. This is not realistic.”
DIRECTOR YORGOS LANTHIMOS
up with 10 of them, but we soon realised that ten was probably too much.” “Far too subtle,” Lanthimos teases before adding, deadpan: “She’s incredible.”
Stone says, “One of the reasons we like working together is because I don’t want to sit and intellectualise the characters I play. Like [she puts on a dreamy, whispery voice], ‘In this part, she’s feeling this way.’ No. Yorgos is just like, ‘Say it faster.’ Because that, in the end, is what it is. Just say it faster. And I trust that he’s putting this together in a way that’s going to make sense.”
Six months in Hungary was followed by a rapturous debut at the Venice Film Festival. “We had a 10-minute standing ovation,” Price says. Heath adds: “It was so nice to see people love something that was wild and creative and a bit out there.”
The film was celebrated as a “feminist Frankenstein” and a hilarious yarn that, yes, includes many sex scenes. But they illustrate Bella’s unfettered nature and satirise what the film’s screenwriter Tony McNamara describes as “men’s views of women and the lens that they are put under, and how men believe women are there to serve them”.
Of her prospects of a second best actress Oscar after La La Land, Stone says: “I’m trying to hold it as lightly as possible because if I think about it too much I’d go into a full anxiety spiral.” But awards attention has arrived with a backlash. The knee-jerk bloviators are out in full. The film is sexist. The nudity is exploitative. And, said one BBC commentator, because Bella’s brain is, technically, the transplanted brain of a child, the movie faces “consent” issues over its sex scenes. “If it helps, as the person who played it and produced it, I didn’t see her as a child in any of those scenes,” Stone says, coolly. “But even that’s too literal,” Lanthimos adds. Bashing Poor Things, Stone adds, is the inevitable product of our rapid rate of cultural digestion, where films are loved, then hated, often on social media, with dizzying speed. “My mum has this saying that at the start of a relationship you say, ‘Oh we’re so in love we finish each other’s sentences’. And then, as time goes by, it becomes, ‘You’re always interrupting me’. That can happen in a relationship with film, too, especially a film like this, that’s asking more questions than giving answers.”
“People will watch the same film differently, according to who they are and according to circumstances,” Lanthimos says.
His attention is already turning towards his next movie, another collaboration with Stone called Kinds of Kindness. He says that contradictory audience reactions are “just what you have to expect. That’s the interesting aspect of putting something out there.” In fact, he adds mischievously: “That’s the whole point.” .
Because that, ultimately, is the secret of Poor Things. What drives it is that rare thing in contemporary culture – ambiguity. It’s a film that resides in the gap between the feminist and the anti-feminist, between the hilarious and the creepy, between the forward heel kick and the backwards toe stamp.