When you conduct an interview via Zoom these days, you often have no idea when you’ll actually speak to your interview subjects. Click a link, and you might be popped into a virtual conference room immediately, or you might find yourself wondering if someone forgot you were on the schedule. For “Poor Things,” this writer was looking at his phone when he realized he had already been allowed into the room. Actually, he might have been in the room for more than a minute. And there before him were Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone aligned in intentionally cutesy poses. Just waiting for their interviewer to realize it was time. That delightfully whimsical energy is perhaps one reason the pair have reunited for their first of what will be at least four films together (and that’s just what is planned so far).
READ MORE: “Poor Things”: Holly Waddington Breaks Down The Acclaimed Fantasy’s Incredible Costumes
Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s original 1992 novel, “Poor Things” follows Bella Baxter (Stone), a woman who has been reincarnated in mysterious circumstances by a not-so mad 19th Century scientist, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). As Bella begins to become more aware of her surroundings, she escapes from Dr. Baxter’s care to explore the world (and her sexual being) with a shallow but mostly harmless philanderer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara’s epic, which took the Golden Lion at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, explores humanity’s uncomfortableness with itself and disturbingly inherent sexism in an often hilarious manner (partially thanks to virtuoso performances from Stone and Ruffalo).
Over the course of our sadly too short conversation, Lanthimos and Stone recall how the latter became a producer on the project, reveal their own surprise regarding Ruffalo’s comedic abilities, wax over whether portraying an arc like Bella’s is actually “hard,” ponder watching the movie with an audience in theaters this weekend, and much more.
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The Playlist: Yorgos, I think you were involved in adapting this even before you worked on “The Favourite,” is that correct?
Yorgos Lanthimos: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I discovered the novel around 12 years ago. So yeah, it’s ever since that I’ve been trying to adapt it into a film, and I just got the opportunity right after The Favor to actually do it, but it was always on my mind all this time.
The Playlist: Emma, how did you become involved, and also how did you become a producer on it?
Emma Stone: Yorgos asked me to be a producer on it. That’s it. [Laughs.] He told me a little bit about the things that he was thinking about working on next, right after “The Favourite,” and he told me about this, which he and Tony had already begun adapting years prior, I guess. And I just became kind of obsessed with it and in love with Bella and wanted to be a part of it. And then I annoyed and pestered him enough about every single aspect of every decision he was making for the film that he eventually was like, “O.K., fine, just be a producer, because then at least there’s a title to how annoying you’re being.”
The Playlist: I’ve talked to actors in the past when they portray characters that have these transformative sort of arcs like Bella’s, and some of them will reveal, “I make notes in the script so I know where to be at a certain place.” Were you that detailed in your performance? Did you feel you needed to be?
Emma Stone: No.
The Playlist: Are we making it seem harder than it seems?
Emma Stone: Yeah, I think it, well, I mean…
Yorgos Lanthimos: It was hard.
Emma Stone: It was hard. It was hard. And yeah, I mean, of course, it had its challenges. But I think the thing about maybe Bella specifically, but also both of us don’t really love to intellectualize this stuff too much, but I think I realized pretty early on that Bella was about undoing, not adding to. So, it was about stripping away elements of shame or self-judgment, and of course, I struggled with that throughout because I’m me, but she is so free and so kind of curious and open to the world and doesn’t judge herself or really others very much. And so that was the most that I could really do. And then just to kind of stay open to the process. And we worked on the physicality quite a bit. But in terms of her growth and development mentally, that was kind of as we went along, we were discovering it within all those environments, and with her costumes and all of that was very helpful to the process too.
The Playlist: The only reason I asked is I’m assuming you didn’t shoot this sequentially, right?
Yorgos Lanthimos: Well, the most complicated part was the beginning of the shoot, because we had to shoot the beginning of the film and the end of the film because it took place in London, which was a set that we built, and we had to finish that set because we were building the other sets. So, we shot the beginning and the end back to back, [and] we had shot nothing in between. So yeah, we needed to have figured out, and mapped out what those in-between stages would have been in order to be able to go from the first stage to the last stage.
The Playlist: Yorgos, this is the most fantastical movie you’ve ever made. There’s nothing you made that sort of approaches this. What was your inspiration and what made you go so hard in that direction?
Yorgos Lanthimos: I mean, definitely first of all it was the novel itself. And it is a very unique world, a very unique character, and Alasdair Gray himself was a very interesting artist. He was a great painter as well. He did illustrations. And from the first moment I read the novel, I thought that this would be a world that we had to build because it made sense that we saw it through her eyes, through her perspective, the way she experiences the world. And it only made sense to me if we built a world that feels familiar, but unique at the same time, and not necessarily realistic. And I was inspired by old school kind of filmmaking, looking at old studio films or Fellini films and Powell and Pressburger and all those filmmakers that created these wonderful, beautifully magical sets that were not realistic, but they were adding so much more to the scenes and the complexity of the story and the characters.
So, we wanted to do as much as possible in camera, and we built these sets. 90% of the film is built-in sets, built inside a studio. At the same time, I knew that technology is available to us now, and I tried to find a way to use it so that it wouldn’t obstruct the tactile feel of the sets and everything that we built, so we mainly used modern technology to enhance the world and enhance the edges of the world, rather than building environments behind the actors or anything like that. So, everything was built beforehand, everything was filmed, and we just used a certain kind of extension and enhancement when we needed to.
The Playlist: Mark Ruffalo has done funny stuff in the past, but I have never seen him do something quite like this. What was your inspiration for casting him? How did you know he could pulls this off?
Yorgos Lanthimos: Well, I didn’t know he could do this, to be honest.
Emma Stone: We both really just loved Mark.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Yeah, we just loved Mark and we wanted to work with him. And this seemed like a good opportunity because, I mean, well, he hasn’t done anything like this, but I thought he certainly could. And I thought it would be interesting because this character could become very one-dimensional and not very sympathetic, and Mark has this inherent warmth as a presence, and I thought that that [he] actually gave another dimension to the character. And despite the fact that he’s constantly being totally annoying and horrible, you still somehow are able to…
Emma Stone: Love him.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Yeah, love him or feel for him or understand him, or excuse him, justify him in a way, or just…
Emma Stone: I don’t think you excuse and justify him, I think you just have a weird affinity for him.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Yeah, and you just enjoy him making a fool of himself. So yeah, and I knew all that, but to be honest, the extent to which he took it, I never imagined.
Emma Stone: Nobody ever imagined.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Nobody ever imagined it. Such a wonderful surprise during rehearsals when this character started coming to life, it was so funny and we had so much fun just rehearsing with him and everybody else. And yeah, it was the best thing to cast him.
The Playlist: Emma, you didn’t get to go to Venice or Telluride or any of the premieres before the strike. Have you gone into a theater and watched it with an audience or watched an audience react to it at all?
[Emma Stone shakes her head]
The Playlist: Is that because you don’t like seeing yourself, or you don’t-
Yorgos Lanthimos: She loves seeing herself. All the time. [Laughs.]
Emma Stone: No, I love watching this film, but no. Well, first, yeah, I hadn’t had a chance to watch it with an audience. Obviously, it’s not in theaters yet. But I do think that it will, I don’t know. I think it would be tricky. I really desperately wanted so badly to be, especially in Venice, but then when I really think about it now, of sitting in an audience watching this movie, it’s different in theory than in practice, I think. So we’ll see. Do you want to go see it on Friday?
Yorgos Lanthimos: No.
“Poor Things” is now playing in New York, Los Angeles, Austin and San Francisco.
