Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and American actor Emma Stone are quite the collaborative powerhouse. Since working together on dark period comedy The Favourite (2018), which earned 10 Oscar nominations and seven Bafta wins, they have made the short film Bleat and the Oscar-tipped feature Poor Things , and shot another feature, currently entitled Kind of Kindness. Their working relationship is clearly nothing if not productive.
In Poor Things, which has been described as a “twisted science-fiction romantic comedy” (and that doesn’t get close to quite how strange it is), Stone plays Bella Baxter – a reborn 19th-century woman, living under the paternalistic care of Frankenstein-like surgeon Godwin Baxter (a makeup-laden Willem Dafoe), whom she calls “God” and who appears to have gifted her with the rapidly developing brain of a baby. While critics have struggled to define the film’s more outlandish elements (the Chicago Sun-Times called it “beautifully garish… unabashedly raunchy”, while Empire went with the rather less prosaic “absolutely batshit, utterly filthy”), Stone says simply that it’s a story about a woman “who doesn’t have to deal with shame”.
When I meet Lanthimos in London, the Oscar campaign around Poor Things is starting to heat up, with a slew of awards and nominations following its Golden Lion win at Venice in September. It doesn’t open in the UK for two weeks, but it’s already the most talked-about movie of 2024. Yet Lanthimos, whose films Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and The Favourite all attracted Oscar attention, appears impressively unfazed by all the hoopla. He’s relaxed, easy-going and genial, unlike so many of his movies.
I recall that when I introduced Dogtooth on Channel 4’s Extreme Cinema strand several years ago, I hyperventilated about its “eerie, icy” satire and remarked on Lanthimos’s staunch refusal to explain his often surreal movies. “People are always trying to get me to confirm their point of view and I just won’t do it,” he once said. But now, sipping coffee in a West End hotel, he seems eager to talk – to get into the nitty gritty of what Poor Things is really about. Does he agree with Stone’s pithy description of the film, I wonder.
“Well, shame is one thing that we are conditioned to feel in certain situations and Emma’s character doesn’t have that,” he says. “She never got to know what shame is, so she is totally free to give her mind, her thoughts, her opinions, her body, whatever.” I remind him of his own description of the film as being “about a woman who has a second chance”. He subtly rephrases that description now, reconfiguring it as being about “a human being that has a chance in the world – someone who hasn’t been moulded in a very specific manner to perceive the world in a certain way. She gets to start clean, and that gives her a far freer view of things. She’s a 28-year-old woman who, up until then, had lived a life that obviously didn’t satisfy her. And she comes back with a blank slate, able to start again, and to own that life.”
Poor Things was adapted by Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara from a celebrated 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, the Scottish writer who won both the Whitbread award and the Guardian Fiction prize for the book, and who was described in the Guardian’s 2019 obituary as “the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art”. In the novel, a rambunctious Victorian pastiche, Gray presents several competing accounts of the life of Bella Baxter. In one version, it is claimed that Dr Godwin Baxter swapped the brain of a drowned woman with that of her unborn foetus, creating a child-like adult with no sense of moral decorum, who embarks on an uninhibited journey of discovery. In another, such claims are dismissed as fantastical tales, reeking “of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries, the nineteenth”, wantonly plagiarising “episodes and phrases to be found in Hogg’s Suicide’s Grave, with additional ghouleries from the works of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe”.
Lanthimos first approached Gray about adapting the novel back in 2011, at which point the author hadn’t seen any of his films. Indeed, Gray’s son had to show him how to work a DVD player so he could watch Dogtooth, which he apparently greatly admired. As for Lanthimos, he was just surprised that Poor Things hadn’t already been adapted for the screen.
“It was incredible because it’s so cinematic,” he enthuses. “It’s complicated but you can see clearly that there is a film in here. So as soon as I found that it hadn’t been made I went up to Scotland to meet him, and when I arrived he was there at the door, putting on his jacket. He just said, ‘Follow me!’ and started showing me around Glasgow, very fast! Because the novel takes place in Glasgow, and this was his world. Then we went back to his house and he said, ‘I think you are a talented young man and I would be happy if you want to make my film.’ Then I got back on to the train and went back to London. We never really talked about it again after that.”
How faithful was he to the source?
“Well, the essence of it is very much in the novel. The novel has a very different structure, a very different narrative. Her story is mainly being told by all these other men, so it has various literary devices that sometimes refute – is that the right word? – that sometimes announce what they say as false. We made a shift from the novel because the film is solely about her journey, her perspective. And I felt that if we were going to do this, this world needs to be seen through her eyes. So I thought that we should build this world; go into a studio and build everything, use old-school techniques and make everything ourselves and paint backdrops and make the sets and have a tactile sense of this world.”
Lanthimos also crucially decided to drop “the part of the novel which is like a philosophical political essay about Scotland and its relationship to England and the world. I thought that couldn’t be part of the film, both in terms of just practically making that kind of philosophical essay into a film, but also me being a Greek person, making a film about Scotland. It would have been totally disingenuous of me.”
As a proud advocate of socialism and Scottish nationalism, politics was very important to Gray, whose most (in)famous novel is often referred to as a “political allegory”. Lanthimos’s films have regularly dealt with thorny issues of personal liberation and societal repressions (the performative grieving rituals of Alps, 2011; the absurdist personal “defining characteristics” of The Lobster) but in the past he has declared flatly: “If I wanted to talk about politics or social problems I’d become a writer. But I’m a film-maker and that’s all I can do.” I wonder if that position has shifted – whether he now sees his films as being at all political, or polemical.
“Not polemical, no. But I think in some sense they are political, without declaring a specific ideology. When you make films in the world and deal with the issues you mention, that’s a kind of political act – a comment, an urge to ask questions about things. Most films that have some profound questions are political in one way or another.”
I wonder what formed Lanthimos’s inquisitive worldview.
“Well, it is still being formed day by day,” he laughs. “Remember, I grew up in Greece, and I never imagined that I would be able to make films – not at all.” The son of a shop owner and a professional basketball player, Lanthimos pursued business and marketing studies before deciding that his future lay in directing. Switching to the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos in his native Athens, he wound up making commercials, music videos and dance films, certain that he would never get the chance to direct a feature. “In Greece a decade or so ago there wasn’t any film industry or tradition,” he says. “There were two or three standalone film-makers who were working. But you couldn’t get financing. But then at some point I said, ‘Why don’t we just go and make a film ourselves? We don’t need much. Let’s get a camera, we’ll pay for the film, the lab, pay for some actors, go someplace and just shoot something. What’s the big deal?’ I never imagined that people would watch this stuff! I thought that it was something we’d show to our friends and they would be happy that we made it. Then slowly, people started to appreciate it, and somehow it became a reality that we might be able to make films for a living. Not in Greece – that’s why I moved to England, to London, after the three films I made in Greece. But the method was the same.”
Lanthimos and his wife, Greek-French actress Ariane Labed (who appears in both Alps and The Lobster), returned to Athens in 2021 but the director still seems to be on home turf here in London. As we order more coffee, I stop to check that my phone is recording our conversation, apologising for the fact that I’m constantly terrified of being let down by digital technology. I’m slightly embarrassed but Lanthimos is absolutely delighted. “We are the same!” he declares. “That’s why I wish to shoot everything on film! I have shot a couple of films digitally and I totally hated the experience.”
I ask what it was particularly that Lanthimos disliked about shooting on digital and the answer seems to be… everything!
“I just don’t appreciate the process,” he sighs. “Being on set and watching these things that look like a soap opera on the monitor. It kind of distracts you. You don’t understand what it is that you’re getting and you’re seeing, and then you have to live with that horrible image during post-production and editing. Then when you are finishing the film you are just striving to make it look like something – to add texture, make the skin tones look kind of OK; it’s an effort to make it look OK instead of enjoying a creative experience. Also, I just feel that everybody senses there is something a little more precious going on when you are doing a take on film instead of just pressing a button. And I am becoming more hardcore. I have just built a darkroom – a studio in Athens for developing and printing my film. Actually, during Poor Things, I would shoot pictures on set, on film. And after finishing filming, Emma and I would go together and develop all the negatives. It just became this thing of winding down and relaxing after an intense day of shooting. We’d go and process the film of the day.”
I ask Lanthimos to describe his creative relationship with Emma Stone, and how their latest project (originally titled AND before being renamed Kind of Kindness) is shaping up.
“It’s all shot and we have started editing,” he confirms. “It’s a contemporary film, set in the US – three different stories, with four or five actors who play one part in each story, so they all play three different parts. It was almost like making three films, really. But it’s great to be working again with Emma. It makes it so much easier to have someone there who trusts you so much, and who you trust so much.”
Describing his casting methods as “very intuitive”, Lanthimos recalls meeting Stone for the first time and knowing immediately that they could work together. “I just thought that she had something very special. I’d seen the work that she’d done, and I thought that she would be great for The Favourite. She had seen The Lobster and Dogtooth, and she said, ‘I like what you do, so let’s just do it.’ She is ready to do whatever it takes to get things done. And apart from her being an incredible actress, it’s just being able to communicate with someone without having to explain anything, without having to use too many words. Just getting it.”
This kind of creative intimacy is crucial for Poor Things, not least because the central role of Bella presents a series of exposing challenges for the actor.
“Definitely. But by the time we made Poor Things, we’d already made The Favourite, and we had become friends. And then we shot this silent short film, Bleat, in Greece for the Greek National Opera. That was a very special experience because Emma came to Greece and went to an island. It reminded me of the way that we made the early films in Greece.”
A three-time Oscar nominee (she won Best Actress for La La Land), Stone was reportedly the highest-paid actress in the world in 2017. Yet according to Lanthimos she is far more interested in the prospect of pursuing smaller-scale passion projects than big Hollywood blockbusters. “With Bleat, we had a crew of 10 people on an island in winter,” he remembers. “There wasn’t the rest of the world around us – it was just us. Emma actually said after, ‘Why can’t we make all films like that? Why do we have to have all these people around? I just want to be here, me and you and the camera and whoever else is absolutely necessary, and just make this and make it intimate.’ And I said, ‘I’ve been striving for this ever since I started making English language films!’ I was always saying that we don’t need all these people. And the truth is that on Poor Things we did manage to do that quite a few times. I said to [cinematographer] Robbie Ryan, ‘I know there are these huge sets and there are going to be hundreds of people around but why don’t we just hang the lights from the ceiling and then send everybody out. Close the door so it’s just us in the room. If we need anyone, we’ll call them – they’re just outside the door – but let’s just create this intimate situation again. And that’s what we did.”
Our conversation turns towards Jerskin Fendrix, the Golden Globe-nominated British musician who provides the electrifyingly eclectic score for Poor Things. When Lanthimos heard Fendrix’s 2020 album Winterreise, he had the feeling that he had discovered another creative soulmate. “There are so many different sounds in his work, so many different feelings. There’s humour, there’s melodrama. It’s playful, it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it can be heavy when it needs to be. I found the sound so particular and so beautiful. I just felt there was something in the soul of this thing that would somehow fit into the world of Poor Things. And when I played the album for Emma, she said, ‘It’s like everything in your head exploded into music.’”
Fendrix’s music definitely helps to connect Poor Things’ audience with the film’s off-kilter emotional heart. I note that while Lanthimos’s films often have fairly cerebral conceits (the value of one life over another in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, for example), they work because on some level they elicit a visceral response; they make you squirm, or cry, or wince, or (most often) laugh. “Yes, yes!” he responds. “Being moved or laughing is something you can’t help but experience by feeling. I appreciate that much more than the intellectual part of it. You can think, ‘Oh, this is a great film because of this and this’, but if you don’t experience it in the moment, if you don’t feel something, even if you don’t know what it is, then what’s the point?”
What makes Lanthimos laugh?
“Mark Ruffalo in rehearsal!” he replies immediately (the actor is heavily Oscar-tipped for his hilarious portrayal of Bella’s pompous buffoon of a beau, Duncan Wedderburn), before offering a more considered response: “The awkwardness of human interaction and behaviour, I guess, is what makes me laugh.” I wonder whether Lanthimos also sees a philosophical bond between the created, artificial worlds of Poor Things and Dogtooth, in which a controlling father keeps his children imprisoned in their home, isolated by invented tales about tiny planes and killer cats.
“Well, the imprisonment of Bella and the fact that she doesn’t understand the world and she is kept there, is very much something that exists in Dogtooth,” he agrees. “But Poor Things is more like what happens when she gets out. I have to say, I didn’t think about that when I read the novel. But when we were actually making the film, the parallels became more apparent. Dogtooth explores the confines of the family, or whatever social structures can manipulate human perception. Poor Things takes that as a starting point, and then you see how that can have an impact when you come into contact with the real world.”
Does Lanthimos have a favourite among his own films?
“They are all problematic children,” he sighs, “all problematic in different ways.”
And does he ever rewatch them?
“I did, about a year ago. And during the pandemic, I thought: ‘Let’s have a look at what we’ve done here.’ I watched The Favourite, Dogtooth, Sacred Deer. I was pleasantly surprised.”
Surprised how?
“I thought they were worse!” he laughs. “I thought they were worse and when I saw them I was like, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad! It works well.’ I mean, you can never make a perfect film, but it’s well put together and there are ideas there that are interesting. And I guess that’s what I wanted to do.”
Poor Things opens in UK cinemas on 12 January
