Interview: Tony McNamara

A conversation with the screenwriter of Poor Things.

Poor Things is perhaps the most inventive movie of the year. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of the Sacred Deer, The Favourite) with memorable performances by Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Willem Dafoe, the script, an adaptation of a novel by Alasdair Gray, was written by Tony McNamara (The Favourite, The Great).

From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter (Stone), a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Under Baxter’s protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

Here is an excerpt from a Vanity Fair interview with McNamara.

Vanity Fair: Poor Things, The Great, and The Favourite all have this invented style of language that seemingly combines classic style and a modern sensibility. How do you do that?

Tony McNamara: I love language and I love dialogue. It’s one of the most exciting things about writing a script for me. We knew it was a big world and I knew Yorgos had a vision for a big world that was also a fantasy. But I was also aware because it’s period, and we were telling this young woman’s story, that I wanted you to be able to access it as a modern audience. So the idea was, yes, the language had to nod that it was a period thing, but it also had to allow the audience to enter her experience. It had to be period enough that you bought the world, but contemporary enough that the audience could access her emotionally. And then this third part of it was her particular way of speaking was a constant evolution, which is not, I guess, normal in a film. You don’t normally have a character who changes the way they speak every 15 minutes.

What was your approach to the way Bella’s language develops?

In the end I mapped out how old she was at certain points, and so I mapped out when we start, she’s three. By the time she leaves for Lisbon she’s like 16, 17. And by the time she leaves Lisbon and goes to the boat, she’s like 21. And that was her college years where she discovers books and politics. And then Paris was like mid-20s of making a lot of bad decisions and thinking they’re good decisions. And then you kind of feel like you have to go home and metabolize your past.

It’s a person who doesn’t know words and she hasn’t been taught words for things. So she would just call stuff things because she saw it and had a response to it. So it was tricky. It was a lot of work to hone each section of what it would be. And you’re still trying to just make it funny, as well as make it reflective.

“Furious jumping,” which is how she describes sex, is one of my favorite phrases.

That was what I meant about the words thing: I didn’t want her to know words we knew because she wasn’t educated in that way. She was educated in science but not in the world. She has a very instinctive reaction to everything that happens to her, and that was kind of very much the story of the film was this person going on this instinctive adventure through life.

Here is a trailer for the movie:

For the rest of the Vanity Fair interview, go here. In it, McNamara breaks down a scene from the screenplay and explains “I don’t write sex scenes — I write character beats where people are having sex.”

To listen to a Final Draft audio interview with McNamara, go here.

For 100s more interviews with screenwriters and filmmakers, go here.