“People have strict ideas about how we should and shouldn't behave”: Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
In a bright rehearsal room in Budapest, a week or two before filming began on Bad Things, actress Emma Stone picked up an apple from the breakfast table, mockingly thrust it between her legs and started moaning. It was an early moment of self-discovery for the film's fearless (and unfiltered) heroine, Bella Baxter—a formerly dead Victorian gentlewoman who is reanimated, Frankenstein-style, with the transplanted brain of her unborn child, and then strikes. about a sexual and philosophical odyssey across Europe.
As Stone writhed in her seat, her co-star Ramy Youssef begged her to stop, as the scene demanded, but after their director Yorgos Lanthimos announced the end of the proceedings, Youssef's shock did not completely disappear.
” Tony,” he said to screenwriter Tony McNamara, who was sitting in the corner drinking coffee. “You know we're all going to get canceled because of this, right?”
A little over two years later, McNamara sits in a London hotel room, clutching another coffee in his hand, still awaiting the cancellation that hasn't come yet. did not take place.
“When we made this movie, not one of us said, 'Well, here's something that's going to beat everyone,'” says the bookish Australian, who looks younger than his 56 years despite his horn-rimmed glasses, a mop of graying hair and a narrower long silvered beard. “But the people he won’t defeat haven’t come forward yet, so maybe I should be nervous.”
When Bad Things premiered in Venice last September, it received the most positive reviews in the festival's recent history. Well, McNamara joked in a WhatsApp message to Lanthimos: then there is no hope of a prize from the jury. A week later, he was lying on the sofa in his London home when Lanthimos texted him and told him he had just won Venice's top prize, the Golden Lion. It went on to rave reviews at further festival screenings in Telluride, New York and London, grossed $3.4 million (£2.7 million) over the US Christmas weekend and is up for seven awards at the Golden Globes. which will take place tomorrow evening. McNamara seems to have found a formula that has become increasingly elusive since the 1970s: create a very strange and provocative film that also becomes a popular hit.
Bad Things, which opens in UK cinemas on Friday, is a dazzlingly funny and madcap reworking of the 1992 novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray. Lanthimos, the Greek-born director behind such deadpan provocations as Dogtooth and The Lobster, assigned it to McNamara just over a decade ago when they were both working on the script for their Restoration-era black comedy The Favourite.
< McNamara, who was working as a playwright and screenwriter in Australia at the time, had never heard of the book before Lanthimos put it in his hands. But the barista at his local coffee shop turned out to be Scottish, “and when I told him about it, he was very happy.”
In 2011, shortly after moving to the UK, Lanthimos, a long-time admirer of Gray's work, traveled to Glasgow to try to win the author's approval. Upon arrival, however, Gray immediately pulled him back out the door and took him on an impromptu walking tour of his favorite spots in the city, from the university to the Necropolis. In an email to McNamara afterward, Lanthimos described Gray telling him on the doorstep, almost as an afterthought, that he loved Dogtooth and was happy to give his blessing to the Poor Littles adaptation.
“It was incredibly generous of him and Yorgos was overjoyed,” says McNamara, adding that it “brought a real bittersweet touch” to the production that Gray, who died in 2019 at age 85, did not have nearby to see how the cameras finally turned on for the project.
“I’m not the right person to talk to about the modern world because I try to avoid it”: Bad Things author Tony McNamara Photo: Gareth Cattermole
McNamara took some well-judged liberties with the source material, darkening the final act and cutting away playful narrative framing that calls into question the mainstream version of events. But the most radical change was the change of setting from Glasgow to London – or at least a beefed-up version of it, built (like each of its locations) in a Hungarian film studio – and thereby draining the tale of its distinctive Scottish flavor. There's just one thing left: as the eccentric scientist Godwin Baxter, Willem Dafoe puts on a very convincing Scottish Enlightenment accent.
When the first trailer was released last summer, some parts of Scottish social media were consumed with grumbling about it, while others rightly wondered why their country's own cultural sector had given England (and Australia, Greece, Hungary and so on) the opportunity bring this beloved novel to a wider audience.
McNamara stresses that the move was not personal. “We were sad to move him away from Glasgow, but we felt we had to do it,” he says. “With a wider audience, it became much easier to get into the film and we didn't have to create such a specific cultural context. We wanted to bring everyone into this bizarre world of a mad scientist performing brain transplants on cadavers and fetuses, so to tell the audience, “By the way, this is happening in Scotland,” was asking too much. Because then they start wondering, “Well, what does this mean?” So, although I understand that some Scots are a little nervous about this,” he suddenly looks worried, perhaps in case his Scottish-accented interviewer is one of them, “it was only because London instantly becomes clear to everything to the world as a gothic Victorian background.”
Nicholas Hoult and Elle Fanning in Great Credit: Christian Black
In any case, Lanthimos always considered this film an international project. McNamara recalls the day during the filming of “The Favourite” when the director quietly pulled him aside, pointed at Stone and said of the Arizona-born actress, “I think she's our Bella.”
“When we told her what we had, she loved it and agreed immediately,” McNamara says, although he did not begin the customization process specifically for Stone. “When I write, I can’t imagine the actors,” he says, “even when I’m literally married to one of the actors.” (In his streaming series The Greats, a historical comedy about Russian Empress Catherine II, McNamara's wife, Belinda Bromilov, plays Elizabeth of Russia.)
McNamara was born and raised an hour's drive north of Melbourne. He came to London at 22 to work as a merchant banker, but ran away before the end of the year. During his short time here, he fell in love with the theater, and during a trip to Rome to relax, he decided to reinvent himself as a playwright. Returning to Melbourne, he took a year-long creative writing course, which resulted in long periods of work as a waiter, but also enough downtime to write his first play, a Ferris Bueller-style satire about a middle-class Australian teenager. life called Latte Kid Cafe. This in turn became his feature film debut, 2003's Rage at Placid Lake, which he also directed.
“I loved doing it, but I also knew I could never do it well.” writing and directing,” he recalls. “The first one I had to make was a commitment.”
His ability to create complex and unruly female characters – Catherine the Great, all three leads in The Favourite, young Miss de Vil in Cruella – quickly won him the admiration of Stone, who brought him to this latest Disney film in 2019 after how his script got stuck in a rut.
The work was “entirely methodical and calculated,” he explains. “You quickly realize that you are here to service a piece of intellectual property” – intellectual property; in this case, an existing character or premise “that Disney is very emotionally invested in, but also wants to make a lot of money, so it's all about finding a middle path that satisfies both halves.” He remembers being nervous before his first meeting with producers “because it seemed so corporate and cumbersome, and I’ve always been an indie person. But they were so nice to me. They sat me down and asked, “What would you do to solve the problems that we think are problems and what other problems we haven't noticed?”
Did it work? Well, as for his Poor Little Things schedule (technically also a Disney job, since the film's parent studio is Searchlight Pictures), he's currently lounging around on Cruella 2.
Olivia Colman in the movie “The Favourite”: Atsushi Nishijima
It's certainly interesting that a studio as image-conscious as Disney would bring back McNamara to write one of its iconic heroines at a time when writers' identities—that is, their gender, race, and cultural background—are scrutinized for suitability for such roles. projects. . How does he feel about the modern obsession with who gets to tell what stories?
“I'm not the right person to talk to about the modern world because I try to avoid it,” he laughs. “But I mean, no matter what you do, someone is going to get in trouble. Oprah Winfrey sent $5 million to Hawaii after the wildfires, and some people are hounding her for it. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in. But I feel like this movie is about that kind of control—about what it means to live in a time when people have strict ideas about how we should and shouldn't talk and behave.”
Bella Baxter – dancing, fucking, arguing and mocking Portuguese quiches until she pukes – is, in this regard, as out of place in the 2020s as she was in the 1890s. Perhaps that's why it resonates so well.
Poor Things is in UK cinemas from 12 January
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