'Poor Things': Tony McNamara reveals most difficult aspects of crafting Emma Stone's journey as Bella Baxter
"It was extraordinary because it's a massive challenge," the screenwriter said
One of the most memorable movies of the year, Poor Things, proves that the collaboration between director Yorgos Lanthimos, actor and producer Emma Stone, and screenwriter and producer Tony McNamara is cinematic magic.
"He's one of the great directors of our time," McNamara told Yahoo Canada about working with Lanthimos, following their previous project, The Favourite. "But he's also a great collaborator in the sense that there's a lot of freedom with him ... You really bring everything you've got and there's no real limits, he's not really scared of anything."
"We have a very similar sensibility, so we have a very easy process. ... We spend a lot of time just really being meticulous about the script. I just come in with drafts and then we go through it, and then that just goes on for a couple of years, on and off, usually. He also takes his time, he's never in a hurry. He waits until we're ready. ... He'll wait for the cast for two years, rather than make the movie. So he's very thorough and he's a real artist."
What is 'Poor Things' about?
Poor Things is based on the novel by Alasdair Gray and follows the evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), who has been brought back to life in a Frankenstein fashion by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who's referred to as "God." She has the body of an adult woman but the brain of a very young child. When we first meet Bella, she's still getting a handle on walking and still relies on grunts and other sounds to communicate.
Dr. Baxter gets an assistant, medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), to help with observing, analyzing and documenting Bella's progress in maturing, ranging from the development of her vocabulary to her discovering masturbation for the first time.
Things take a leap when Bella meets Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) and she decides she wants to leave God's home in London to travel with Duncan to Portugal.
After exploring Lisbon with Duncan, including several sexual experiences, Bella's journey moves to Alexandria and Paris, where she no longer wants to see the world with Duncan. She wants to experience things for herself as she's faced with the harsh reality of what the world is really like.
One of the biggest shifts in Poor Things, from the novel, is that the film is told through Bella's perspective, instead of the various voices telling the story in the book. That required McNamara to essentially, "start from scratch" to develop what her perspective is.
"There were a couple of touch points in the novel that I knew we wanted and then it was really, how do we tell this story?" McNamara said. "So it became, ... we'll do it through the journey."
"I was like, let's do Lisbon, because ... it was something to do with discovery. That was where all boats left in Europe to discover the world and that's what she's doing. So let's take her there. ... So it was merely, what do we need to tell her story as much as anything, and then me just writing what I thought would do that, and then making that up, in a lot of ways."
McNamara explained that after that, Yorgos was tasked with "infusing" those elements with his sensibility.
"He would make suggestions, and then we would sit at lunch and just talk about what we could do," McNamara said. "It's a bit of a trial and error process."
'She hasn't been taught to have shame'
At the core of what makes Poor Things such a captivating, intriguing, innovative and thought-provoking film is that we get to see the intellectual development of a character's brain from a place of infancy to adult maturity.
"It was extraordinary because it's a massive challenge," McNamara said. "I think to have that opportunity with a character and take them through a whole life, and a whole evolution, was great."
"I love language and I love dialogue, so it gave me an opportunity to create a way of speaking, and to create a world where the dialogue fitted the world. That was fantastic. So I knew the dialogue had to have a slightly fantastic kind of vibe to it."
McNamara's script came to life though Stone's portrayal of Bella. Having worked together on The Favourite and Cruella, McNamara highlighted that there was an established "confidence" in that collaboration.
"Before Emma came on I was like, 'Who's going to do this? It's insane,' and who could bring it off, because it's such a journey," he said.
"But then, as soon as Emma came on, I was just confident. She's so funny. She's so emotionally truthful. She's so smart. She's so brave. Then you just go."
Stone also serves as a producer of the movie and the exploration of a woman who doesn't operate under the patriarchal constructs that women are conditioned to operate within was a significant point of involvement for her.
"I think one of the big things for her was the lack of shame," McNamara said. "Coming from our world ... here's a woman who doesn't have shame because she hasn't been taught to have shame."
"Emma was very pivotal in that being a real fundamental in the character, because society hadn't brought her up, she was just sort of instinctively moving through it and experiencing things without shame, without judgement, without society's rules. ... She was very instrumental in how that was thought about."
McNamara did identify that a "difficult" point in the story to craft, but a necessary component, was the moment when Bella meets Harry Astley (Jerrod Carmichael) on a cruise ship. It's tonally distinct from much of the rest of the film as the moment when Bella is faced with the reality of her privilege, the first time she becomes aware of the world's injustice.
"It was all part of her evolution," McNamara said. "You're all about yourself when you're very young, in your 20s or whatever, and then it becomes like, oh there's a bigger world."
"She was very privileged and she didn't understand that, but she wanted to understand. That was the point, she wasn't turning away from it. ... I wanted her to react to it very naively, because she is naive, but I also wanted her to feel it. So we we knew she was that person, that she was a person of empathy and that whenever things contextualize for her, it would mean something."
Poor Things is in select Canadian theatres Dec. 15, before a wider release Dec. 22
