[music]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. Welcome back to our pre-Academy Awards show of encore presentations featuring some of the nominated films. Now we'll turn to the film Poor Things, which is nominated in 11 categories. Yes, 11. It's up for cinematography, editing, costume design, hair and makeup, production design, and score. It's also up for best-adapted screenplay, best director, best actress, and yes, best picture as well. Here's Alison's conversation with screenwriter Tony McNamara and actor Ramy Youssef about Poor Things.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The film Poor Things recently won two Golden Globe Awards for Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and for Emma Stone in an acting category for her work playing Bella Baxter, who when we meet her in the film is a full-grown woman with the behavior of a small child. She throws food. She toddles when she walks. She has few words and she likes story time snuggles with her maker, not her father, her maker, Dr. Godwin Baxter, an experimental physician who "saved" a newly dead Bella.

As my guest screenwriter Tony McNamara writes for the character of Dr. Baxter, these are the lines, "All my research has come to this moment. Fate had brought me a dead body and a live infant and it was obvious. Take the infant's brain out and put it in the full-grown woman, reanimate her, and watch." She is a Victorian lady Frankenstein-esque human. Godwin brings in a research assistant named Max McCandles who becomes attached to Bella and is played by our next guest, Ramy Youssef.

Bella matures rapidly and the story follows her journey of physical, emotional, and sexual self-discovery. Bella really likes sex, and music, and dance. Wherever she goes, Bella shocks people with her behavior. She is all in. She finds herself in positions that would make the average Victorian woman blanch, but Bella takes things at face value. Eventually, she finds that life is full of both joy and suffering and she'll have to find a way to live with both. The film is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and reunites him with Emma Stone and screenwriter Tony McNamara, who wrote the script as well as the screenplay for the favorite. Tony joins us now. Hi Tony.

Tony McNamara: Oh, hi. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm great. How are you?

Tony McNamara: I'm very well, thanks.

Alison Stewart: Actor Ramy Youssef joins me to discuss Poor Things. Ramy, welcome back.

Ramy Youssef: Oh, thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Tony, when Yorgos approached you about working on this project, what were your initial ideas about how to tackle the source material, this 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray?

Tony McNamara: Yes, it's a great book. It's massive and it's about a lot of different things like Scottish nationalism, which isn't in the film, you might notice. It's Bella's story and this premise for Bella Baxter, but her story in the book is told by the men. All the men tell her story. You don't know her journey through her eyes. Yorgos really wanted-- and when I read the book, I was like, “This is what I think we should do,” but he really wanted to put Bella at the center and tell her story. Then it was just getting into it was such a great opportunity for language, which I love, and for creating this very funny, but philosophical story, really.

Alison Stewart: Ramy, you're a writer and a director. What were your thoughts about the scripts from your experience in both of those jobs? Then how did you think about it as an actor?

Ramy Youssef: As Tony mentioned, the original book had a lot of Scottish nationalism, which is why I got involved. I was pretty disappointed to know that.

[laughter]

Ramy Youssef: I walked in with an initial disappointment, as [unintelligible 00:04:00] again, was the magnetism for me. No, look, he was just amazing to do nothing but just show up and truly jump into a script that was honestly so funny and so heartfelt and weird and entertaining that I was almost a little bit intimidated because I think my writing perspective is always on and I do stand up. We're always looking for how to make a joke better. Then I read it and I thought, "Oh, there's nothing here to improve. This is just to [unintelligible 00:04:37], you just have to be present and it's a real testament to Tony and Yorgos.

Alison Stewart: Tony, Ramy's character in the book is actually originally called Archie McCandles. How did you come to Max McCandles?

Tony McNamara: I think sometimes you just change things because they sound better in my head or you're just trying to get away. In a way, adapting a novel is about getting away from the novel and creating a film abstract that has some relationship to the novel, but is quite distant as well. Sometimes it's just things like that. You change names a little bit. Yes, I guess it's just little weird bits of process that help you write a script.

Alison Stewart: Ramy, in your mind, what does Poor Things refer to, the title?

Ramy Youssef: [chuckles] Certainly, all the men involved. I think in many ways, Bella is unflinching in her curiosity. I find this to be a story about curiosity not just uncaged, but really unhinged and allowed to have fun. I think it’s everyone around her is pre-programmed into these societal norms. I think they're the poor things for me, but I definitely can't speak for how Tony and Yorgos view it.

Alison Stewart: Tony, how did you view it?

Tony McNamara: I think I viewed it as like, for me, all human beings are poor things because we're victims of our own selves as well as each other. I felt like the lot in the movie is about desire for control, to people trying to control her ideas and her body and thoughts and also be misguided. All the men particularly are in love with her and it's so misguided and it manifests in dark ways and comical ways.

In some ways, like Max is quite unmalicious in his love for her, but he still acts badly because of it. It's like we're all poor things. All the characters, except in a way, Bella is not a poor thing because she's freed from society and from shame. She gets to just live a life that's beat by beat, that’s a very pure response to the experiences she has.

Alison Stewart: My guest is screenwriter Tony McNamara and actor Ramy Youssef. We're talking about Poor Things. Ramy, before your character even meets Bella, he's a student of Dr. Godwin, who's a badly disfigured man played by Willem Dafoe. There's this scene that we get a sense that Max has his own moral compass. He tells some obnoxious students to pipe down and listen to this man. He's a genius. When you think about Max, what's behind his sense of ethics?

Ramy Youssef: I think, one of my favorite lines in the script from the beginning was just first, there's the description of what Godwin Baxter looks like. He's incredibly disfigured because he was the result of many experiments that his father tried on him. There's this line when Max is walking with him in the beginning of the film and he says to him, "Have you thought of growing a beard?" Just to help hide the scars. Then, Baxter goes, "I look like a dog." He is like good people. Kids like dogs is Max's response.

I just thought there was this really sweet thing where he he's clearly more interested than what's behind a person rather than what they look like. I think that's what you're getting at, because I do think his curiosity for the way Baxter thinks is the same curiosity that he eventually has for Bella. One is following this very structured, methodical line of thinking and then the other is the curiosity of the heart. He seems to not really care what the encasement is around that. He's just going for the essence.

Alison Stewart: As Bella grows and develops, Tony, her facility for language changes greatly and her way of speaking changes. In the beginning, she talks very much like a small child, refers to herself in the third person, “Bella wants this, Bella likes that.” By the end, she's reading and discussing philosophy. I want to play a clip from early in the movie so we get a sense of the way she speaks. This is from Poor Things.

Bella Baxter: Understand we never lived outside God's house.

Duncan: What?

Bella Baxter: So Bella, so much to discover and your sad face makes me discover angry feelings for you.

Duncan Wedderburn: Right.

Alison Stewart: Tony, did you do any research in linguistics, or child development, or speech patterns for young children and how they develop over time?

Tony McNamara: I didn't specifically do this to the film, but I had children, so that was helpful. I think watching my little kids at the time was part of it. I had a four-year-old, so he did-- I did notice he's spoken to the third person, but only that really. I think the rest was about creating a dialogue and arching it across the two hours so that Bella accelerated and that her dialogue changed all the time but she also didn't know, even at the end of the movie, she doesn't know everything. There's still words missing. She still responds to experiences by naming something because she doesn't know what it's called. Yes, I think the only research I did was watching my son. He's very proud now because he does have a line in the movie that was his.

Alison Stewart: Oh, what is it?

Tony McNamara: It's when Bella is in the restaurant in Lisbon, and she hears a baby crying and she gets up and goes, "Must punch that baby." When he was three, we're in a restaurant and he said, he goes, "Punch that baby." I was telling Yorgos as just a story at lunch one day and Yorgos goes, "Bella, that's got to be Bella. We've got to put that in." I was like, "Okay," so he's happy.

Alison Stewart: Everybody's happy with that one. Bella goes and travels the world. She's going to marry Max and she'll come back and marry him, but she's going to go experience the world. Part of that experience is having sexually liaisons with all sorts of different men. She runs away with Duncan Wedderburn, this rake played by Mark Ruffalo, who's hilarious. She even becomes a sex worker at one point. When she returns to talk to Max, there's a really sweet moment when she returns from her travels and reveals to Max that she spent some time as a sex worker. Let's listen to that clip and we can talk about it on the other side. This is from Poor Things.

Bella Baxter: Wedderburn became much weeping, swearing when he discovered my whoring.

Max McCandles: I find myself merely jealous of the men's time with you rather than any moral aspersion against you. It is your body, Bella Baxter, yours to give freely.

Bella Baxter: I generally charged ₣30.

Max McCandles: Well, that seems low.

Alison Stewart: Ramy, why isn't Max upset?

Ramy Youssef: I think it all has to do with really again, that idea of that expansiveness that they both go through. He lets go of something in terms of feeling like he needs to control, which I think for his character who's a scientist, that's a hard thing because that work is all about control and it's all about being able to have control. His whole love affair with her is the fact that he has to let that go.

I think the scene at the end, it's beautiful and it's also just really funny. Again, that's where the writing is great. He loves her and it's not about what she's done. It's about who they are, or who they could be together. I think that's what was really fun to play. I think it's why they keep finding each other despite how the Ruffalo character tries to barge in on that.

Alison Stewart: Tony, there's a lot of sex in the movie, whether it be Bella discovering her own sexuality, enjoying sex, enjoying different partners, thinking about sex transactionally when she decides to join a brothel and thinks like, “Well, I should have a good time. That would be better for the client as well.” When you were thinking about writing about sex and writing about sex through Bella's eyes, what was that process like? Is it the kind of thing-- What was the process like? I'll just leave it there.

Tony McNamara: I guess it was all part of the coming of-- I think I viewed it as all part of her discovering life. She goes through these periods of discovery emotionally and in and politically and intellectually. It was the same. It was like, "Oh, well, she's doing this random discovery of everything, food, sex and if she likes something, she does it more.” This just makes sense to her.

She doesn't really-- She's not carrying any what should be or how she should feel about anything. She's just carrying-- This is an experience. I think to what Ramy was saying, there's a scientist element in the movie that she's on an adventure, but she regards her life as an experiment and it's her own experiment. She lives by her own experimenting rules and sometimes it goes well for her like the sex worker thing seems interesting to her at the start. Then she tries to change the way the rules work and then ultimately she's like, "You know what? There's something really not good about this."

She just goes through her own experience and learns it all herself. I think that's one of the joys of the movie, really. I think the sex element was something we-- It was just part of a human experience and it seemed like we had to throw ourselves into showing that and not soft-pedaling any aspect of her politically or any other.

Kousha Navidar: That was Alison's conversation with screenwriter Tony McNamara and actor Ramy Youssef about the film Poor Things, which is up for 11 Academy Awards this weekend.

[music]

Up next, Jeffrey Wright is up for Best Actor for his performance in American Fiction, which itself is up for Best Picture. That's next. This is All Of It.