When director Yorgos Lanthimos approached production designers James Price and Shona Heath with a vision for his latest feature, “Poor Things,” the Venice sensation and Golden Lion winner that’s landed the filmmaker and lead actress Emma Stone at the forefront of this year’s Oscar race, the notoriously meticulous and demanding director had no shortage of notes for the duo. Nor did he have any reservations about the scale of what he wanted to achieve.
“When I first met Yorgos, he was talking about wanting to make a 1930s studio movie, but with today’s techniques,” Price tells Variety. Supplying the duo with visual references ranging from the paintings of French futurist Albert Robida to Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula,” the director envisioned lavish, monumental sets built from scratch and glorious backdrops splashed across LED screens. He encouraged them to let their imaginations run wild.
“The brief from Yorgos was wide open,” says Heath. “He wanted to build all the worlds that we would see, mainly to keep consistency in a new-found language that was somewhere between surrealism, fantasy, otherworldly, dreamlike, but also being set in an era that was familiar.”
Adds Price: “Nothing was off the table, right from the beginning of filmmaking. He wanted it to look like nothing that had ever been done before.”
To accomplish that would require studio space — lots of it — as well as craftspeople with the technical skills to bring Lanthimos’ extraordinary yet exacting vision to life. The production team scouted studios around London — including Pinewood and Warner Bros. Studios Leavesden — and traveled to Wales, Northern Ireland and Czech Republic before arriving in Hungary, where they found abundant studio space and a highly skilled crew base, along with favorable costs and an attractive 30% cash rebate. According to producer Ed Guiney of Dublin-based Element Pictures, “All roads pointed to Budapest.”
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things.”
Atsushi Nishijima
The production was based at Origo Studios, where it utilized roughly 115,000 square feet across four soundstages and 60,000 square feet of backlot space to build sets for London, Paris and the colossal steamboat that takes Stone’s Bella Baxter across the Mediterranean alongside Mark Ruffalo’s foppish lawyer Duncan Wedderburn. The sprawling Lisbon set was constructed at nearby Korda Studios and built on the largest soundstage in continental Europe.
Scale was important to the production team. “We created these immersive sets where they become like a theme park,” Price says. “It helps the cast immerse themselves, especially when you’re doing…a really unique world. They can just be completely absorbed in that. It helps them get into existing in that world.”
Over the course of the movie’s 11-week shoot, four large-scale sets had to be constructed from scratch. “You were delivering million-pound sets a couple of weeks apart,” says Price. “We had so many sets at work at once, we became like a self-eating snake…. We were stealing people from one set to take to another set. It was kind of crazy, the scale that we were working to.”
None of that would have been possible, adds the production designer, without an all-in effort from Hungary’s below-the-line talents. “The whole construction team were incredible. The art department in Hungary are just super, super talented. The skill sets of all the art directors and the drafts people, with their 3D modeling and their drafting, is impeccable,” Price says. “Other than London, I don’t believe that we could’ve done it [elsewhere] in Europe…at the scale we were building to, and the time that we had to build.”
“There were moments of absolute desperation,” says Heath, laughing, as she recalls the frenetic pace. “We couldn’t actually house all the sets we needed in the whole of Budapest studios.” Several locations that would be used in the film were “completely changed.” “We put in new floors, new walls, new curtains, added architectural details to try to bring them into our world,” she continues. “It was enormous. Everything was bursting at the seams with ‘Poor Things.’”