He has just earned his second Oscar nomination for best director, among a flurry of nominations for Poor Creatures, eleven in total, which also includes best picture. Regardless of whether or not Yorgos Lanthimos manages to defeat the favorite Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) on March 10, the recognition is a boost to the insistence of this director born in Athens and trained in London who had been trying to adapt the novel to film for years. by Alisdair Gray. He achieved it after becoming the darling of Hollywood thanks to surprising proposals such as The Favorite Lobster and The Sacrifice of a Sacred Deer.
What was the process of transferring Alisdair Gray’s novel to the screen?
I read it for the first time in 2010 or 2011. I was very impressed, I did some research and saw that it had never been adapted to film, which surprised me quite a bit. I looked for a way to contact him and traveled to Glasgow to meet him. He seemed to me to be a wonderful man, very particular and with many talents. He is a great painter, he is also an illustrator and of course a wonderful novelist. Fortunately he gave me his blessing. But since I was very busy doing other things, I kept the project on the back burner, waiting for the right time to film it. I made other films and finally, after filming The Favorite, I felt that we had the opportunity to be able to make the film. I proposed it and fortunately they gave me the green light. I gave the novel to Tony McNamara, with whom we had worked together on The Favorite and we had gotten along very well, we wanted to continue collaborating together. I also mentioned the project to Emma Stone and she was immediately excited about the role. And a few years later we managed to make the project a reality.
Are you surprised that it couldn’t be done sooner?
I often wonder if a decade ago would have been as good a time as this has been. I don’t think it would have had the same reception. I also don’t think I could have made the same film. Who knows? Everything happens for a reason.
Because it says?
The world has changed a little, and in these ten years, at least in the bubble that is our Western world, we have been watching films that have a similar style, that talk about the perception we have about the position of women in society. . We have slowly realized how it has been built. Now we see it more clearly. Most people are trying to better understand that situation so they can change it. And that has helped the film’s reception. Ten years ago they rejected the project because I had not yet made a film in English and it was a risky project of considerable size. But it also influenced that at that time it was not understood why it was important to tell the story of this woman who is trying to make her own path and wants to know the world on her own terms, and not those imposed on her by society. Now the reasons why it has to be told are clearer. The good reception has been due to the open-mindedness of people, who can look back and wonder how we could behave that way in those times. How did the world then seem normal to us? I’m sure that ten years from now we’ll be saying the same thing about something else.
The film asks existential questions. To what extent did your perception of the world change?
I don’t feel like my perception of things has changed. I think that one makes these films or any type of artistic work to be able to illuminate complex topics, ask questions and generate feelings and reactions. And I hope that everyone can react to the film in a way that suits their personality, their experiences, their culture and their social environment. I make my films to see how people react to what I present to them. That doesn’t change my perception of the world. I’m very comfortable being uncomfortable and being a little strange. I simply hope that what I do has some impact on others.
Do you think there is an influence of ‘The Bride of Frankenstein’ in your story?
Not particularly. Obviously in the reanimation scenes we used a small reference, but that influence was already immersed in the novel.
What was Emma Stone’s contribution to the character of Bella Baxter?
I gave him all the freedom to do whatever he wanted. It’s all about creating a friendly environment and a safe space so that all actors can try things. We did some rehearsals before filming, but not so that they would discover what they had to do, which they already knew, but so that they would get to know each other and feel comfortable, so that they would feel safe and confident that they could try everything they wanted. happened to them. They could look like idiots if necessary or try different things, knowing that others were going to be there for them. It was a creative atmosphere where they could learn the text and play games, instead of sitting around analyzing, or creating theories about the characters or things like that. For me everything always depends on the actors, on what they do.
How did you imagine the very particular appearance of Dr. Godwin Baxter?
It was the result of a long process. We started thinking about it when we were designing the world. We take many references to develop the characters. From very realistic things about soldiers who had been injured in old wars, and how they had been left after surgery, which then were not so advanced. But we didn’t want it to look like Baxter had been in an accident, it had to be something more abstract. And so it was that we started looking at other abstract images and paintings. One image that stayed in my mind was a self-portrait of Francis Bacon. Then we started putting it all together, using Photoshop and also sculpting a bust, experimenting to try to keep it recognizable. The truth is that when we did physical tests on Willem it was not very pleasant for him, but he endured it like a gentleman.
What was the most enjoyable part of building a world?
Walk around the sets. We made many drawings and 3D visualizations of all the sets that were very ambitious. And many times I had doubts about how they were going to look when we built them. But seeing all these things we dreamed about up close while we were drawing them was very inspiring. It may sound a little strange, but there were difficulties because no matter how big they were, they had a limit, and many times we hit the wall where they ended. It wasn’t a world, it was just part of a world, but in the film we tried to show a complete world. I tried to make the actors inhabit them and that the space was not limiting. That was something very creative, going to the sets and imagining how we were going to develop the scenes, and then seeing how they turned out, without trying to adjust to something I had imagined beforehand.