Things are about to get weird.
You know that when you sit down to watch a new Yorgos Lanthimos film. The surreal family nightmare of Dogtooth (2009) was followed by
The Lobster (2015), an absurdist pitch-black comedy that changed dating, and lobsters, forever. 2017’s The Killing Of A Sacred Deer was a psychological revenge story starring international-marker-of-unsettling-weirdness Barry Keoghan eating spaghetti, and Colin Farrell facing an impossible choice. And then came The Favourite (2018), with Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz as two points of a cut-throat manipulation triangle, each vying for the attention — and bed — of Olivia Colman’s sickly Queen Anne, her 17 rabbit children nearby.
Each of these films is completely Lanthimos — dark, funny, playful — and his new one, Poor Things, is all of those things, too. But when you take your seat, know this: Lanthimos’ work has never been weirder, or grander.
For this — his riskiest, most expensive, most philosophical film yet — Lanthimos has reteamed with Tony Mcnamara, screenwriter of
The Favourite, and with Emma Stone, who stars as Bella Baxter: a living experiment by the deformed, eccentric scientist Dr Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe, under four hours of prosthetics), whom she calls God. Baxter has shelved his innovative work of creating duck/bulldog chimaeras to bring the body of a dead woman back to life.
When we meet Bella, in a segment filmed like a black-and-white 1930s Universal horror movie, she is a grown woman with the brain of an infant, smashing plates purely because she delights in the smashing of them. But she is maturing at hyperspeed. Her hair grows inches in mere weeks; within months, her clumsy totter on the unwieldy legs of a toddler learning to walk becomes a bold dance in the colourful bars of Lisbon. Her speech develops from baby babble into academic argument. It’s a Frankenstein coming-of-age story, a skewering of societal norms through the eyes of Bella encountering them without prior knowledge and conditioning. It’s about identity, memory, the pursuit of freedom, and — though her origins are in death — it’s about a full-hearted love of life and discovery. Together, Lanthimos, Stone and Mcnamara have built a world and a woman unlike anything we have ever seen.
“It’s a myth, it’s a fairy tale,” Lanthimos tells Empire. “She’s a creature that has never existed before.”
Where the hell did she come from? Well, “Scotland” is the easy answer.
Lanthimos fell in love with Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things in 2010, after a friend told him he had to read it. Immediately, he then sought out the author, by then in his late seventies, and travelled to meet him. “He took me around
Glasgow, walking in neighbourhoods where he had placed certain scenes,” recalls Lanthimos. “He was a wonderful, energetic man. I just had this amazing day with him, and then at the end of it he said, ‘I think you’re gonna do a great job with this. Here it is, go ahead and do it.’”
Lanthimos, though, had trouble getting it greenlit. “I think people were quite afraid of it,” he says, not because of the subject matter, but because of the sheer scale of it. It was a hard sell asking for enough money to build a whole woman and a world. First, Lanthimos had to build a career outside of Greece. He hadn’t yet made a movie in English. Later, though, everything changed. “After The Favourite everyone was like, ‘What do you want to do next?’ Immediately I said: ‘I want to do Poor Things.’ From that moment on, it was relatively straightforward.” He catches himself and laughs. “Well, in the sense of, ‘We’re starting to make it.’ It was not straightforward at all.”
For Lanthimos, Tony Mcnamara was the obvious choice to adapt the novel for the screen — Mcnamara has a tone of voice that matches his own, says Lanthimos, but is different enough that when they mix, they make something entirely different. Mcnamara agrees: “My wife jokes that we’re sort of brothers, in a weird way.”
The writer grew up in Melbourne, Australia, which has the largest Greek-speaking population outside of Greece and Cyprus, and thinks this upbringing feeds into it too: the tone they share is not just theirs, but cultural. “I do think there’s an Australianness to the tone of the comedy. And both the Australian and the Greek cultures have a sort of black-comedy aspect to how they understand the world.”
Lanthimos gave Mcnamara some cinematic touchpoints to think about as he was working on the screenplay, a vague template of tone and feel: Federico Fellini’s And The Ship Sails On, set on a luxury ocean liner; Luis Buñuel’s psychologically layered Belle De Jour, about a young housewife’s discovery of sex-work and high-class brothels; and Mel Brooks’ delightfully batshit Young Frankenstein. But the novel was large and unwieldy, a sprawling story with many narrators.
“I had to fillet it, and work out what it’s about, and what characters to stick with, and how to tell this story that goes to a lot of different places,” says Mcnamara. At least one character had their motivation changed: in the novel, Dafoe’s scientist reanimated this woman to become his sexual partner, and was dejected when she would touch everyone but him. That was one of the first things to go. “As well as our sense of humour, something we’re both very drawn to is the idea that people are very complex,” says the writer. “We never like characters who are just one thing. That felt a bit one thing.” It became a paternal relationship. At once simpler, but also more complicated.
However, Mcnamara had a wobble at around page 80 and wrote to Lanthimos to say it might be going quite badly actually, and he wasn’t sure if he could finish it.
“And then,” says Mcnamara, “I went: ‘I think I can do this if it’s about her.’”
Both The Favourite and Poor Things are stories about women, something Lanthimos feels unconsciously drawn to in a way he can’t really figure out — possibly it comes down to being raised by a single mother, and then, after her death when he was 17, his aunt. Now it has become about working with Emma Stone (between The Favourite and Poor Things there was also a 30-minute black-and-white silent film about grief and goats called Bleat). “So you’re stuck with women,” jokes Stone across the Zoom screen at Lanthimos. But while both films explore ideas of women and power, they could not be more different.
“Abigail, my character in The Favourite, and Bella are complete polar opposites,” says Stone. “One is completely caught in everything that’s happened to her and the other one is completely free from everything that’s ever happened to her.” When she talks about Bella Baxter, Stone practically beams. “I love absolutely everything about her,” she enthuses. “She’s my favourite person. She’s not like anybody else. She’s free and she’s without shame. She’s funny, and she’s just so alive.”
Bella is a group creation. Her manner of speaking — her repeated words like a thesaurus entry as her vocabulary expands — came from the novel. Her pure instinct and lack of filter came from Mcnamara’s five-year-old kid — an extreme naivety fast-tracked into not entirely innocent teenagehood. For Stone, it was a chance to start from scratch. “The best part about it,” she says, “was thinking, ‘What would you be if no-one told you what you’re supposed to be?’ Or how you’re supposed to be, or how you’re supposed to witness the world? Getting to move through it with fresh eyes. Removing as much of my own conditioning as possible was not just important for the character and the story, but also, I think, in my life. Not to make it, you know” — she rolls her eyes and pulls a face — “therapy.”
It’s a performance that requires an absence of self-consciousness, a fearless commitment to the part, and full trust in Lanthimos. As her co-star Willem Dafoe explains, “Emma really throws herself into things. Sometimes you see performers that do that, but there’s a masochism about it — she doesn’t have any of that. She’s very joyful. And her gameness is a good blend with Yorgos’ curiosity. It’s that relationship where somebody wants to see something and then you try to help them see it by being it.”
The environment for this kind of freedom doesn’t exist on every set — and there’s a reason it does on a Lanthimos one: his rehearsals are infamous. With a background in experimental theatre, and being an actor himself, Lanthimos puts his cast through a couple of weeks of theatre games — like physically entangling and untangling themselves while saying
lines, or deconstructing words until they are meaningless sounds — which bind the actors together by basically embarrassing them so much that they simply have no embarrassment left in front of each other. All that remains is trust; a feeling of safety in trying and failing. It’s the kind of thing that makes non-actors shrivel up in agony like a salted slug, Mcnamara included (“I’m too much of an awkward writer”) though he did watch.
Dafoe, also with a background in experimental theatre, says those preparatory games are essential for a film like this. “It’s a different relationship than you normally have with scene partners,” he explains. “You’re very patient with everyone, and everyone’s patient with you. They need to be confident in what they’re doing, because what we’re doing is quite risky. It’s not a normal film.”
The comedian Ramy Youssef — in his first major film role as Max Mccandless, a colleague of Baxter and, in competition with Mark Ruffalo’s louche lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, one of Bella’s love interests — said these rehearsals were one of the coolest things he’s ever been part of. “The level of intimacy in these theatre games — how could we not love each other after that?!”
Then he was sent off to mortician school with Dafoe to learn the technical aspects of being a 19th-century anatomist, practising the slicing and stitching of human flesh on animal parts, using medical instruments from the 1800s.
“It was like: ‘Mark’s going to accent class, Emma is going to dance class, and then me and Willem are going to hang with the mortician, and we’ll link back up at lunch,’” laughs Youssef. “It felt like a college campus.” The pair also visited an old medical museum in Hungary on their day off, but mortician school was Lanthimos’ idea.
“Willem got really focused on it,” Youssef continues. “I’d be joking around, stitching something up — I kind of had a knack for it because my hands are a little bit smaller, I was able to get in there — and Willem would be like, ‘What the fuck?’ But once he got it, he really got it better than me.”
But even the jarred brains of a medical museum and the tools of long-dead anatomists were not half as strange as the worlds Bella goes on to visit when she leaves the lab that created her.
There are distinct chapters in Poor Things, each with its own feel and place as Bella sails around the world, from Alexandria to Odessa to a Parisian brothel. “The book is set in a straightforward Victorian period, but in focusing on Bella’s viewpoint I felt that we had to build a world for her to inhabit,” says Lanthimos. “And it shouldn’t be what we know exactly — it should be slightly tweaked.”
For some locations, Lanthimos looked to paintings for inspiration: Baxter’s sooty Victorian Glasgow was Francis Bacon, and in Paris, Bella looks as if she was painted by Egon Schiele. For the feel of the dance scenes in Lisbon, Lanthimos made the cast watch Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (which has since become one of Stone’s favourite films). “There are so many different things that we tapped into while trying to create our own world and be free of all of it at the same time,” he says.
Lanthimos used a mixture of very old-school filmmaking techniques and new technology: like the boat, which is a handmade miniature but sails on an LED sea. Every scene is on a built set, inspired by the handmade, painterly quality of Hollywood studio films from the 1930s, as well as the work of Fellini, and even the Swedish director Roy Andersson, who has been known to build entire sets just to shoot one specific angle. Though the sets of Poor Things were enormous to begin with, very wide-angle lenses necessitated extensions to fill the space at the edge of the frame. At one point, they filled every film studio in Budapest. Lanthimos isn’t sure how much they finally spent on it. Poor Things is a risky, experimental film not just financially, but artistically: the director has gone further than ever before. Is he worried he might lose people by going too far?
“I don’t want it to sound like I don’t give a fuck about people, but I kind of… don’t,” he chuckles. “I started out making all these little films in Greece and we’ve just carried on making them the same way. Every time I make a film, I just want to stay true to my instinct. I feel really fortunate that I can be completely free creatively to make this kind of film — but at the same time, I don’t think I would be making films if I couldn’t make them this way. People are going to see certain things a different way, and that’s the joy of it: creating these kinds of films that are not closed or specific. Or trying to say just one thing or make you feel a certain way.”
Poor Things is not the end of the burgeoning Lanthimos/stone film universe. They have already shot And, their next feature, in New Orleans. Dafoe is in it too, now part of the expanding theatre troupe that includes trusted writers, actors, and crew. But how do you follow up something as ambitious as building a woman from nothing? What even is And?
There’s a silence. Neither Lanthimos nor Stone is sure what has to remain a secret for now. Eventually Stone leans forward and says, “So you’ve seen Jurassic Park, right?” Yes. “It’s that. It’s Jurassic Park.” Okay. “It’s a new take,” adds Lanthimos. “Without the dinosaurs.” They grin.
Fine. We can wait: we’ve got Bella Baxter to keep us company.
POOR THINGS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 8 SEPTEMBER
“Bella is not like anybody else. She’s free and she’s without shame.” EMMA STONE