Yorgos Lanthimos is reworking Frankenstein with… | Little White Lies

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Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos is rework­ing Franken­stein with Emma Stone

02 Feb 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

Two people, a woman in a bold dress and a man with a beard, conversing in a dimly lit room with candles and wooden panelling.
Two people, a woman in a bold dress and a man with a beard, conversing in a dimly lit room with candles and wooden panelling.
The pair are set to adapt the nov­el Poor Things’, about an undead woman pieced back together.

Few direc­tors enjoy the lev­el of indus­try cachet cur­rent­ly held by Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos, still rid­ing high off of the hand­some box office receipts and cav­al­cade of Oscar nom­i­na­tions for his last film The Favourite. He can get just about any­thing green­lit and draw any tal­ent to make it hap­pen, so he’s tapped a favourite of his own for a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly con­cep­tu­al, strange project.

Our pals at The Film Stage have got­ten hard con­fir­ma­tion on the recent­ly swirling rumor that Lan­thi­mos has found his next project in the nov­el Poor Things’, which he’ll soon adapt with his for­mer col­lab­o­ra­tor Emma Stone in the lead. Alas­dair Gray’s book reworks Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein cre­ation myth, but with more cre­ative license than such mod­ern attempts as Vic­tor Franken­stein, or I, Frankenstein.

This time around, the sto­ry focus­es not on a mad sci­en­tist but on Bel­la Bax­ter, a volatile, over­sexed, eman­ci­pat­ed woman” with a plan to escape her abu­sive hus­band. (That’ll be Stone.) She drowns her­self, and returns from the dead with the brain of her unborn child now in her head, ready for vengeance or at the very least, a new lease on life.

One can only imag­ine how Lan­thi­mos will han­dle the more eso­teric aspects of his cho­sen source, such as its long­form Pale Fire-style texts with­in the text, or the deep-dive focus on the cul­tur­al admin­is­tra­tions of Glas­gow. Most of that could be dis­posed of with­out too much trou­ble, need­ing just a change in medi­um and set­ting, though Lan­thi­mos could prob­a­bly make them work as is if he real­ly want­ed to. Hol­ly­wood is get­ting wise to the fact that there’s a lot of mon­ey to be made in let­ting the man do as he pleases.

The Film Stage’s arti­cle spec­u­lates that shoot­ing will com­mence lat­er this year for a like­ly debut at Cannes 2022, which feels sev­er­al eter­ni­ties away at present. Lan­thi­mos still has to find a suit­ably oily hus­band to dole out the wry sort of vio­lence the direc­tor so favors, now the hottest gig in town. That sound you hear is the most pow­er­ful Hol­ly­wood agents’ phones all ring­ing in unison.

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