Shona Heath and James Price “spliced up” architecture for Poor Things sets

by : Cajsa Carlson

The Oscar-nominated set design for Poor Things aimed to create a “1930s studio movie with today’s technology”, the film‘s production designers have told Dezeen.

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things tells the story of Bella, played by Emma Stone, who has a child’s mind trapped in a grown woman’s body – a plotline that affected how the sets for the black comedy were designed.

“The script dictated our way into the world we were trying to make, and the first way in was to work out how Bella lived,” said Shona Heath, who co-created the film’s production design with James Price.

Bella’s house in Poor Things was informed by the Sir John Soanes museum

“Her interior world would have been created by [her father] Godwin Baxter,” she told Dezeen. “And he was a maverick doctor, a very precise and artistic man, who had fine taste and was an artist in his way.”

Ninety per cent of the action in the film takes place on large sets in Budapest, where the film was shot, with only a small part of it filmed in existing locations.

To create the interior for Bella’s home – built as large sets – Heath and Price took inspiration from the neo-classical Sir John Soanes Museum in London, which is filled with paintings, antiques and artworks collected by its owner in the 19th century.

The interior features padded rooms and lots of different textures

Playing with contrasts and different textures, they also focused on “splicing up” the architecture in a similar way to how the doctor, played by Willem Dafoe, splices up animals and other subjects.

“Art and very decorative surfaces suddenly had a very flat side to them,” Heath explained. “Or a heavy, textured wall was contrasted with a very sleek staircase, that sort of approach.”

“Bella’s room was also led by the fact that Baxter would have prepared it to house this dangerous toddler in a huge body, so he padded the room so she couldn’t hurt herself,” she added.

The sets for the house were built in Budapest

The duo thought extensively about the texture of the sets at the request of the director who, without their knowledge, shot parts of the film in black and white.

“[Lanthimos] was super keen on huge texture,” Heath said. “Whatever ever we were doing, he said to make it thicker, deeper, more of it, more texture.”

“He wouldn’t be specific about colour but I think the texture was what he knew would read well in black and white.”

While the first act is mainly set within Bella’s home and the operating theatre where Baxter makes hybrid animals – including a dog-chicken creature and a goat with the head of a duck – the film quickly moves on to depict Bella’s journey out into the world.

Shona Heath and James Price created colourful sets with maritime details for Lisbon

For these scenes, which take up most of the film, Heath and Price created a colourful set design that underlines the difference between Bella’s black-and-white upbringing and her coming-of-age experiences.

The designers used a mix of architectural references for the sets in Lisbon, the first city Bella visits.

“We looked for the fantastical in architecture wherever it would be and we had a massive library of architectural details,” Price said.

“We knew that we wanted it to feel like a real city in the sense that nothing was uniform,” he added. “That’s sometimes a problem with built sets; there’s a uniformity because that’s quick to do but I think we managed to avoid that with our set builds.”

The city’s architecture draws on buildings by Ricardo Bofill

Some of the architectural references used for Lisbon were “quite modern”, according to Price, who named the work of Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill as an example.

“For Lisbon, we combined modernist architecture with very medieval architecture,” he said.

“And added lots of mythical creatures,” Heath interjected. “We also put in owls and dolphins.” These are accompanied by maritime and nautical motifs, including fish and mermaids.