Oscars 2024: Inside the surreal setting of Poor Creatures

The 2024 Oscar- nominated set design for Poor Things aimed to create a " 1930s studio film with today's technology ", according to the film's production designers in an interview with British magazine Dezeen. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos , Poor Things , the filmmaker's highly anticipated eighth feature film, tells the story of Bella Baxter , played by Emma Stone , who has the mind of a child trapped in the body of a grown woman and who follows a Frankenstein-like figure as she discovers the world in all its wonder and misery . "The script dictated our way into the world we were trying to make, and the first way was to figure out how Bella lived," said Shona Heath, who co-created the film's production design with James Price. Much of the film was shot on sets in Budapest, Hungary , with only a small portion actually filmed on existing locations. To create the interior of Bella's home, Heath and Price took inspiration from the neoclassical Sir John Soanes Museum in London , which is filled with paintings, antiques and artwork collected by its 19th-century owner. Playing with contrasts and different textures , they also focused on "splicing" the architecture in a similar way to how the doctor, played by Willem Dafoe, splices together animals and other subjects. Rather than creating the domestic sets fragmented, the house was created in a single piece , allowing the actors to flow easily from space to space and adding a sense of realism to the surreal world . While the first act takes place primarily inside Bella's home and the surgical center where Baxter makes hybrid animals, the film quickly transitions into Bella's journey through the world. For these scenes, Heath and Price created a colorful set design that emphasizes the difference between Bella's black-and-white upbringing and her growing-up 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 we went, and we had a huge library of architectural details," Price said.

Some of the architectural references used for Lisbon were "quite modern," according to Price, who cited the work of Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill as an example. "For Lisbon, we combined modernist architecture with very medieval architecture ," he said. One of the most important settings in the film, in terms of impact on the story and length of time in the film, was the Paris brothel from Poor Things. The heavily ornamented Baroque-style building features phallic windows and other details that suggest its use. While viewers spend less time with Bella in Alexandria, the city's setting—built as a large miniature rather than a full-size location—needed to underscore an important plot point and give a condensed view of an entire city . To create the city, which is depicted as an island in the ocean rather than a city on the coast of North Africa, the designers also drew on a book about ancient sculptures called Cabinet of Curiosities. The first scene in Alexandria is one of the few that was filmed in an existing location – a restaurant that designers transformed into a breakfast room that resembles an "almost pseudo-Bond villain lair". The two designers received a 2024 Academy Award nomination for their production design along with Zsuzsa Mihalek, who was responsible for set decoration . The 96th Academy Awards will take place on March 10, 2024 . Source: Dezeen