By Iain Blair
Lavish, audacious and visually stunning, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things tells the fantastical story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant, daring scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). The film just won five BAFTAs and scored an impressive 11 Oscar nominations, including nods for cinematographer Robbie Ryan, BSC, ISC, and editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis, ACE, who were both previously nominated for their work on Lanthimos’ The Favourite.
I spoke with Ryan and Mavropsaridis (aka “Blackfish”) about making the film and collaborating with Lanthimos, who also got an Oscar nom.
Robbie Ryan
You’ve both worked with Yorgos Lanthimos before. Was this process very different, or was it pretty much the same way he always works?
Robbie Ryan: It was my second time working with Yorgos, and I felt like the approach was similar. But I was a bit more tuned in to his thinking process, which is quite loose from a filming perspective. He likes to get the things he needs in place and then elaborate or experiment, maybe search for something new. We’re not too set or stringent in our approach. It’s pretty loose.
What about you, Blackfish?
Yorgos “Blackfish” Mavropsaridis: We have been working together for almost 25 years. I know his approach, and I know that during the assembly I need to put things in order according to the script. That’s not the main work… it’s just for me to understand the material. Then, when he comes back, we start looking at the sequences and trying things.
Yorgos “Blackfish” Mavropsaridis
I’d say it was an easier process for Poor Things in the sense that I know him so well. And we had to focus on a specific character, which gave us the path to follow. Of course, having said that, films are not easy in that sense. We always try to deconstruct the script to take it off the paper and make it more interesting. We also involve the viewer in different ways than a classical Hollywood film does.
Robbie, is it true you shot this whole thing in a studio in Budapest?
Ryan: Yes, that’s correct. We shot 35mm celluloid and used a bunch of stocks. We shot some old VistaVision as well, which is a lovely format, and black-and-white and Ektachrome.
What were the main challenges of shooting a film like this, where nearly everything was constructed? I assume you were quite involved with set design and the like, which is unusual?
Ryan: Yes, we basically did 12 weeks of prep on this film. That was so we could build the sets and watch their design. The production designers, Shona Heath and James Price, built five or six big sets and used Unreal Engine to create them in 3D. Yorgos [Lanthimos] and I would look at what they were building in a 3D world. It was amazing to walk onto that set a few weeks later and see it for real. It looked exactly like those sets built in 3D. That was the world we prepared, and it was amazing.
So you were able to previz it all like that?
Ryan: Exactly, as Unreal Engine is previz in a way. It’s a 3D program that lets you look around at every angle. For instance, for the ship, you could really look at every corner, and if one corridor on the ship was a little bit too skinny, we could make it a bit bigger so we could fit a dolly on it. There was lots of that sort of preparation, and it helped a lot.
How did that affect your lighting approach?
Ryan: It took a little bit more work from a lighting perspective. I had to light it a bit more because we were indoors and in studios. We took the same approach that we did on The Favourite, which was not to use lights on the set. We lit the studio sets with a sky outside all the buildings, and that gave me confidence that I was going in the right direction because that is the way Yorgos [Lanthimos] likes to work. We just had to create something that resembled a real environment in an interior space.
Blackfish, were you on the set at all?
Blackfish: No, I was in Athens from the beginning. The only time I went on-set was for The Lobster, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience for me. I prefer to see it objectively as it comes in rather than go to the set and get influenced by the atmosphere, the actors and all these things. So I stayed home in Athens, and they sent me dailies. I’d get the negatives and black-and-white the next day, but the Ektachrome took a couple of days more since it had to go to Andec, a lab in Berlin, and then to Athens. But it was a really fast process. Yorgos and I don’t talk at all when he’s on-set, or very rarely.
Robbie, I know you’ve worked with colorist Greg Fisher at Company 3 before. How early on did you start working with him on LUTs and the look for this?
Ryan: We didn’t do that actually, and that was a bit of a mistake. We had a dailies grader in Budapest, which was driving Yorgos [Lanthimos] a bit mad. Film doesn’t need so much grading now. But Greg did a lot of work with us from the very beginning, helping us out with early tests about nine months before we shot. But then, when we went to Hungary, we used a Hungarian lab and a Berlin lab. They were doing the dailies for us there, and it wasn’t quite what Yorgos [Lanthimos] was expecting, so he got a little bit frustrated by it.
The bottom line is that we should have done a show list, but we didn’t know that’s what was meant to be done, so we kind of learned the hard way. The film still looked nice in the rushes, but it just wasn’t quite what we thought it would be. When we went into the final grade with Greg at the beginning of last year, we spent three weeks grading the film. He’s got quite a thorough process. We went through every sequence one by one and didn’t review the whole film until we got through all the sequences. We spent a week and a half going through everything, then we watched the whole film back, and then we went deeper again. Yorgos likes to go quite deep into the color grading. Just recently, we made a 35mm print of the film. That was an interesting coda to the whole grade process, and it was quite a lot of work as well.
Robbie, how long was the shoot, and what was the most difficult scene to shoot and why?
Ryan: We shot for about 50 days. The scene when Bella comes out of the hotel and walks around Lisbon was pretty difficult because it was a big lighting kind of environment. The set was great, and it was amazing to walk around, but it was difficult to photograph, so I think we struggled a bit on that.
Blackfish, walk us through the editing process when you sit down together with Yorgos.
Blackfish: Two weeks after shooting finished, I had an assembly ready, but it was so long there was no point watching it as a whole. We just went through sequences and then refined the scenes exactly as they are in the script order. We took care of the actors’ performances — which one Yorgos liked best and how the emotions were interpreted in each scene. When we have a good assembly or first cut, then we start experimenting, somehow deconstructing what we have done, discussing, “What if we start with this scene, not the other one, and then what does that give us for the next scene?”
Then there are points where the exposition takes many scenes to develop. For example, there’s a dinner scene with Max, Godwin and Bella. In the assembly, the scenes appear in linear order in the continuity of time and space, so we found ways in the edit to go to previous scenes and then cut them in, or go to later scenes to create a sequence. We developed this method of intermixing scenes and making them a sequence on Dogtooth and have been using it ever since — and very interesting ideas arise. For example, you can say the same thing in the scene — or say it even more forcefully with a thought — if it’s combined with dialogue from another scene. Of course, that’s quite difficult.
Sometimes you have to go through a lot of edits to find it, to refine it, but in the end, we get it to where we want it. We try to get around problem areas and keep the phrases or the moments that we need and then cut them with other things to pick up the pace. That editing technique also creates internal combustion. It provides momentum so the viewer doesn’t get ahead of us. We sometimes need to surprise viewers, and it has to do with how we think or how we want the viewer to feel or think at that moment. So it’s a whole procedure.
How long was the edit in the end?
Blackfish: It took about eight months.
What was the most difficult scene for you to get just right?
Blackfish: Technically, it was the dinner-and-dance scene. The actors had done a lot of movements. The camera was moving all the time, and there were also some static shots. The difficulty was to keep the eyeline correct in the 180-degree space so as not to lose the audience. It was difficult to find the best performance moments. All the other things, of course they’re difficult, but it’s different to edit a difficult scene like a dance. It’s also more fun and more satisfying.
Did you use a lot of temp sound?
Blackfish: Not at all. The music was done much earlier than the filming, and composer Jerskin Fendrix had written the theme of the film. Of course, it was not the final music, but we had the same thing played differently or with a single instrument or with a big orchestra, and we had a lot of options to try. We could cut the music if we wanted to speed it up, or at other times we could edit the film according to the music. So having the music gives you a lot of good opportunities. As for the sound design, my assistant always uses external sounds. We need to have that for me and Yorgos to see how it works, to make sure there are no gaps or anything. We cut on Avids with Nexis storage, and we had about 12 terabytes.
Robbie, I assume you had to coordinate with visual effects on-set, as there’s quite a lot of VFX.
Ryan: Yes, we had an on-set supervisor from Union Effects who did all the VFX [and picked up a BAFTA for their work], and he would let us do what we wanted. For instance, Yorgos [Lanthimos] didn’t want to use greenscreen, so when we were filming the hybrid animals, even though the VFX guy liked the idea of using greenscreen, we didn’t do it because we could just rotoscope it. We shot it twice, one animal first, second animal second, and then that was comped in together.
Yorgos was trying to do it with older cinema technology, like backdrops and moving-image backdrops, and we had LED walls as a backdrop and painted backdrops. I think that was really a nice way to do it because the actors felt like they were a little bit more immersed and didn’t have to worry about getting it right for VFX, which sometimes happens.
That was a really nice atmosphere to work in. Yorgos has such a knowledge of cinematography and what you can do VFX-wise; he was confident that he would get it in post, and they did, indeed, get it in post. They went through quite a long process of trying to perfect all that, there were quite a few incarnations, and it was a very VFX-heavy job, but they got there in the end. Union did a great job.
How would you each sum up the experience?
Ryan: It’s been a long journey, and it was never in any way boring. It’s always been fun. Yorgos likes a fun film set to work in. He doesn’t like to have any sort of tension at all, so we have a crew around us that are very relaxed, and I really enjoyed it. We worked hard, and sometimes it didn’t go right, but we always found a way, and it was a really exciting film to work on.
Blackfish: It’s new all the time and interesting working with Yorgos. We’ve almost finished editing the last film he and Robbie shot in New Orleans, and I guess he’s planning the next one in May. So I’m going to continue the experience.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
