In the world of film, creating a true odyssey requires no shortage of unique spaces and settings. For Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos’s highly anticipated eighth feature film that follows a Frankenstein-like figure as she discovers the world in all its wonder and misery, production designers James Price and Shona Heath collaborated to create some of the most imaginative sets seen on screen this year.
After a lifetime stuck inside her family home, the film’s central character, Bella Baxter (portrayed by Emma Stone), travels the world in an attempt to discover it and herself. The dreamlike renderings of each location—from London to Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris—evoke both the distinct mood of the quickly changing Baxter and the surreal tone of the film itself. With so much ground to cover, Price, Heath, and their teams set to work on mood boarding, throwing every idea into the mix until they landed on the mélange that felt appropriate for each step of Baxter’s journey.
“It’s sort of a poisoned chalice when you’re told ‘I want to make a 1930s studio movie, made with today’s technologies and also technologies and techniques from the time, but I want it to look like nothing that’s ever been seen before,’” Price tells AD, explaining the double-edged sword of Lanthimos’s ambitious vision for the film’s look. “There was no preconception of what we were trying to create, so we had to figure it out and workshop it together.”
“We started to collage worlds together,” Heath says. “There might have been a Brutalist building with a medical drawing and a crazy animal, and those things would equal something else. James and I would physically collage images together and sketch on top of them, then they would be put on the computer and somebody would work on them further.” Lanthimos gave Price and Heath a few references to work from—paintings by Egon Schiele, Hieronymus Bosch, and Francis Bacon. Those works served as touchstones throughout the design process, which culminated in a 200-page document detailing every element that needed to be built.
Once complete, the expansive world that was built from that guide sprawled across one of continental Europe’s largest soundstages, Korda Studios in Budapest, and it was so large that it took half an hour to walk the entire set. Though select scenes were shot on location, the vast majority were filmed on the soundstage, with meticulously crafted miniatures employed for shots of the city of Alexandria, the London Tower Bridge, and a grand home that appears toward the end of the film. Heath and Price insist the real challenge of the work wasn’t in devising the original look of the sets, but in actually manifesting them. “The sheer scale and amount of everything [was the challenge],” Heath says. “Everything had so much detail. Everything was three-sixty.” Considered textures catch the eye throughout, whether it be layered carpets, wall ornamentation, or stonework. Many of these elements were chosen to evoke the body or the feeling of slicing because of the importance of surgery to the central characters.
Rather than creating the Baxter home sets room by room, as many filmmakers might, the home was created in one piece, allowing the actors to easily flow from space to space on screen and adding a sense of realism to the otherwise surreal world. The Lisbon and Paris sets were constructed as their own small cities for Baxter to wander about as well, and practical lighting was used as much as possible, adding flexibility to the filming process. Though oddity can be impressive, what’s most notable about Poor Things is that it manages to feel grounded despite its glorious strangeness.
