James Price: The conceit was that we’d make anywhere that was real feel like a set, because Yorgos really wanted to make a 1930s studio picture as if it were made with today’s technology.
SH: We had to put the skies there, whether they were hand-painted or huge LED screens. We shot ink tanks and cloud tanks to create skies as well. It’s never what you think.
JP: We’d say, “In this world, you can’t take the sky for granted.”
Before we can talk about travel in the abstract, I do have to ask – where in the world were you making this movie?
JP: We were based in Budapest, in Hungary. Alfie’s home was the [Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library], it was attached to a university. The woods were a 20-minute drive from central Budapest. The church was actually a crypt, beneath a church, on the outskirts.
The London medical school was in the old television building right in the city centre, not far from where Parliament is. And then one site for Lisbon, a restaurant, was an old shelter for orphaned children that we made unrecognisable – we changed the windows, we stuck plaster fish on the walls, and we built a stage.
We enjoyed Budapest for other reasons, rather than actual filming. It was a great place to live for six months – the baths, the food, it’s a great city. I lived two minutes from Budapest Jazz Club. My family came out and spent the summer with me, and they’d hang out every day at Margaret Island. When I was there, I’d join them because there’s an amazing swimming pool. In the evenings, we’d have a bit of goulash and head to the jazz club.
SH: I wasn’t there for the whole time, so I would go out in the city proper. What I found really strange was, when we were looking to find the architectural style for Poor Things, whether it was Lisbon or London, we looked towards avant-garde architects. And Budapest strangely, serendipitously matched all of the research and design work we had done before we got there, didn’t it? I kept on walking around and seeing fish scales and design choices that had no rhyme or reason – it felt like we should have come there for inspiration. The feeling is very similar.
JP: When I turned up to the hotel when we first got to Budapest, the Four Seasons, I looked up in the lobby and there was a light hanging and I was like, “Shit, we’ve had that exact light on our reference board for months, and there it is.” There’s a lot of humour in Budapest’s architecture, it’s a very humorous city in that way.
SH: That’s a good way to describe it. It’s not so serious. The colours and the textures, the decoration and ornamentation – do you remember those owls you took pictures of? And then we made gigantic versions of them to put in the Lisbon restaurant.
