‘Poor Things’ Director Yorgos Lanthimos & DP Robbie Ryan Struck An Unusual “Balance Of Artificiality And Realism” With Surreal Victorian Tale – The Process

For Oscar nominated filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan, Poor Things was the most ambitious film to date — daunting in terms of the volume of both sets and lights required. An adaptation of Alistair Gray’s novel, scripted by Lanthimos’s regular collaborator Tony McNamara, the film finds its way across a colorfully surreal version of the Victorian era, from London to Lisbon to Paris, with epic sets for each city having been built inside Budapest studio space.

RELATED: Element Partners Ed Guiney & Andrew Lowe On The Audacity Of Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Poor Things’ “I kind of found it overwhelming as to how that was all going to be achieved,” says Ryan of Poor Things in today’s episode of The Process . “I just went along with it and then maybe was in a bit of denial that it was going to be quite like it was.” Poor Things tells the story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman resurrected by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr.

Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), seeing the brain of her unborn child transplanted into her own skull after taking her own life. Under Baxter’s protection, the now childlike Bella proves eager to learn. But as she grows hungry for the worldliness she is lacking — and for sex, specifically — she runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents.

RELATED: ‘Poor Things’, ‘The Marvels’ And ‘Barbie’ Production Designers On Creating Fantastical New Worlds Through Innocent Eyes Ryan came to the project after scoring an Oscar nomination for The Favourite , the dark historical comedy marking his first collaboration with Lanthimos, and in some respects, the project would expand on ideas and motifs tinkered with on that project, including an interest in wide angle lenses.

The pair experimented with a wide assortment before narrowing down their list to four or five, which helped cement the film’s heightened visual language. Most notable among them was a 4mm lens, made for 16mm cameras, which when set up on a 35mm camera, produced an unusual vignetted frame. In addition to that lens, which the duo first looked at in prep on The Favourite , visual elements played with this time around included assorted zooms, which made for a new addition to their shared language, as well as the rare widescreen format known as VistaVision, brought to bear in a reanimation sequence.

Serving as inspiration for zoom heavy sequences were the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, particularly those lensed by Michael Ballhaus. RELATED: Greta Gerwig & Editor Nick Houy On Managing ‘Barbie’s Tone & Having “The Gall” To Commit To Unexpected Vision For The Film – The Process While scenes set aboard a ship at sea, which were shot against an LED wall, posed one unique lighting challenge, the most challenging set to work with overall was that for the city of Lisbon, which co production designer James Price equated, per Ryan, to a “theme park.” The principal challenge here, for the DP, came in replicating the light of the sun for the labyrinthine city.

For Lanthimos, it came down to the people featured within it. “It was the set that needed [the] most extras, which was a tricky thing to organize and create in a believable manner,” he says, “believable, but also non believable, the same way that the film strikes this balance of artificiality and realism.” Lanthimos adds that ironically, while the set for Lisbon was “huge,” it wasn’t that big when taking into consideration its intended use.

“So it was a bit of a head f*ck, as well, to just figure out … how we would film that,” he says, “making it seem like this was actually a place that [Bella] would get lost in.” RELATED: ‘Poor Things’ Review: Emma Stone In Yorgos Lanthimos’ Glorious Paean To Freedom – Venice Film Festival World premiering in Venice , where it got a standing ovation exceeding 10 minutes and won the Golden Lion , Poor Things is up for seven Golden Globes on Sunday , including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and is a leading Oscar contender this year.

For more from Ryan and Lanthimos’s discussion of their general process in building visual language, as well as the specifics of this “quite mad” film and the conscious decision to go in a different direction with their next movie, Kinds of Kindness (fka AND ) — also for Searchlight — click above..