Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos Discuss “Poor Things” and Taylor Swift Jokes
Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos have a sense of comic timing that rivals Nichols and May.
Case in point: When I ask Lanthimos how he became aware of Stone, the 50-year-old Greek director hesitates for a moment before addressing his 35-year-old muse.
“I was aware of her work,” he says. “I thought of her for ‘The Lobster,’ but didn’t use her.”
“Do you want to say why?” Stone asks.
“Do you want me to say?” Yorgos responds.
“Tell him why it didn’t work out,” Stone says. “I’m not embarrassed.”
“The reason I didn’t actually go to her,” Yorgos says, “is because there’s a lisping character in ‘The Lobster,’ and I didn’t want her to be that character. But Emma has a lisp of her own, so I was like, ‘That’s going to be confusing. If someone who’s not the lisping woman in the script has a lisp, then the whole film will collapse.’”
“Makes sense,” Stone says.
And thus a beautiful friendship was born. Since then, the duo have collaborated on 2018’s “The Favourite” and now “Poor Things,” a favorite, of sorts, to bring home serious hardware in March commensurate with the film’s 11 Oscar nominations.
In a way, “Poor Things” is the culmination of Lanthimos’ earlier films, almost all of which fall into the “WTF did I just watch?” category — notably 2009’s “Dogtooth,” the tale of cloistered children seeking some understanding of the world through sex and ’80s VHS tapes; and the before mentioned “The Lobster,” from 2015, which deals with the cheery premise that single folks have 45 days to find a new mate or they will be turned into animals.
As I said, Stone, who won an Oscar for “La La Land,” first worked with Lanthimos on “The Favourite,” where she and Rachel Weisz compete for the affections of a queen played by Olivia Colman. “Poor Things” is, to paraphrase Neil Young, neither the middle of the road of “The Favourite” or the ditch of “The Lobster” and “Dogtooth.” The film tells the story of (deep breath here) Bella Baxter, born out of the husk of a distressed pregnant woman who commits suicide but is brought back to life by scientist Dr. Godwin “God” Baxter (Willem Dafoe), with her fetus’s brain replacing her own. She eventually undergoes a sexual awakening in a steampunk world filled with gondolas, cruise ships, and Dafoe’s gastric bubbles.
Lanthimos built Bella’s world on a massive soundstage in Budapest. He then assembled his actors, including Stone, Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, and Mark Ruffalo, for something rarely seen in modern filmmaking: rehearsals.
“It very much reminded me of theater rehearsal,” Ruffalo says. “I’ve never done anything like that in film.”
Ruffalo plays Duncan Wedderburn, a lascivious creep — think Snidely Whiplash with sex appeal — who sets out to seduce Bella, with things not quite going as he planned. Ruffalo tells me that the actors did not work on characters so much as a vibe the director wanted his troupe to find on their own.
“He didn’t give me specific directions,” Ruffalo remembers. “He’d just say something like, ‘Check out the Peeping Tom dance company out of Belgium.’ The one thing that we all developed in that rehearsal process was this kind of communication that wasn’t always verbal — it’s a lot of feelings.”
For our interview, Lanthimos arrives a few minutes before Stone. We chat about EuroLeague basketball for a while until Stone pops her head into the interview space and mentions that she needs another minute.