‘Poor Things’ Screenwriter Tony McNamara Breaks Down One of Its Most Complex Scenes

When director Yorgos Lanthimos mentioned to Tony McNamara on the set of The Favourite that he was considering adapting Alasdair Gray’s 1992 book Poor Things for his next film, McNamara knew it wouldn’t be an easy task. “It’s quite a massive book and it’s about a lot of different things,” he tells Vanity Fair.

Not only would it be McNamara’s first adaptation—he previously wrote the script for Lanthimos’s The Favourite, would later cowrite 2021’s Cruella, and is the creator of Hulu’s popular series The Great—but he quickly noticed that the story was told from the perspective of the men who come into and out of the main character’s life, not from Bella Baxter herself. And to both Lanthimos and McNamara, Bella was the key to making this film work. “That was sort of the biggest challenge, but it was also kind of a freedom,” he says. “Her internal experience of what was happening was kind of the big invention of the script, as well as the language.”

In the film, Bella (played by Emma Stone) starts out with the brain of a baby that has been put into her adult body by an eccentric surgeon whom she now views as her father (Willem DaFoe), named Godwin but literally called “God.” As she grows, the sheltered Bella decides to go on an adventure across Europe with her new boyfriend, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), where she explores new sights, has a whole lot of sex, and learns about how the world works in many ways.

McNamara’s script is a rich, wild adventure with unique characters and colorful, playful scenes that always keep Bella at the center of this coming-of-age tale. The Australian writer and Oscar nominee for The Favourite spoke to Vanity Fair about creating Bella’s world, taking inspiration from Fellini, and why he writes so well about women. Plus, McNamara annotated two pages of his incredible script for a deeper dive into Bella’s wild night out in Portugal.

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.