Poor Things Interview: James Price & Shona Heath On Collaborating With Yorgos Lanthimos

Bella is a young woman who the eccentric genius Dr. Godwin Baxter brings back to life in Poor Things. As she evolves, her thirst for knowledge and experiences in the world grows, leading her to eventually run away with Duncan Wedderburn. While on this adventure, she approaches the world with a truly unique perspective, lacking the preconceptions or prejudices of others, leading to her discovering her true purpose in life.

Poor Things is helmed by director Yorgos Lanthimos from a screenplay penned by Tony McNamara. The movie is based on Alasdair Gray’s book of the same name. Poor Things features a powerhouse cast led by Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, and Jerrod Carmichael. Stone and Lanthimos also produced the movie.

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Screen Rant interviewed Poor Things production designers James Price and Shona Heath. They revealed that the decision to shoot in black and white was made only nine days before filming began, leaving them no time to change anything about the set design. They also explained the different inspirations, including art and collaborating with Lanthimos on Poor Things.

James Price & Shona Heath Talk Poor Things

Screen Rant: This movie is spectacular. It is gorgeous with every single set. You guys did a fantastic job.

Shona Heath: Thank you.

James Price: Thank you very much.

Can you talk to me a little bit about how the black-and-white element impacted the set design?

James Price: Well, the truth of it is that we didn’t know that the beginning of the movie was going to be shot in black and white until nine days out. We thought that some elements were going to be shot in black and white and we thought they were actually going to be the flashback scenes where she’s reanimated and brought back to life.

However, with Yorgos and Robbie like to do a lot of testing of film stocks because we shot on 35 mil and he really loved the black and white. And in particular, he was shooting it in the half finished Baxter’s house and the deepness of the textures in there, it looked fabulous and so he decided that it warranted the possibility of shooting the beginning before she goes out into the world in black and white.

Whether he knew for a long time he was going to do that, we don’t know. But we think that if he had known, well, he didn’t tell us basically, but he may have done, but he wouldn’t wanted us to make decisions based on the fact that he was going to shoot it in black and white because he sort of doesn’t want to imprint too much his thinking on your work basically, or what you’re doing. He doesn’t want you to second guess, I suppose is the, yeah.

Interesting. Nine days out. That’s crazy close.

James Price: It was too late. We were like, “That’s what you call it.”

Shona Heath: There’s nothing we could do about it at that point. We couldn’t instill it with something that worked better in black and white. And like James said, actually we had all the texture there and the details. We lost some of the, we had some very nice details with dip dyeing with really amazing shades that we lost. But other than that, really the textures were there, which was good.

James Price: It’s only really Bella’s bedroom that I think we would’ve made different choices on had we known really. And that the dip dyed curtains that Shona is mortified about losing were in Bella’s room and they did look really just unbelievably great actually, the dip dye.

Shona Heath: Yeah. They were sort of dipped from medical green into this blood-red, so they really looked unusual. And I think on black and white, you literally see one color.

When you were looking at inspirations, what were some of the things you looked at? Did you look at the original book or movies? So the other thing I noticed when I was watching is it felt like every shot felt like a painting? Were you looking at different art styles?

Shona Heath: Well, you’re right in that we really did rely heavily on paintings, mainly because actually everybody who looks at a painting interprets something different. You look at a John Singer Sargent painting, which we were looking at mainly for the characters and some of the textures, but what was painted as [inaudible 00:03:56] or gauze you could read as a fine plastic that was actually shiny.

So I think we really looked into paintings in a different way to try and come up with something new rather than going to photography or referencing films or somebody else’s work. We tried to make our own world from probably harder sources actually, but it meant that we ended up somewhere unfamiliar.

Can you talk to me about kind of balancing the period piece aspect of it with the almost fantastical elements that come in throughout the movie? Because when we visit different locations or the cruise ship, it feels almost otherworldly.

Shona Heath: I think the era was we were always trying to sort of go, “Okay, we are sort of in Victorian times,” but really this world we are in is Bella’s world. We are seeing it through her eyes. And she could see that as anything. She was sort of making stuff up, she didn’t know so much. So she could see like a child with an open mind. She could imprint versions of herself on the world she was in. So really this sense of fantastical side was just to try and keep you feeling like you were Bella throughout the film, that you were seeing the world as she would see it.

Oh, that’s so cool.

James Price: Yeah, we didn’t really rely too much on period. We sort of looked borrowed more from the Georgian, especially in London than Victorian. And we were-

Shona Heath: The architecture, yeah.

James Price: Architecture. And we also did what we liked. We were like, “We like this material,” all this plastic. So we didn’t ever feel, I mean I still don’t feel like it’s a period piece. We didn’t approach it. It was a period piece. We approach it. It was a totally, we are free to do what we wanted. It was loosely based in that time, but we didn’t adhere to any of those rules. We made our own rules up.

Were there any sets that immediately popped into your mind when you read the script or you’re like, “I know what this will look like, versus ones that were maybe a little bit more challenging to visualize or actually create?

Shona Heath: No, I mean, I think that the world was so enormous. To see that world when you read the script, it wasn’t there. I mean, it took a while to see Bella to form her and from then form Baxter and actually without the characters, there wasn’t a world. So really, James, don’t you think the characters sort of, they were the seed in a way. Baxter and how he would’ve made his house was the starting point of how we were going to approach the design, so really we started there and it grew from there.

James Price: Yeah. And spaces as well, I think you just see spaces, but they’re not necessarily, you know what they look like, the spaces that you know that this is going to happen in and that’s going to happen in, and then the space could be anything. It’s sort of just blackness, but you know that there’s… You see the characters and we worked them out and then within that we worked out the space and then started referencing and putting ideas together.

We wrote a dogma for what our worlds could be like, and just kept on referring back to that yeah, and it evolved from that. We wanted to create an environment that these characters could exist in and create a real world as opposed to standalone sets that were just in a traditional sense that there’s the bedroom and then you go over here to the, we created immersive environments and they evolved from the characters and out of the blackness of where the spaces were, I suppose.

Can you talk about collaborating with the director, Yorgos, to bring this world to life from his vision?

Shona Heath: I think Yorgos went into this with such an open mind, and then really it was a process of a back and forth between us all incremental. And quite often we’d have so many meetings and sometimes we hadn’t made much progress, but he always wanted to be involved to see it growing and put in his ideas and thoughts. So really, it really grew. It was very, very, and we had the time, didn’t we, James?

We did concepting stages when we didn’t even know if the movie was going ahead. So we had time to sort of sit on it a bit, all of us. So I think we got used to the idea of maybe is this too weird? I mean, there were so many designs we did that were way crazier than what you see that got axed very early on but yeah, it was an evolution for sure.

James Price: Yeah. He doesn’t like to go in with too many preconceptions, I don’t think. And otherwise, I think that’s why his filmmaking seems so fresh that he wants to… It was more of a design brief than a kind of idea of what the world would be. He knew that we needed to build the sets, and he knew he wanted to use techniques from the thirties and the fifties and right up to LED screens.

He talked about that and creating a manned handmade world that was handmade that Bella could exist in. But with regards to what it would look like, he was like, “You two guys come to me with stuff.” And as Shona said, you kept trying to push it even further and then he’d pull you back and go, “Well, no, I’m not sure about that idea. That’s a bit bonker.”

Shona Heath: But not many. And actually he was always, you can’t second guess Yorgos, you just can’t. So you offer everything you’ve got on a plate and it’s always a surprise the things that he responds to or doesn’t, or doesn’t respond to. You just, I never worked it out. I don’t think anybody has or can.

James Price: No, no. It’s impossible. You can’t work it out. Just got to offer as much up as you like and then something will stick.

Shona Heath: Yeah.

About Poor Things

From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

Check out our other Poor Things interviews:

• Robbie Ryan
• Holly Waddington
• Mark Ruffalo & Willem Dafoe
• Tony McNamara
• Ramy Youssef
• Emma Stone