As an actor who’s no stranger to the green screen — having to create from the imagination while “just sort of floating in no man’s land” — Mark Ruffalo relished a very different sort of experience on the fantastical Poor Things.
“I’ve worked on some really big pictures, pictures where they have a lot of money, and I’ve never had such an immersive experience walking into a set,” the actor says. “When you walked out on these sets, everything you touched was either a period piece or made by a craftsman that understood the period, and that rarely ever happens.”
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His experience, he suggests, is the ultimate embodiment of the degree to which behind-the-scenes craftsmanship can inform and enhance a performance. In conversation with production designers James Price and Shona Heath in today’s episode of The Process, Ruffalo enthuses: “Your sets, just the wonder of them is so inspiring. It’s so beautiful and such a pleasant place to be that yes, it does affect the crew, and it does inspire more artistry, and it does inspire people to have to feel like they’re going to match that with authenticity and texture and craftsmanship… Everything is dictated by the place.”
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Certainly, Price says, helping to foster such a creative environment was part of the designers’ intent, as much for the crew as for those appearing on screen. “If the crew believe it too,” he explains, “that whole energy runs on through the film and you’re going to get a better film across the board, or more believable, because of those immersive worlds that we create.”
An adaptation of a novel of the same name by Alasdair Gray helmed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things tells the story of Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a young Victorian woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Wille, Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, this woman with the mind of a child is eager to learn. But as she grows hungry for the worldliness she is lacking — and for sex, specifically — she runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, she grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.
When Heath first read the script, she saw “all these fantastic opportunities for crazy ideas within the set,” including the “squishy floor” built into Baxter’s residence, to ensure that his science experiment Bella wouldn’t fall and hurt herself. “The script gave us so many narrative bouncing boards to respond to visually that it was just amazing,” she says. “I know those don’t come along so often.”
It was clear to Price from early conversations with Lanthimos just what kind of an undertaking the project would be. “We’d been told that he wanted to build everything like a 1930s studio movie, a lot of old school techniques and things was what he was thinking…so I just start thinking about, that’s a lot of world to create in a studio,” he recalls. “So there was the enjoyment of it, but already from the word go, you were just thinking, ‘Whoa, that’s ambitious.'”
Heath explains that the amount of detail present in sets stemmed from an aesthetic concept honed by Lanthimos and DP Robbie Ryan, which involved fisheye lenses, practical lighting, and fluid, exploratory camerawork. In order to support shooting in this fashion, 360-degree sets would need to be created. “We’d done a test [early on] with Robbie and Yorgos with the fisheye lens, and I remember the first thing you see is kind of up and under the curtain rails and we were like, ‘S**t, everything’s going to have to be a hundred percent finished. There’s nowhere to hide,'” she recalls. “So we didn’t hide. We just filled it and finished it. So, I think out of fear, all that stuff was there.”
Remarkably, while Heath and Price joined Ruffalo in landing Oscar nominations for their work on Poor Things, as part of the film’s total tally of 11, neither has been working in production design for very long. While Price had a great deal of experience as an art director and segued to the role of production designer on Sean Durkin’s 2020 drama The Nest, Heath had only previously worked on a short film, having come to prominence with her set design in the world of fashion photography.
Beyond the fact of enormous, visually wild sets — sometimes, representing entire European cities — being built on stages in Budapest, part of what made the experience of Poor Things so unusual for the duo was the simple fact that they’d be taking on the project as co-designers previously unaware of each other, something neither had previously experienced. Admits Price of his thoughts early on, “I was kind of acutely aware of what an insane undertaking it was.”
For more from our conversation between Ruffalo and the production designers of Poor Things, click above.