‘We Suck. And We Know It. So We Keep Trying.’

a long talk

Updated
2:00 P.M.

‘We Suck. And We Know It. So We Keep Trying.’
Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos explain what makes collaborations like Poor Things work so well.

By
Rachel Handler,
a features writer at Vulture and New York

“We’ve made four things together, and hopefully more. People are really gonna get sick of us,” says Emma Stone.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures

This article was originally published on December 8, 2023. Since then, Poor Things has been nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Picture, and is now available to stream on Hulu.

Sitting next to each other at a Manhattan hotel just a few hours ahead of the premiere of their new film Poor Things, Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos fall into a sort of Abbott and Costello routine, interrupting each other, playfully mocking each other, and finishing each other’s thoughts. They’ve spent a lot of time together over the last few years: In 2018, Stone starred in Lanthimos’s The Favourite as a sharp, scheming wannabe aristocrat; a few years later, the two decamped to Greece to film Bleat, a Surrealistic black-and-white short film about a grieving widow that’s only screened a handful of times (it requires a live orchestra). Shortly thereafter, they made Poor Things, the bawdy, feminist adaptation of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name that’s already got Oscar buzz ahead of its December 8 premiere.

Stone, who also executive-produces, is Bella Baxter, the subject of a strange, questionably ethical reanimation experiment at the hands of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) and his besotted assistant, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef). When we meet Bella, she’s awakening on the table after throwing herself from a bridge, getting rescued by Baxter, and undergoing a mysterious operation that causes her to restart her mental development entirely from scratch, albeit at a wildly accelerated pace. In one of the weirdest, funniest, and most moving performances of the year, Stone charts Bella’s development from a tottering, tantrum-throwing, peeing-on-the-floor baby to an intellectually, emotionally, and sexually free woman, all over the course of two and a half hours. We see her learn about masturbation and run off to Europe for a “diabolical fuckfest” with a rakish cad (Mark Ruffalo), study socialism and strange French sexual proclivities in a Parisian brothel, calmly search for the truth about her own origins, and confront painful truths about mortality and suffering. Stone goes for broke in every frame.

Though the film premiered to rave reviews at Venice and TIFF earlier this year, Stone hasn’t been able to do press until quite recently. The morning we meet, she’s thrilled to finally get a chance to talk about Bella. “This is newer to me because the strike is over, as of last night,” she says. “Woo-hoo!”

I know you started talking about this while filming The Favourite. Do you remember that first conversation?
Yorgos Lanthimos: Emma remembers everything.

Emma Stone: We had dinner one night, just after The Favourite, in London. I think he was just generally talking about things he was working on or developing. He’d had the rights to this book for —

YL: Twelve years.

ES: No. You keep saying 12 years but it was, like, five. He was telling me about multiple projects he’s working on because he’s always developing like, five or six things at the same time. And Tony McNamara was working on a draft of Poor Things, so it was just one of the things that he mentioned. I don’t think he was mentioning it like, “We should do this together!” But right when he gave me the general overview of the story and the character, I remember thinking, Don’t be weird and say, “And I’ll play that character?” So I know that you weren’t actually pitching it to me. Because I remember going, Just play it cool. Even though you love it so much.

YL: And you didn’t.

ES: I didn’t.

Were you thinking of her specifically for Bella?
YL: Well, yes, I guess. I think during and after The Favourite, there was that kind of realization that we really loved working with each other and we get along in life, too, as friends. And that we’d love to just keep doing stuff together. So maybe I didn’t say it that way, because I probably didn’t even know if or when we were going to make it, but I mentioned it to her thinking that she would do it, eventually, if it actually got made.

This movie is so specific in terms of its tone and its look and your performance, I’m curious what kinds of conversations and reference points you had about those things beforehand, to sort of calibrate.
YL: We don’t do that.

ES: We talk about tone!

YL: No.

ES: Well, we talked about what the world would look like. It took five years from the time we talked about it to making it, so we talked about everything, actually.

YL: I work a lot on the script with Tony; it takes years for us to feel like we have a draft of the screenplay that feels right. So that gives us a lot of indication of tone and world and characters, because it’s quite specific and precise. So from that, we started talking about the world. The novel takes place in a very specific time, the Victorian era, but we wanted to tweak that and create a world according to how Bella experiences it. So we did research on design, the costumes, and discussed other actors for the other characters — it’s a long, slow process of getting there without saying, “It should feel like this, or like that.”

Emma, I know it was difficult to get into the character of Bella in the beginning of the movie, when you’re really driven by her physicality. What were those few weeks of shooting like?
ES: We found her physicality in the rehearsal process the month before we started shooting. We created development stages for her, but even those were rough outlines. We shot as chronologically as possible, so she’s only in stage one for those first few weeks of shooting, and beyond that, it was discovery and experimentation as we went. We were finding it on the day. From scene to scene, even. That’s what’s so great about knowing each other as we do — it creates an environment where you can do that. It’s not like I’m showing up and you’re like, “What do you got?”

I’ve read that you cried a lot on set and Yorgos talked you through it. Can you give me an example of a specific moment that overwhelmed you and how you guys solved it together?
ES: Can you count the number of times I’ve cried to you?

YL: It’s a lot.

ES: I don’t even know that I have a specific example. Whenever I feel anything lower than a three or higher than a seven, I’m in tears. If I’m in that midrange, I’m not crying, but any strong emotion elicits tears. And there were a lot of strong emotions. I’m not mentally sound. So I became an actor.

That’s why I became a writer.
ES: Perfect!

Poor Things is risky in a lot of ways. Your performance is one of them and I’m curious if there were things about doing it that scared you.
ES: Film in general, or acting in general, I don’t think is legitimately scary. People do legitimately scary things in life all the time. That’s the great thing about acting — you can experiment and create things that aren’t life or death. Maybe they’re emotionally embarrassing or vulnerable, which is legitimate, and different actors have different relationships to that. For instance, Yorgos is completely miserable. But I have a good time.

Why so miserable?
ES: He has the weight of all of it on his shoulders. He’s retained creative freedom and final cut on all of his films. I know that he cares so deeply that it makes him kind of nuts while we’re doing it. When you’re ensconced in that world day in and day out for that many hours, you’re tired and overwhelmed and doing everything you can. It’s very hard to get yourself out of it sometimes and go, “It’s okay. This is joyous. We’re making a film.” It feels very huge and permanent because every scene lasts forever. But when it comes to being “hard”? I don’t know. Maybe it’s hard in a different way.

Yorgos, what makes you return to making movies if they make you so unhappy?
YL: Time.

ES: Forgetting. He doesn’t have a great memory.

YL: I have a bad memory. I forget and I go back and get excited again. And I’m like, Oh, no, it’s the same. There’s also the element of wanting to do better next time: “Maybe let’s have another chance at this, let’s try and make something better than last time.” Of course you fail again, and you fail differently than you failed before. You fix some things and then others fail. It never ends.

You’re striving toward some unattainable version of perfection.
YL: Yeah, whatever that means.

ES: Perfect to you. Which is impossible. It scares me when a creator is like, “I’m so proud of this. No, it’s great.”

YL: It freaks me out.

ES: It’s so weird. I’m like, “Why do you keep making things, then? What forces you forward if you think everything you’re doing is so great?” We suck. And we know it! So we keep trying.

You feel that way about this film? You must be proud on some level.
ES: I am, actually.

YL: You are, yeah.

ES: Not of me! Of the film. I’m proud of you!

YL: Well, I’m proud of you too.

ES: So that’s the thing, we’re able to be proud —

ES and YL, in unison: For each other.

ES: But not for ourselves. God forbid. Can you imagine?

YL: I’m never gonna say it.

ES: Never. I’ve tried to get him to say it.

YL: I’m proud of the other actors, the production design, the costumes. I don’t feel proud of myself. I feel like we did the best we could with what we had. In postproduction, editing, finishing the film, you have to be okay letting it go to share with the world. So I think I reached that point — it’s the best version that I can structure out of this thing. I’m okay with it.

ES: When we’re done with a setup on set and there’s been enough takes, he says, “That’s enough of that.”

“Gen Z is having less sex, right?”
Photo: Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight

How would you characterize your dynamic with Yorgos as a director versus, say, Nathan Fielder or Benny Safdie? What’s different about how you work together?
ES: We’ve made four things together, and hopefully more. People are really gonna get sick of us.

YL: It’s all right. They forget as well. It’ll take a year or two.

ES: That’s true. But just speaking without comparison, because I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to do that, we just get along and have known each other for almost a decade. You understand a lot about someone when you’ve worked together for this long and this closely. I feel like I can really let go with him.

YL: With Yorgos.

ES: You want me to say your name? She knows.

YL: It’s not a video!

ES: “With Nathan and Benny.” With you! With Yorgos.

Yorgos, you often come back to this idea in your films of people pushing against concepts of “polite society” and oppressive expectations. What keeps you returning to that well?
YL: It’s always there. It’s strange that we don’t question our structures more often, that there isn’t real change very often. So I just keep asking those questions and making these experiments. See how people react to them, what they think about them, have them make up their mind about whether they think certain things are okay and whether they need to do anything about it.

You also have a tendency toward bizarre dance scenes in your films, going as far back as Dogtooth. Is that intentional?
YL: [Laughs.] Not really. I’m very fond of physical expression. Dance somehow is very fitting for that. I guess whenever we find the opportunity, we do it.

[Emma looks at him expectantly.]

YL: What? What else is there to say?

ES: No, that was great. I concur!

How much of this one was choreographed versus you just feeling it out in the moment, responding to the music as Bella?
ES: Constanza Macras, who was our choreographer on The Favourite for the scene between Rachel Weisz and Joe Alwyn, came in and choreographed that with me and Mark Ruffalo during the rehearsal process. We practiced a lot.

YL: Yes, but we also tried things to see what worked. There’s a fight at the end of the choreography, so there were stunt people and also the choreographer getting involved in the fight. It’s choreographed, but because Bella is so kind of inconsistent, she’s not set, there’s always room to improvise or lose control a little bit. We work within a framework, and within that, both Mark and Emma could take their own initiative or lose it or allow something to happen between them that wasn’t necessarily planned. But they did rehearse it hundreds of times.

ES: So many times. It ended up being like half the length of what we rehearsed.

YL: Well, that’s normal in film. You do more than what you need. It was structured in the edit.

ES: Because that’s how film works!

YL: That’s how film works. The editing. Not all films, by the way. But let’s not get into that.

Was that shade?
[Both smirk; Yorgos shrugs.]

The brothel montage/segment of the film was my favorite part, when Bella becomes a socialist and her own “means of production.” At Venice, Yorgos, you were asked about the sex scenes and you said you felt like it was weird to talk about them without Emma present. So Emma, now that you’re here —
ES: Oh, good. Great!

They’re so well done, and I’m curious what that segment was like for you to film.
ES: The brothel was a week of filming, so it was pretty consolidated. We talked about how each scene would differ, where they were leading to, how it would evolve. And Elle, our intimacy coordinator, was amazing and comforting and an exciting presence. I really love when the environment is intimate and small. In those brothel scenes, the set is closed, which means it’s Yorgos; Robbie, our DP; Haley, our first AD; and Olga, our focus puller. And Elle. They shut down the monitors so people can’t watch. Except for Elle and Laura, my costumer who I’ve worked with for ten years.

YL: Sometimes. She would go away after she did her part. [Mischievously] Everybody was watching.

ES: [Laughs.] No, they weren’t!

The scenes almost feel like sexual Mad Libs, each more bizarre than the next: She’s hanging from the ceiling while a guy humps her leg; she’s pretending to be an animal. Was any of it improvised day-of, or was it all in the script?
ES: I think I came up with that. Where he’s humping her leg. I thought it was so funny — she’s bored but she’s tied up. And then him humping my leg fully clothed? I thought that’d be hilarious. And it is!

YL: You came up with the humping. I came up with the chains on the ceiling.

There was a headline recently in The Guardian: “Lanthimos’s Poor Things fuels speculation of sex scene’s return to cinema.” I don’t know how much you’ve followed the debate about “necessary” versus “unnecessary” sex scenes in cinema, sort of a Gen-Z-led discourse —
ES: Gen Z is having less sex, right?

Yeah, exactly. Do you see yourself as “returning sex to cinema”?
YL: In my work, I’ve always dealt with sex the same way I deal with everything else. I never thought of it as something special in comparison to other parts of making a film. It would have been horrible if, for this particular story, we all of a sudden shied away from sex and nudity. We’re telling a story about a free woman who discovers herself and has no shame about her body. So it had to be that way. But I’m never consciously saying, ”Oh, we should put more sex into film!” Sometimes I am saying, “I don’t understand the big deal around it.” Why do people pick at it compared to everything else, like violence? It baffles me that we’re so tolerant of violence in films.

ES: And in society.

YL: But when it comes to sex, it’s all of a sudden taboo. There’s a weird morality around it because of how it functions in the entertainment business. But I’m not actively trying to do anything. I guess sex is missing mostly in mainstream cinema. Maybe it has to do with the logistics of it. I don’t think it’s missing from other kinds of cinema. And apparently there is quite a bit on TV, as I’ve been told.

ES: You’ve been told there’s sex on TV?

YL: I’ve been told.

ES: The sex in this film is funny and can feel kind of clinical and, to me, develops the story and moves things along. When something is more gratuitous? Even then, I’m like, Great, who cares?! I’ve now switched firmly into the camp of: It’s no big deal.

‘We Suck. And We Know It. So We Keep Trying.’