Poor Things | Building A Surreal World The Production Design - Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe | Searchlight Pictures - video Dailymotion

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Now playing everywhere.   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.  Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Jerrod Carmichael, Christopher Abbott, Margaret Qualley

Transcript

00:00 The production design is an incredibly important part of the story and what the

00:04 production design leads have created is something unlike anything that's ever

00:08 existed before that I've seen.

00:11 I think the script is quite pure and funny that felt quite a free place to

00:26 start and it felt there was a place for beauty, humor, art. It felt sort of

00:32 timeless which is something that really appeals to me. Your mind just starts

00:36 racing of where it could go. London, Lisbon, Paris. We've built a composite set

00:41 epic in scale. You're obviously one in a 1930s film but with today's technology.

00:46 I always envisioned it like this. I always thought that we should build a

00:51 world according to Bella and her understanding and perception of it. You

00:56 have this idea of the Grand Tour, this 19th century idea that you left the

01:01 place you were born and you had to tour the world and see the world in order to

01:05 come of age and we see through her eyes how amazing the world is and how messed

01:10 up it is. I do think that there's a spiritual connection that happens in

01:14 these practical sets and you can feel it. With Shona and James I thought that

01:18 maybe if I put two people that have you know very different minds together and

01:22 if it worked out and if they got along it would become something very

01:26 interesting. They worked very closely in tandem. I remember seeing the early

01:31 lookbooks of what they were working on because they have two very different

01:34 sensibilities that seem to have met up so beautifully. I met Shona in a studio.

01:39 So I wanted to see her in a natural inhabitants hat. So I was worried she might be mental.

01:46 My experience on film is zero so this wouldn't be standing if it wasn't for

01:51 James and the whole process of building something so enormous so beautifully.

01:55 We're in Budapest in Hungary shooting on many sound stages. Our world has been

02:01 built. This house is fantastic in every sense of the word. It is a thing unto

02:08 itself. It shapes how you act, it shapes how you feel. Dressing and the detail is

02:13 quite extraordinary. There's so much originality. There are fish on Bella's

02:18 ceiling and there's seaweed and a mirror that has ears and these padded silk

02:23 walls with cityscapes sewn in and I want to copy it. I want to live in that bedroom.

02:28 Bella's an adult but she needed sort of soft corners and things that she

02:33 couldn't hurt herself on. So her room is incredibly soft and very beautiful and

02:37 there's a secret door. I got scared for a second. I thought we were trapped in here.

02:44 They did a lot of work in coming up with references and then you would pick and

02:50 choose. We also tapped into some old-school techniques like miniatures,

02:55 painted backdrops. I think it was an interesting combination of techniques.

02:59 The functioning shops, the doors lead to actual rooms. It's incredible. You don't

03:06 have to make anything up. Everything's there. Everything that you need is there

03:10 and then there's more. It feels like something of the era but also it has so

03:16 many nods to the future. It's a fine line between feeling real and fantasy. We've

03:20 created lots of different little alleyways. You can walk into the hotel

03:24 and walk up the hotel stairs and come out and stand on the balcony. This is my

03:29 favorite place, the vodka bar. It was quite tricky. There were crews working 24 hours.

03:34 There were night clustering teams, painters to come in the next day to paint.

03:37 The ship had to feel like an enormous moving Victorian garden. An impractical

03:43 boat designed to make it practical. So we had quite a lot of fun with the boat.

03:49 This is Paris, the main square in Paris. You can come in off the street into the

03:54 interiors. When I first met Shona and we started talking about this project, Shona

03:59 had already said there should be red trees in Paris, which was just a

04:03 brilliant idea. We've tried to take the classic Paris vibe, Art Nouveau vibe and

04:08 give it a twist. I mean you could see they have created a world. It's Victorian,

04:13 it's a dream, it's gorgeous and it really does serve the vision. It really defines

04:21 the story we're telling. It's got a refined aesthetic but it's also got a

04:26 sense of humor. I've never seen anything like it and it is as big as it looks

04:29 even in a four millimeter lens, which is the widest possible angle. It's bigger

04:35 than that. The designing and the building, it makes the scale of the logistics of

04:42 the film a huge undertaking and just takes so long and it was a great

04:46 collaboration between the two.

04:51 you

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Poor Things | Building A Surreal World The Production Design - Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe | Searchlight Pictures

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