PARTNERSHIPS IN FILM often result in some of the duo’s finest work: think Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, and, more recently, Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone. The pair first worked together on their 2018 black comedy The Favourite, which saw Stone play a scheming scullery maid-turned-Queen’s confidante. They return five years later with Poor Things, a surreal sci-fi movie based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel. Stone stars as Bella Baxter, a young woman brought to life by an experimental scientist with dubious ethics (Willen Dafoe), who goes on a headspinningly peculiar odyssey around Europe. With another film, And, also in the pipeline, Empire sat down with the pair to discuss the expanding Lanthimos/Stone universe, monosyllabic communication, and magic.
How well do you work together? Are you able to communicate in grunts at this point?