How the ‘Poor Things’ Production Designers Turned Yorgos Lanthimos’ Madcap, Macabre, Ecstatic Vision Into an Oscar Frontrunner
variety.comChristopher Vourlias 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.
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