Even though Bella has obviously been through trauma in her life, it just isn’t there for her now. She was the most joyous character in the world to play, because she has no shame about anything. She’s new, you know? I’ve never had to build a character before that didn’t have things that had happened to them or had been put on them by society throughout their lives. It was an extremely freeing experience to be her.
And what was it like to portray Bella in her almost-feral “early” stage?
Stone: I thought I would love that. We shot pretty chronologically, so it began with that, but then we also shot the end scene soon after, so I had to go from the beginning of Bella to the end of Bella without having shot any of the in-between. We rehearsed so much and talked about it for such a long time, but Bella was just growing so rapidly. There’s no world where I would have done this project with anybody else. I think you could probably feel it when you watch the film that I trust Yorgos implicitly. We had three weeks of rehearsal process where everybody was together, but I knew the actual shooting experience itself was going to be when I needed to let go of shame or fear of my own self-judgment. In a way, I kind of did have to alter my mind for the beginning of shooting. Speaking of the infant part of Bella’s development, I think I cried every day that first week because I was being so hard on myself, but as time went on, I was sort of able to shed that a little bit, although maybe not completely.
Lanthimos: Emma really found that complexity of not just playing Bella as a child or a baby in a cute way; it was quite tricky, and the way we approached it in the end was to really work with the physicality of the character without trying to analyze it or understand it.
There’s such a range of masculinity presented within the film, from Mark Ruffalo’s character to Willem Dafoe’s to Ramy Youssef’s; what was it like to assemble this cast of men who all seemed to represent such different desires and wishes for Bella?
Lanthimos: There are variations, I guess, but in this film, there’s a general tendency to try to control [Bella]—even if it’s done in a caring or subtle way, in the way that a parent might or that [Dafoe’s character] Baxter does, or just being infatuated in the way that Ramy is. You know, being a nice man deep down, but still having the characteristics of a man of that era. You take a wife and place all these kinds of conventions and a quite narrow understanding of how life works and how people should work onto her, and people then want to take advantage of her and ultimately fall in love with her because none of them has ever come across a human like that—let alone a woman in that period—who is so free from convention and has no guilt, no shame, no judgment about herself or other people. There’s this array of different men trying to have impact on her life, and that’s what makes her grow.
Stone: I remember when you first talked to me about the book, there was something that you brought up in describing the character where you were saying that the more agency Bella gets, the more she learns and grows, the more it drives these men insane. The more she has an opinion and her own wants and needs and all of that, it makes them crazy; they want her to stay this sort of pure thing.
This being Vogue, I have to ask about Bella’s style transition from the loose, puffy silhouettes of her childlike era to the almost corseted gown she wears at the film’s climax. What was that sartorial conversation like?
Lanthimos: Holly Waddington, who did the costumes, and I realized early on that costumes and production design would be a very important part of not only telling this story, but creating a world. A character like Bella hasn’t been seen before, so you need to start from scratch, because there’s not a straightforward way to go; the book takes place in the late-19th century, but at the same time, it’s kind of an open, unknown period, because there are a lot of elements in it—from technology to costumes—that are not loyal to the period, and feel almost futuristic. We looked at materials they used in the ’70s and thought about how they would work in a costume, from latex to plastic to all sorts of things.
Stone: At the start of the film, Bella is being dressed by a maid and is wearing that white silk house cape a lot of the time; then, once she’s set off on her journey, she’s dressing herself, so she’s wearing bloomers with a jacket and a big hat or whatever, and I loved that element of, How would Bella put clothing together with the way her mind works at this point? At the end, there are these very military-looking dresses that look like nothing you’ve seen Bella wear; things are much more form-fitting and constrained, but that’s because she’s come to a place where she’s grown and decided who she is and what she’s going to do. She’s not assimilating, necessarily, but there’s just more structure there.