Bringing the vision of Yorgos Lanthimos to life is not an easy task, and yet with each new movie, the team behind his work manages something special. With Poor Things, they took on worlds like no other, and we spoke with the production team behind the new movie from Lanthimos!
Poor Things production designers include Shona Heath and James Price, the two helping to bring the world of Bella Baxter to life in stunning detail. But when I spoke with Heath and Prince about the details of Poor Things and the beauty in which this movie exists, Heath pointed out that so much of it comes from a mix of Lanthimos keeping a lot of his vision close to his chest while still letting the creatives he works with explore within their own right.
“I think he had an overview of what he wanted with that and that really is down to him,” Heath said. “I think he kept that quite sort of close to his chest and wanted all options, always all the time really. So then he really chose what he wanted to shoot when, how, and in which color. So I don’t think it was so planned, but the color evolving in the sets definitely I think was heightened when we moved from the black and white of London to Lisbon being this sort of psychedelic sort of Wizard of Oz through rainbow glasses.”
Price pointed out that Lanthimos lets those he works with play a bit and doesn’t necessarily limit them but also doesn’t try to preplan and just explores while he is working. “If he had known about the black and white earlier, he would’ve known that we would’ve thought about that and we would’ve changed, made decisions based on that fact. And he wouldn’t want that because you do come back and see it later in color. So whether it was planned or not, we’ll never know, but even if it was, he wouldn’t have wanted us to know.”
Bringing Lisbon and Alexandria to life
Two of the most sprawling set pieces come in the form of Lisbon and Alexandria. For Price, Alexandria was the hardest to bring to life. “We think probably Alexandria was the trickiest. Lisbon was hard,” he said. “They were all tricky, but Alexandria, because you have this juxtaposition of the rich within the very poor and the slums below and how to create something that’s of a scale, but also it was such a short bit of the script. So it was making that feel rooted in our world and also that you get the horror of it, but it also was a very fine line that one to trip to tread, I think. That for me, I think, was the thing that we agonized over most and definitely what from two years out was going, ‘this really worries me this bit. Do you think that’s right?'”
Heath agreed. “I think maybe it’s because by the time she was in Alexandria, the humor went from the script actually for that very short time that she was there,” she said. “So actually sort of flights of fancy and beauty, I suppose we felt it was harder to kind of grasp those because we had to show some amount of cruelty.”
Poor Things is in theaters now.
(featured image: Searchlight Pictures)
