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In Poor Things, Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest (out December 8), Emma Stone is a baby. To be specific: Emma Stone plays Bella Baxter, an unhappily married woman who throws herself off a London bridge only to be resurrected by a demented surgeon (Willem Dafoe) who replaces her brain with that of her unborn child. It’s a Victorian futurist Pygmalion, or a gender-swapped Frankenstein. The very funny film, based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, follows Bella’s journey from toddler-woman to fully sentient (and sexually liberated) adult, with feeble attempts from men to repress and possess her all along the way. To create the look of this manic movie—which takes place in zany versions of 19th century London, Lisbon, Alexandria, Paris, and on a steamship at sea—Lanthimos turned to production designers James Price and Shona Heath (the latter a long-time collaborator of fashion photographer Tim Walker) and encouraged them to go nuts.
Price and Heath reject the word “steampunk” to describe their work, even though it seems like the obvious descriptor (“It’s like saying Voldemort,” says Heath); as they tell Vogue, they prefer thinking of their sets for Poor Things as “a fantastical, adventurous, surreal magpie world, as seen through Bella’s eyes.” Lanthimos wanted an Old Hollywood feel, and thus shot the movie at a studio, using painted backdrops. Four large-scale Escher-esque sets were built on several enormous soundstages in Budapest—the London set took 16 weeks to build, while Lisbon took 20. A skilled team of craftsmen and artisans constructed composite sets (sets featuring more than one room or location) from the ground up. “All of our sets were done that way, because you're trying to create a unique world that everyone’s got to buy into,” says Price. “It all starts with us. Everybody else follows the world that we create, so it’s a great responsibility, setting the tone and making it believable for these characters to inhabit that world.”
The design process began with devising the London house belonging to Bella’s creator, Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter (Bella appropriately calls him God), whose body is so patchworked and mangled by cruel scientific experiments that he needs a medical invention, inspired by the look of chloroform vials, in order to function (Heath calls it a “collage of a machine”). “We thought that he might have approached his house in the same way he cut up his subjects,” says Heath. “That he would splice and cut all sorts of different things together—architectural styles, art materials, all sorts of things.”
Stone’s character bops around the house, throwing food and toddling down the stairs and doing all the things you might expect a 5’6” baby to do. “Bella, obviously, was coming into the world as a gigantic toddler, and so the house was decorated with sort of round walls and padded walls,” says Heath. “Once we'd got the house as our seedling, I suppose, we grew the rest of the world around it.”
The team then built distorted, vertiginous versions of European capitals–like a child’s fantasy of the cities. The Lisbon set needed to be large enough for Bella to get lost in; Heath describes the environment as “a bit trippy, a bit Yellow Brick Road.” The whole set included a hotel, restaurants, a waterfront, and numerous sloping cobblestone streets. (Price calls it a “theme park.”) The crew constructed countless steel-frame buildings (complete with meticulous details from a team of Hungarian sculptors), a giant water tank, a 60-foot-high painted backdrop, and undulating timber and concrete streets. “Sometimes, with sets that are built, there's a uniformness that gives it away,” says Price. “So we wanted all of our sets to be quirky and individual. No reason to have too many straight lines.” He is grateful that Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan used extremely wide-angle lenses, letting the audience see a larger spread of his work. “With most filmmakers, you don't see 90% of what you create,” he says. “But with these guys, up to 80% of what you create gets seen. It’s really cool.”
Building the giant composite sets was, as Price put it, a “logistical nightmare,” but working with miniatures was no less complicated. For panoramic shots, the production demanded teensy versions of things like the steamship and city of Alexandria, and for close-ups, life-size chunks of those locations. “It's like you’re working on almost three or four different scales all the time and trying to get it to work,” says Heath. But despite the headache, the miniatures had their charms. “Not everybody uses miniatures,” she says. “This was something that Yorgos really wanted, for a slightly handcrafted feeling. It’s a bit otherworldly.”
The technical achievement here is astonishing. But Price and Heath have also infused Poor Things with witty detail. Pieces of art give hints of where each chapter is heading—like paintings depicting traveling via spaceship or hot air balloon, mounted to quilted walls, or a giant marble sculpture of a tiger killing a goat. A Parisian brothel, structured to feel like a dollhouse and a birdcage (symbolism!), is rife with literally built-in innuendo, like phallic windows and molded brass clitoris light switches. In one of Price and Heath’s favorite touches in the film, one bedroom in the brothel has what looks like plaster walls that are actually made of waxed faux fur (“It still amazes me every time I see it,” says Price). “But our first thing with the brothel was like, ‘Oh God, we don't want it to be red,’” says Heath, laughing. “Brothels are always red. They're always this womb-like thing.” She and Price went with ultraviolet blue instead, making the place look “sort of ‘90s nightclubby.”
As Bella changes, so does the design of the film. The looks of whole cities adapt to her increasing awareness. “In the set, there's a lot of reference to where she’s going, or where she has been, or where she wants to be,” says Heath. It’s all a trip.
