We were happy to have director Yorgos Lanthimos back at the New York Film Festival to discuss Poor Things, a Main Slate selection of this year’s festival, as well as cinematographer Robbie Ryan, costume designer Holly Waddington, composer Jerskin Fendrix, and production designers James Price & Shona Heath, with NYFF programmer Rachel Rosen.

In his boldest vision yet, iconoclast auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, previously featured in NYFF with The Lobster (NYFF57) and The Favourite (NYFF56), creates an outlandish alternate 19th century on the cusp of technological breakthrough, in which a peculiar, childlike woman named Bella (Emma Stone) lives with her mysterious caretaker, the scientist and surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). At once poignant and grotesque, Poor Things, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is a punkish update of the Frankenstein story that becomes a deeply feminist fairy tale about women taking back control of their own bodies and minds. A Searchlight Pictures release.

Listen to the conversation with Lanthimos and his team as they discuss Poor Things.

Don’t forget to mark your calendars: Poor Things opens in theaters on December 8.

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