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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-masque 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 blanche, 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 this 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. [inaudible 00:02:24] 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, and Yorgos really wanted-- When I read the book, I was like, "This is what I think we should do." He really wanted to put Bella at the center and tell her story. Then 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, so what were your thoughts about the scripts from your exp1erience in both of those jobs, and 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, so I was pretty disappointed [inaudible 00:03:18]

[laughter]

Ramy Youssef: I walked in with an initial disappointment, as again was the magnetism for me. No, look, it 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. I do stand up, so we're always looking for how to make a joke better, and then I read it and I thought, "Oh, there's nothing here to improve. This is just to live, you just have to be present." 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 [inaudible 00:04:27] 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, 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: 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. Everyone around her is pre-programmed into these societal norms, and so 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, for me, all human beings are poor things because we're victims of our own selves, as well as each other. I felt like a lot in the movie is about desire for control, to people trying to control her ideas and her body and her thoughts and also be misguided. All the men particularly are in love with her, and it's so misguided, and so it manifests in dark ways and comical ways. In some ways, 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 a very pure response to the experiences she has.

Alison Stewart: My guests are screenwriters Tony McNamara and actor Ramy Youssef. We're talking about Poor Things which is in theaters now. 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 a 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: One of my favorite lines in the script from the beginning was 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's like, "Kids like dogs," is Max's response. I just thought there was this really sweet thing where he's clearly more interested of 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 me, never lived outside God's house.

Duncan Wedderburn: What?

Bella Baxter: Bella has 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 for the film, but I had children, so that was helpful.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I'm sorry.

Tony McNamara: I think watching my little kids at the time was part of it. I had a four-year-old, so I did notice he spoke in the third person, but only that really. I think the rest was about creating a dialogue and arcing it across the two hours so that Bella accelerated. Her dialogue changed all the time, but 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, and he's very proud now because he does have a line in the movie that was his.

Alison Stewart: 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 were in a restaurant and he goes, "Punch that baby." I was telling Yorgos as a just a story at lunch one day and Yorgos goes, "Bella, that's going to be Bella." We've got to put that in." It's like, "Okay." He's happy.

Alison Stewart: Everybody's happy with that one. That's hilarious. That's a hilarious story. Lost my train of thought. Made me laugh so hard. Max comes on as a research assistant, Ramy, what are his first thoughts about Bella?

Ramy Youssef: I think he's enamored and confused at the same time. Again, I think he sees this raw curiosity, he sees this spirit, and he's also incredibly confused as to what is happening in this house. I think because he's been such a fan of Baxter's and the student that defends him the most, he probably walks in with the interest of defending what's happening there. Then at the same time, he becomes an advocate for Bella to be able to go out and to see more and have experiences.

Alison Stewart: How does he square those ethics we were discussing earlier once he realizes what's going on? I read that bit of dialogue when Max first hears what the deal is.

Ramy Youssef: I think it's what pushes them to first go outside, and I think that when they do go outside, then she can't get enough of being outside. I think in that moment, we do see that for lovely as maybe Max is, or curious, he does try to do what the other men in her life try to do, and he wants her to stay, he doesn't want her to leave when she wants to go with Duncan. I think it's a great plot point just as an actor because I felt like I was getting to play multiple shades that were real. He's not just this doting assistant that nods his head and goes along with everything, he has a lot of what the men in this film have. What's fun is getting to hold that kind of tension for him and then watch it let go and exhale and then they return and they're both expanded versions of themselves from the beginning of the film, and taking Max on that journey was really fun.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing Poor Things, which is in theaters now. My guests are screenwriter Tony McNamara and actor Ramy Youssef. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Tony McNamara. He's the screenwriter for the film Poor Things. Ramy Youssef is one of the actors in the film. Stars as Max McCandles, the love interest, one of the love interests for Bella Baxter, the lead in the film. The woman whose brain is that of an infant, but then she grows and matures and we go along for this journey.

Tony, a lot of the humor comes from Bella not adhering, understanding, or even acknowledging the polite rules of society at that time. If she doesn't like what something tastes like, she spits it out. She says out loud that she wants to have sex. She dances, let's say, pelvic forward quite a bit. She suggests punching a baby, which we found out is a line from your kid.

Aside from the laughs that we get from these moments, what do you hope audiences get from these moments? How does it help tell the story?

Tony McNamara: Well, I think it, one of the, I guess the satire of the movie, is about, I guess Emma talked about that Bella in a way it's a romantic comedy and she's having a love affair with life itself in the sense that she gets to live without shame and she gets to just experience life moment-to-moment. It's sometimes oblivious to society's wants and mores, and sometimes just unflinchingly like, "I don't want a part of that."

I think that's part of the comedy of the movie because everyone else is living in a paradigm that they're trying to get her to kind of live in. She keeps refusing to do it or completely oblivious as to what it is and doesn't understand it when it's explained to her. I think a lot of the comedy comes from that. Of course, Emma's just a exceptionally brilliant comic actor. I think that's the beauty of the movie for me as a writer, is it's just Mark and Ramy and Willem and Emma, just extraordinary comic and dramatic actors. We get this heart from the movie, but all the comedy is relentlessly there in this joyous way.

Alison Stewart: I'm not giving too much away because I think this is in a lot of the trailers. 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, and part of that experience is having sexual 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 weepy and sweary 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 charge 30 francs.

Max McCandles: That seems low.

Alison Stewart: Rami, 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, and 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 the process like? I'll just leave it there.

Tony McNamara: I think I viewed it as all part of her discovering life as she goes through these periods of discovery emotionally and politically and intellectually, and it was the same. It was like, well, is she's doing this random discovery of everything, food, sex. If she likes something, she does it more because that just makes sense to her. 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, and then she tries to change the way the rules work. 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, and 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 peddling any aspect of her politically or any other.

Alison Stewart: Tony, have you felt about the decision to edit a scene in the movie for the UK release in which the father takes his sons to the brothel to watch him so they can learn about having sex while he's having sex with Bella.

Tony McNamara: I don't know that much about it, I vaguely remember it happening, and I think it's a bit strange within the context of the movie, but I think sex is a real trigger point, I guess, in society, and there's a lot of shame about it, and I know there's a sort of-- I think that it's that.

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I think sometimes it's a bit odd because you go, and as Emma says, you can go and watch 12-year olds shoot each other in the head and BPG, but you can't-- but sex, which is much more natural part of us, murder, it flares people up.

Alison Stewart: Ramy, this is a film that people are having very strong reactions to. People love it. They think it's a masterpiece, but there have been a couple of theaters that have reported people not knowing what to do with it and deciding to leave. Why do you think the film is provoking a strong reaction?

Ramy Youssef: I think that's really funny. I didn't know about the people leaving.

Alison Stewart: That's probably healthy. It means you're not on social media. That's healthy. [chuckles]

Ramy Youssef: I really try not to be. I think anyone who knows Yorgos' work, maybe this film has the least number of people leaving, whatever that metric could be.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] You're so hilarious.

Ramy Youssef: I don't know if a PLM, people leaving movie, metric, I would say, is probably at its lowest with Poor Things-

Alison Stewart: Oh God.

Ramy Youssef: -if you are familiar with Yorgos Lanthimos' work. I think that's why I have always loved him as a director, because it's purposefully not for everybody. I think that's why it's fun. I think that to see a movie do so well at the Box Office, and it's actually designed to not be for everybody, is actually such a bright spot, I think, for the industry in a really tough time. That doesn't surprise me. I think it's actually why the film is good.

Alison Stewart: Tony, what do you hope people talk about after they leave the film?

Tony McNamara: I don't know. I think that they just talk about what an extraordinary piece of filmmaking it is, because I do think Yorgos has made of an amazing piece of cinema. That's like a Fellini movie from the '70s or so. It's a really exceptional piece of filmmaking with incredible performances, and all the design of the movie is something incredibly special. I hope they can talk about that and how funny it was.

Alison Stewart: Poor Things is in theaters now. I've been speaking with screenwriter Tony McNamara and Ramy Youssef who stars as Max McCandles. Thanks so much for your time today.

Ramy Youssef: Thank you.

Tony McNamara: Pleasure. Thank you.

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Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way right after the news. The Milk Carton Kids join us.

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