‘Emma Stone came up with a lot of the sex stuff that we did’: Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos

Amid all the local awards-season chatter – Golden Globes nominations for Andrew Scott, Cillian Murphy and Barry Keoghan – we may, again, have lost track of the news that an Irish film is bossing its way to the front of the pack. Last September Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, a feminist fantasia in shades of steampunk, became the first domestic feature in 20 years to win the Golden Lion at Venice.

Lanthimos, the Greek master of cerebral weird, does not pause in acknowledging his debt to the Dublin-based production company Element Pictures and to that organisation’s founders, Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe.

“It’s just mutual respect,” the director says. “They were the people who said, ‘We like what you do, and we want you to continue making what you’re making.’ Whatever I’m making they’re happy to support it and try to get it made. Also, I find them very transparent, straightforward people. Which is very important.”

Poor Things is his fourth collaboration with Element, following The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite. A fifth, Kind of Kindness, is already in the can. Fans of the preceding projects – angular comedies with solid philosophical foundations – will have some idea what to expect, but this is the team’s wildest ride yet.

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Emma Stone (also a producer with Lowe, Guiney and the director) stars as a Victorian woman who, after flinging herself fatally in the river, is revivified by an eccentric scientist who then places her own baby’s brain in her skull. Based on a novel by the great Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, the film is aggressively feminist and stubbornly bizarre.

“Many years ago, when I hadn’t yet built that relationship with Element, I tried to develop it with a different producer,” Lanthimos says. “When the first difficulties arose – when it was rejected by various funding bodies in the UK – they said, ‘Well, I guess this cannot be made. Do you have anything else you want to do?’ With Element it was different: ‘If these people don’t want to develop it, we’ll do it.’ That means a lot to me.”

Guiney, who was Oscar-nominated for The Favourite, bubbles with enthusiasm.

“You love the film-maker. You love working with them. What’s not to like?” he says. “That’s the engagement. You don’t know how you’re going to get the thing made. It was an incredibly ambitious film for us to contemplate at that point. You hope these relationships are in for the long haul.”

Do we need to ask what it was that scared off funders? The screenplay sends Bella Baxter on a lunatic journey throughout a heightened version of late 19th-century Europe. She works in a Paris brothel. She is moved by visions of poverty. She is uninhibited in her sexual enthusiasm. All salty stuff. But anyone viewing Lanthimos’s earlier Greek films – the allegorical Dogtooth and the austere Alps – would surely have been prepared for the oddness.

“Twelve years ago, when I started to try and develop it, I hadn’t made an English-language film and I hadn’t made such a large-scale film before,” he says. “So it was a hard sell. To start with, I think people were not interested in this kind of story – the story of a woman who is so free and who has her own mind. Someone who progresses the way she does in the world – her freedom around sexuality.”

Here we get to an interesting issue. The first press screening at Venice was among the most enthusiastic I have ever attended. Key moments were celebrated with loud applause. There were whoops as the credits rolled. The social-media reactions were equally celebratory. It did seem, however, as if many American commentators were taken aback by the amount of sex. Poor Things is, to be sure, much at home to what Bella calls “furious jumping”. But not so much as to justify some of the overheated responses.

Alex Billington of First Showing – who much enjoyed the film – was among those reaching for the smelling salts. “Poor Things is ... the raunchiest film of the decade?!” he panted on what we must now call X. “Everyone remember how much of a stir Antichrist caused?! Poor Things is that x100! THE WORLD IS NOT READY.”

Poor Things, often at home to comical humping, really has nothing to compare for explicitness with the erect penis ejaculating blood in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist. More recently, Sasha Stone of Awards Daily, responding to reports of American audiences walking out, commented: “It isn’t that they’re prudish, it’s that Poor Things, as good as it is, is a soft core porn film.”

No, it isn’t.

What in the name of heck is going on? There is little here you wouldn’t see on the HBO series Euphoria.

“I was a bit surprised by it,” Guiney says of the responses. “I really was. I don’t really understand where that comes from. Because it’s not necessarily in the lexicon of popular culture now, that aversion to sex. That doesn’t seem to be a thing. But the cinema is very particular. It is perplexing. It feels like an anomaly.”

A lugubrious, bearded fellow with a good line in fatalistic exasperation, Lanthimos is similarly puzzled. The cultural liberalisations of the early 1970s have not been reversed, but there does seem to be a budding new puritanism about the place.

“I do find it strange in general, not necessarily just for this film, that sex is such a taboo – in film-making especially,” he says. “It was never an issue for me. When I started making films I never thought about it. I made films the way I made them. Sex or violence or love or ... It was all the same to me. I dealt with them all the same way.

“But since it is less present in films there is a need to talk about it. My answer is that, for me, it’s just natural. And it’s natural to the story.”

He must have pondered why sex has again become such a hot topic in movies. They’re mad about it across the pond.

“I am not sure what the reason is,” he says. “Everything else is so accepted. The comparison we would make is with violence. Why is violence so accepted? Even with younger ages, people are allowed to watch violence. Of course, it’s a cultural thing. It’s different in different cultures.”

Now 50, Lanthimos can fairly claim to be, of his generation, among the most prominent figures in Greek culture. Raised in Athens to a mother who owned a shop, he studied business administration and, like his dad, played basketball to a high level. After swerving towards film at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos, he moved into commercials and pop videos. His feature debut, My Best Friend, emerged in 2001 to decent domestic box office, but it was Dogtooth, his third feature, that really set the ball rolling.

[ Sex is back in the movies, and the Irish have a lot to do with it ]

Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes, the jagged comedy put in place his signature traits: comic cruelty, sharp satire, spare surrealism. In 2015, now working with Element, he brought The Lobster, a pitch-black comedy with Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, to Cannes and carried off the Jury Prize. The Favourite, from 2018, scored 10 Oscar nominations and generated a win in best actress for Olivia Colman.

Few film-makers have had such an extraordinarily sound hit rate. So is he celebrated at home? Has Greece recognised his success?

“I don’t really know,” he says warily. “They do watch them. I think sometimes there is this mentality of ‘Don’t think that you’ve done anything special. We’re all the same.’ In every small country or society, there’s bound to be that kind of mentality. Ha ha!”

I can’t imagine what he means. That sort of thing would never happen in Ireland.

“But there are a lot of people I meet who really appreciate it and who also see it as a positive image for the country itself – that it’s internationally acknowledged. They take pride in that. They share that with me. It’s a complex situation.”

Lanthimos attracted the world’s attention just as Greece was going through its traumatic economic meltdown. Reasonably enough, critics sought to find reflections of that crisis in Dogtooth and Alps. Most of them probably got it all wrong. Perhaps the director can explain what he sees as inherently Greek in his work.

“When I started making films in Greece, the circumstances were quite particular,” he says. “There wasn’t so much structure in film-making. There wasn’t any financing. It was just a few people wanting to make films out of the love of making films. I think that informed me in a great way. No matter how much larger the film has become – or how much more means we have to make them – I still try and maintain the core of that experience.”

He sees that spirit in Poor Things. He and Robbie Ryan, the now legendary Irish director of photography, were adamant they would “make the film in the same way”. They used little artificial lighting. “There will be no one on set other than the camera, the sound and the actors,” Lanthimos says. “We actually managed to create this very intimate experience.”

There is, however, no getting away from the larger scale of his current production. Poor Things, a vessel of the wider Disney armada, now launches into deep awards-season combat. Oscar nominations seem inevitable. Mark Ruffalo, Willem Defoe and Margaret Qualley are among the cast. And Emma Stone is producer and star. Director and lead seem to get on.

“We certainly have this luxury of being very honest,” he says. “Talking, for example, about the sex scenes that might have been the most awkward or uncomfortable. I remember us sitting down the days before and coming up with all the different styles we were going to do. Ha ha! So we decided, Oh, we should do this part. And, Oh, someone should be humping her leg. Ha ha! She came up with a lot of the stuff that we did.”

The team somehow found time to shoot another feature after Poor Things wrapped. Originally titled Kind – good luck tracking that down on Google – the mysterious project is now the slightly more search-optimised Kind of Kindness. Stone, Dafoe and Qualley join Joe Alwyn and Hong Chau in a film whose plot is yet to be disclosed. The world waits eagerly. Might it emerge at Venice in September? Maybe for Cannes in May?

“I don’t know,” Guiney says cautiously. “Look, I’m not being coy at all. But ... maybe? It depends when we finish it.”

Make of that what you will.

Poor Things is in cinemas from Friday, January 12th