'Poor Things' director Yorgos Lanthimos is joined by Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo as he discusses everything about the multi-layered ship scene from his film. Hear them break down the CGI intricacies, the dark symbolism behind certain moments and how he used plenty of wide-angle and fish-eye lens with cinematographer Robbie Ryan to create the surreal world of 'Poor Things.'
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00:00 She was the soo--
00:02 [laughter]
00:04 Stop it.
00:08 I'm Emma Stone.
00:13 I'm Yorgos Lanthimos.
00:14 And I'm still Mark Ruffalo.
00:16 And this is Notes on a Scene.
00:18 Bella.
00:20 Let us take the air.
00:22 In our cabin.
00:26 These two are fighting and ideas are banging around in Bella's head and heart.
00:30 This scene takes place on a ship.
00:32 We're sailing from Lisbon to technically Athens, but we stop in Alexandria along the way.
00:39 You've been kidnapped, basically.
00:41 I've been sort of kidnapped.
00:43 Bella.
00:45 Let us take the air.
00:47 This is Mark Ruffalo.
00:48 He plays Duncan Wedderburn.
00:50 This is John Carmichael. This is Santa Chicola.
00:53 This is the back of my head.
00:55 And these are just some friends we picked up along the way.
00:58 [laughter]
01:00 This isn't CGI. This is an actual, practical LED screen.
01:05 LED screen. We used a lot of painted clouds and some formations from other liquids that we shot.
01:14 We put all that together in post-production.
01:17 On the day, it was actually playing behind the actors.
01:20 Which gets a little nauseating, to be honest.
01:22 The waves were actually breaking up against the ship from time to time.
01:28 Mark, that's not true.
01:30 Well, they were like...
01:31 There wasn't water.
01:32 No, but it was a representation of water that was constantly moving.
01:38 The only VFX enhancement that we did here was, if you see, there's a little bit of spray of water here that we added later in post-production.
01:47 And the only VFX that the LED screen, I think, came about up to here.
01:53 And we just filled in this in post-production.
01:57 Just an extension of the set.
02:00 But everything else that you see, it was actually there.
02:03 The reason we built this set, and actually the whole film is shot on sound stages.
02:10 We just wanted to build this world that represented the way Bella, the main character, sees and experiences the world.
02:17 So we thought that it would be interesting if we built every set, even exteriors, or the ship that you see here, inside a studio.
02:27 And then we would control the lighting, the backgrounds, and we would manage to acquire this non-realistic feeling for the entire film.
02:37 Let us take the air in our cabin.
02:41 Duncan's, I guess, what you would call a rake or a cad.
02:45 He's a bon vivant. He's someone who loves to live life in its fullest.
02:52 And to totally satiate all of his senses whenever given the opportunity.
02:58 Even to the point of stealing away a young, beautiful, naive woman.
03:05 His relationship with Bella is really to teach her the beauties and the loveliness and all the sumptuous activities of the world.
03:17 As kind of her Pygmalion, as her tutor of life.
03:22 These two are fighting and ideas are banging around in Bella's head and heart like lights in a storm.
03:28 Oh.
03:29 So...
03:30 My approach...
03:37 That's a very good frame.
03:41 My approach to Bella. Oh boy.
03:45 I guess, for a while I thought it was, you know, a very...
03:56 It's a pompous.
03:59 For a while I thought she was a very difficult character to play.
04:02 But then I realized, in a way, it was only because she was the...
04:12 Stop it.
04:20 It's fucking ridiculous.
04:23 But I realized that it's because she's...
04:30 She was so simple.
04:31 Do you have a close-up of her?
04:33 Okay, great.
04:34 Just go on her for a second.
04:37 Hi.
04:40 You're watching Notes on a Scene.
04:44 You're always reading now, Bella.
04:47 You're losing some of your adorable way of speaking.
04:50 I'm a changingable feast, as are all of we.
04:53 Bella, at this point in her sort of development, she has been introduced to philosophy by Martha,
05:01 and she is beginning to read the books of many different philosophers,
05:05 and a lot of things are being illuminated to her about, you know, different ways of approaching life and what it all means.
05:11 And it's a very pivotal moment in her sort of growth that she's discovering her own sort of belief system.
05:19 In terms of the physicality, her specific kind of walk and way of speaking, and a lot of that is in the script, how it's evolving.
05:26 Apparently, according to Emerson, disagreed with by Harry.
05:29 Come, come, just come.
05:32 You were in my son.
05:34 What?
05:35 He feels like he's losing control of her in this scene.
05:38 The books are kind of a symbol of her being educated and him feeling like she's leaving his control and possession.
05:47 So as she's given more books, he throws them off the boat.
05:54 She's a surprise to him in every way, and it certainly peaks his arousal that he can't control her.
06:02 And I think he finds that very exciting until it becomes challenging to his ego.
06:09 I think in this particular moment, she is starting to find him very annoying.
06:18 She's expanding so rapidly and in so many ways, and it's becoming more and more threatening to him.
06:24 And he's starting to bug her.
06:27 There was a language, a filmic language, that we developed with Robbie Ryan, the cinematographer.
06:36 We started kind of using it during the making of The Favourite, and on this film, we just wanted to go even further.
06:44 So we remember during The Favourite, we did a lot of tests, and on this one as well.
06:50 And we remembered this fisheye lens that we used that actually created this circle.
06:56 People feel like very enclosed in a kind of claustrophobic way in the frame.
07:03 And the 4mm was just this option for us to, in certain moments, create this kind of awkward feel to the scene.
07:14 And in this moment, he just picks up her books and throws them into the sea, and it just felt like the right moment to use that.
07:23 But in general, we used very wide angle lenses and fisheye lenses in order to be consistent with how we were building the world and make it feel even more vast.
07:51 You do a career and you're in a franchise for a long time, and people start to see you in a certain kind of role.
08:00 You have your social media, and people start to see you in a certain way.
08:05 In some sense, you even maybe start to see yourself in that way.
08:10 And it's deadly for a creative person, I think, ultimately.
08:16 But it's also very comfortable, and it's hard to break free.
08:19 The more you break free, it's harder to break free the next time.
08:23 And so playing this part came up, and I was like, "Oh, do people want to even see me in this part? Can I play it?"
08:29 I've never played anything so gregarious, so cocksure, so narcissistic, with that kind of language and that kind of accent in a period piece.
08:43 I've just never done anything like it.
08:45 So it scared me, honestly.
08:49 I have such admiration for him, and I didn't want to let him down, and I didn't want to let her down.
08:55 And so, yeah, I was scared.
08:58 I now feel kind of afraid of doing something that I don't feel this way about more than anything.
09:05 I kind of want to have this feeling all the time, exclusively.
09:08 You don't always get to make choices as an actor of who you get to work with and what roles you get to play.
09:14 And so learning about Bella, I was just totally in love with her, and so I'm trying to just follow that instinct, whether it comes to a filmmaker or a story.
09:24 It doesn't always work, necessarily, but I kind of only want to feel that way.
09:32 We're probably the worst people that have ever been in this thing.
09:36 No, we haven't gotten started yet.
09:38 I think once we get going, we're going to really be great.
09:41 [Laughter]
09:42 [BLANK_AUDIO]