‘Are we all going to be cancelled for this?’

By Robbie COLLIN

In a bright rehearsal room in Budapest, a week or two before filming began on Poor Things, the actress Emma Stone picked up an apple from the breakfast table, thrust it quizzically between her legs, and started to moan. This was an early moment of self-discovery for the film’s dauntless (and filter-less) heroine, Bella Baxter – a formerly dead Victorian gentlewoman who is reanimated, Frankenstein-style, with the transplanted brain of her unborn child, and then strikes out on a sexual and philosophical odyssey through Europe.

As Stone writhed in her seat, her co-star Ramy Youssef begged her to stop, as the scene required – but after their director, Yorgos Lanthimos, called a halt to proceedings, Youssef’s look of shock did not entirely fade.

“Tony,” he said, turning to the screenwriter Tony McNamara, who was sitting in the corner nursing a coffee. “You do know we’re all going to be cancelled for this, right?”

A little over two years later, McNamara is sitting in a London hotel room, clasping another coffee, still braced for a cancellation that has, as yet, failed to materialise.

“When we made this film, none of us said, ‘Well, here’s something that’s going to win over everyone,’” says the bookish Australian, who looks younger than his 56 years, despite the horn-rimmed spectacles, shock of silvering hair and already long-silvered beard. “But the people it won’t win over still haven’t made themselves known, so perhaps I should be nervous.”

When it premiered at Venice last September, Poor Things was met with the most uniformly positive reviews in the recent history of the festival. Ah well, McNamara joked in a WhatsApp message to Lanthimos: no hope of a prize from the jury, then. A week later, he was lying on the sofa in his home in London when Lanthimos texted him to say it had just won Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion. It then drew rapturous reactions at further festival screenings in Telluride,

New York and London, took $3.4 million (£2.7 million) over the Christmas weekend in the US, and is in the running for seven awards at tomorrow night’s Golden Globes. McNamara appears to have cracked a formula that has proved increasingly elusive since the 1970s: coming up with a deeply weird and provocative film that is also a popular hit.

Poor Things – which arrives in UK cinemas on Friday – is a dazzlingly funny and mad reworking of the 1992 novel by the Scottish author Alasdair Gray.

Lanthimos, the Greek-born filmmaker behind such deadpan provocations as Dogtooth and The Lobster, had earmarked it for McNamara just over a decade ago, when the two were refining the script for their Restoration-era black comedy The Favourite.

McNamara, who at the time was working in Australia as a playwright and screenwriter, had never heard of the book before Lanthimos pressed it into his hands. But a barista in his local coffee shop was a Scot, “and when I mentioned it to him, he got very excited”.

How Tony McNamara turned Poor Things from a weird Scottish novel into a global cinematic sensation

In 2011, shortly after moving to the UK, Lanthimos, a longtime admirer of Gray’s work, travelled to Glasgow to try to win the author’s approval. On his arrival, however, Gray immediately bundled him back out of the door and took him on an impromptu walking tour of his favourite spots in the city, from the university to the Necropolis. In an email to McNamara afterwards, Lanthimos described Gray telling him on the doorstep, almost as an afterthought, that he had enjoyed Dogtooth and was happy to give a Poor Things adaptation his blessing. “It was incredibly generous of him and Yorgos was overjoyed,” McNamara says, adding that it “brought a note of real bittersweetness” to the production that Gray, who died in 2019 at the age of 85, wasn’t around to see the cameras finally roll on the project.

McNamara had taken some nicely judged liberties with the

source material, darkening the final act and lopping off a playful framing narrative that calls into question the central version of events. But the most drastic shift was swapping its Glasgow setting for London – or at least a heightened version of it, built (like each of its locations) in a Hungarian film studio – and thereby draining the tale of its peculiar Scottish flavour in the process. Just a single twang remains: as the eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter, Willem Dafoe does a very convincing Scottish Enlightenment accent.

When the first trailer was released last summer, some portions of Scottish social media were consumed by grumbling over this, while others rightly wondered why their country’s own cultural sector had left it to England (and Australia, Greece, Hungary, and so on) to bring this nationally beloved novel to a wider audience.

McNamara stresses the relocation wasn’t personal. “We were sad to take it away from Glasgow, but felt like we had to,” he says. “It made it so much simpler for a wider audience to get into the movie, without us having to set up such a specific cultural context. We wanted to bring everyone into this bizarre world of a mad scientist performing brain transplants with corpses and foetuses, so to then say to the audience, ‘By the way, this is happening in Scotland’, felt like asking too much. Because then they start wondering, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ So, while I understand some Scots have been a bit twitchy about it” – he looks suddenly apprehensive, perhaps in case his Scottish-accented interviewer is one of them – “it was only because London is instantly understandable around the world as a gothic Victorian backdrop.”

Anyway, Lanthimos had always conceived of the film as an international effort. McNamara remembers an afternoon during the filming of The Favourite when the director quietly took him aside, pointed at Stone, and said of the Arizona-born actress: “I think she’s our Bella.”

“When we told her what we had, she loved it and immediately jumped on board,” McNamara says – though he didn’t start the adaptation process with Stone specifically in mind. “I can’t imagine actors when I write,” he says, “even when I’m literally married to one of the cast.” (In his streaming series The Great, a period comedy about the Russian empress Catherine II,

McNamara’s wife, Belinda Bromilow, plays Elizabeth of Russia.)

Born and raised an hour north of Melbourne, McNamara came to London at 22 to work as a merchant banker, but fled before the year was out. In his short initial spell here, he fell in love with the theatre – and on a trip to Rome to decompress, decided to reinvent himself as a playwright. Returning to Melbourne, he took a year-long creative-writing course, which led to a lengthy spell working as a waiter – but also enough downtime in which to write his first play, a Ferris Bueller-esque satire of middle-class Australian teen life titled The Cafe Latte Kid. This in turn became his debut feature, 2003’s The Rage in Placid Lake, which he also directed.

“I enjoyed making it, but I also realised I was never going to be good at both writing and directing,” he remembers. “The first of those was where I had to commit.”

His knack for complex and unruly female characters – Catherine the Great, all three leads in The Favourite, a young Miss de Vil in Cruella – quickly won him Stone’s admiration, who brought him onto that latter Disney film in 2019 after its screenplay got stuck in a rut.

That job was “all methodical, all calculation”, he explains. “You quickly realise you’re there to serve a piece of IP” – intellectual property; in this case, an existing character or premise – “which Disney are very invested in emotionally, but also want to make a lot of money with, so it’s all about finding a middle path that satisfies both halves.” He remembers fretting before his initial meeting with the producers, “because it seemed so corporate and onerous, and I’d always been an indie kind of person. But they were so nice to me. They sat me down and asked, ‘What would you do to solve these things we think are problems, and what other problems haven’t we spotted?’” Did it work? Well, around his Poor Things schedule – also technically a Disney gig, since the film’s parent studio is Searchlight Pictures – he’s currently beavering away on Cruella 2.

It’s certainly interesting that a studio as image-conscious as Disney would bring McNamara back to write one of its iconic heroines at a time when writers’ identities – that is, their sex, and racial and cultural backgrounds – are scrutinised for suitability on such projects. How does he feel about the modern fixation on who gets to tell which stories?

“I’m the wrong person to talk to about the modern world, because I try to avoid it,” he chuckles. “But I mean, whatever you do, someone’s going to have a problem. Oprah Winfrey sent $5 million to Hawaii after the wildfires, and some people went after her for that. Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in. But I do feel this film is about that sort of control – what it means to live in a time when people have strict ideas about how we should and shouldn’t speak and behave.”

Bella Baxter – dancing, shagging, arguing and scoffing Portuguese custard tarts till she pukes – is, in that respect, as out of place in the 2020s as she is in the 1890s. Perhaps that’s why she’s striking such a chord.

Poor Things is in UK cinemas from Friday

It is surprising, and rather unfair, that the architecture of Edward Maufe (1882-1974) is so little known. Or perhaps it is safer to say that the work that is well known is not widely recognised as his. His masterpiece is Guildford Cathedral, viewed daily by thousands from their cars as they drive along the A3; but he also designed the Air Forces Memorial, at Runnymede. What both have in common, despite their contemporary looks, is a connection with tradition. Maufe designed fine buildings that have stood the test of time.

I first encountered him while at university. He designed the Chapel Court and North Court at St John’s College, Cambridge, a room in which was occupied by one of my friends. To the unobservant, the buildings, as one approaches them, look to be in the manner of a 1930s apartment building, whether the luxurious art-deco blocks that one finds in west London, or the former council flats in the capital’s inner suburbs built under the direction of Herbert Morrison for the London County Council in the years just before the war. The Pevsner architectural guide to Cambridgeshire is sniffy about Maufe’s work here, saying he misses an opportunity to present a more magnificent building where it backs onto one of Cambridge’s busiest roads: “The mixture of new and traditional elements betrays Maufe’s membership of a generation too old to go over to modernism but too young to ignore its imperatives altogether.”

This is unfair. Maufe also had to allow for his work abutting George Gilbert Scott’s cathedrallike chapel at St John’s, which he did tastefully. And when one gets inside Maufe’s buildings, one notices the high specification of the staircases themselves, the doors and door handles, the iron windows so typical of the period, and the fixtures and fittings in the kitchens and bathrooms. Above all, not least thanks to the fenestration but also because of the generosity of scale, the rooms have an airiness that is as far from the student’s garret as could be imagined. Thirty years after first encountering this architecture, I became reacquainted with it when my son lived in one of Maufe’s rooms in the same court.

Maufe – a Yorkshireman born Edward Muff but whose father changed the family name by deed poll to what was claimed to be its original form – was apprenticed to an architectural practice in London in 1899. His family moved in 1904 to Kent, to live in a contemporary house – Red House, in Bexleyheath – designed by Philip Webb for William

Morris. Webb is regarded as the progenitor of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the young Maufe was deeply influenced by his style. Private houses, notably Kelling Hall, in Norfolk, proliferated among his early work, and reflect the inspiration of Webb, Morris and Edwin Lutyens. He had hoped, after the Great War

(in which he fought), to move to larger-scale projects, and although the design he submitted for the Palace of Industry at the 1924 British Empire Exhibition was rejected, it brought him notice. He started to build churches, which display his own evolving aesthetic: St Bede’s Clapham, and St Saviour’s, in Acton. The former, now a social club for the deaf, has a high, narrow nave and lancetstyle window lights that preempt Guildford Cathedral. The latter, now the St Thomas Syrian Orthodox Church, has the same tall nave, gothic windows and restrained brickwork.

Maufe won the competition to build Guildford Cathedral in 1932. Critics attacked the design as being anachronistic at the time, and all the more so by the time the building was finished in 1961. The odd proportions of height and breadth provoke differing opinions: I find his use of space exceptional, and it is in that respect that he fits so well into the tradition of English cathedral builders. The red brick and the austere interior and exterior mark the building out as 20th century, the narrow horizontal windows in the tower date the design to the 1930s. It is the natural successor to Giles Gilbert Scott’s more expansive, lumbering design at Liverpool, which began construction 30 years earlier. Maufe’s legacy may be less celebrated, but it is worth examining none the less.

Walter Reid, the author of an admiring biography of Neville Chamberlain, has written a book claiming that Winston Churchill’s attitude towards India was “malign, cruel, obstructive and selfish”. Pleasingly, however, it utterly fails to prove any of those accusations, except that Churchill tried to obstruct selfgovernment for India from 1930 to 1935, which is hardly a state secret.

Reid revels in hyperbole, stating that Churchill displayed a “disingenuous and unprincipled opposition to any initiative which might edge India, however slightly, out of the clutches of Great Britain”. (Those were the “clutches”, by the way, that gave India its railways, mass education system, irrigation projects, law and order, English as its first national lingua franca, universities, newspapers, standardised units of exchange, telegraphic communications, an uncorrupt legal system, medical advances, and the abolition of the widespread practice of burning widows alive on their husbands’ funeral pyres.)

Was Churchill really “disingenuous and unprincipled” in his five years of opposition to the Government of India Act 1935? Even as hostile a critic as Reid accepts that he pursued his campaign to the detriment of his own career, and it kept him out of government until the Second World War. If anyone was unprincipled at that time, it was, in fact, the National Government, which Reid admits tampered with the vital evidence given to Parliament by Lancastrian manufacturers about the likely commercial implications of Indian self-government. Churchill never did anything like that.

There was also nothing disingenuous about Churchill’s central message of the dangers of over-hasty Indian self-government, which was that the Hindus would use their numerical advantage to strip the Indian princes, with whom Britain had treaty obligations, of their powers, as well as dominate the Muslim minority and keep the untouchables at the bottom of an unaltered caste system. Those were the essential bases of Churchill’s critique, and Indian history from 1947 to the present day has proved him correct in all three.

Churchill believed the British Empire was worth defending, and feared national decline if India left it, and so he fought to keep the status quo, but he did it from decent motives, which Reid either ignores or denies. It was a losing battle, but only because Britain nearly bankrupted itself helping to save the world from fascism. If Britain had had no need to come to India’s aid in 1941, which it did because it was part of the empire, it is likely that it would have been invaded by imperial Japan, with tens of millions of Indians dying, if other Japanese occupations, such as the Philippines, are anything to go by.

Reid is on similarly weak ground where he considers other aspects of Churchill’s career. It was not Churchill’s “force of character” that prevented the War Cabinet from pursuing peace negotiations with Hitler in May 1940, for example: he was in a four-to-one majority there, as the biographer of Neville Chamberlain ought to have known. Reid’s criticism of successive prime ministers and secretaries of state for India for not visiting the country during their time in office has a straightforward explanation: the viceroy of India had constitutional precedence there.

We shall be marking the 150th anniversary of Churchill’s birth in 2024, and along with a panoply of celebrations, there will inevitably be a chorus of the usual baleful criticisms, many focused on his supposedly inadequate response to the appalling Bengal famine of 1943, which killed more than three million people. The facts are straightforward, and confirmed by the meticulous report of the official inquiry, which did not hesitate to allocate blame. A typhoon in late 1942 destroyed both Bengal’s rice and the road and rail networks that were needed to get emergency aid to the region. The Japanese controlled the areas, such as Malaya, Burma and Thailand, from where rice could normally be shipped, and Churchill wrote to ask the leaders of America, Canada and Australia to send food supplies, although Japanese submarines in the Bay of Bengal made such operations difficult. The Bengal authorities, both British and Indian – the province had been self-governing since 1935 – failed to requisition rice from local merchants, as food prices soared. The viceroy in Delhi ought to have acted sooner, imposing central authority. But none of this was the fault of the government in London, let alone Churchill.

Fortunately, Reid is enough of an objective historian to recognise that Churchill did not deliberately want to use the opportunity to kill Bengalis, as alleged by his detractors – who ignore the separation of powers in wartime India – but Reid does quote those detractors ad nauseam. And in swallowing whole the Left-wing economic view that Britain was simply an exploitative leech on India from 1600 to 1947, Reid parrots the profoundly flawed analyses of authors such as Shashi Tharoor, Richard Toye and Sathnam Sanghera. He quotes Tharoor’s belief that “Britain’s Industrial Revolution was built on the destruction of India’s thriving manufacturing industries”, and that “slave-related businesses contributed the same proportion of British GDP as the professional and support services sector does in modern Britain”, despite both claims having been comprehensively exploded in review after

review of Tharoor’s deeply bigoted book. By contrast, there is no indication that Reid has read the works of scholars such as Tirthankar Roy, Zareer Masani and Kartar Lalvani, who prove that Anglo-Indian trade was extraordinarily beneficial to both countries.

“His consistent policy towards India from 1930 onwards cannot be excused or justified,” Reid claims of Churchill. “It was dishonest, mendacious and immoral.” Yet Churchill gave literally hundreds of speeches on the topic, up and down the country, for half a decade, often to huge audiences. If it was genuinely any of those three adjectives, why was it not denounced as such at the time? Contemporaries criticised his stance as wrong or shortsighted or dangerous, but they recognised that he was pursuing his campaign out of honourable motives, and so should we.

Others of Reid’s accusations, such as that Churchill “never matured” from being a subaltern, or that he was responsible for Hindus and Muslims being “divided among themselves” – when the divide had begun centuries before

Churchill’s birth – are frankly risible. One is left with the strong sense that Churchill was neither “malign” nor “cruel”, but that this book is both.

Andrew Roberts is the author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny