‘Poor Things’ Cinematographer Robbie Ryan On Collaborating To Create the Visual World of Bella Baxter

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan first worked with acclaimed director Yorgos Lanthimos on 2018’s The Favorite. Their collaboration on the darkly comic take on Britain’s Queen Anne netted Ryan his first Academy Award nomination. Their work together continues on Lanthimos’s Golden Globe-winning film Poor Things, and Ryan’s work behind the camera on the creatively challenging film appears likely to net him his second bid when the Academy announces the 2024 Oscar nominations on January 23.

When talking to Ryan about his beautifully rendered lensing on Poor Things, it’s evident that awards and the like weren’t at all the primary focus when crafting the film. Rather, Ryan enthuses about his collaboration with Lanthimos and the broader group of artisans working on the film. He loved trying out camera types he’d never worked with previously, even if it meant dusting the cobwebs off one or two along the way. He relished the opportunity to work in a tight-knit community of artisans who partnered with each other so closely when creating the vast world of Bella Baxter, the re-animated women whose journey of self-discovery is the focus of the acclaimed film.

Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Robbie Ryan talks about how he and Yorgos Lanthimos fashioned the look and feel of the film from a history of cinema, including some completely unexpected sources of inspiration. He also talks about the various camera styles he leveraged and what he considered to be the biggest logistic challenge of the shoot.

Awards Daily: Congratulations on your work on Poor Things! The film features a variety of visual styles across its narrative. Given the eclectic screenplay, what kind of initial conversations did you have with Yorgos to determine how the film would look? 

Robbie Ryan: The first time I’d heard of the film was when we were shooting The Favorite. I asked him, ‘What are you doing next?’ He said, ‘I’m doing a film where the woman in the film wakes up, and she’s got her baby’s brain in her head.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, that sounds interesting. So let’s see where we go from there.’ I read the script, and I always remember reading that and going this is great. It’s almost like with every scene the volume gets turned up each time. It was a really long process before we started filming.

So as far as dialogue between me and Yorgos, it was all done practically because we were able to do testing. At the start of 2021, we were in with James and Shona [Price and Heath, production designers], and we did a camera test. He always comes to me with ideas for cameras and lenses and stocks, so I know that’s where I will get the most information about anything. As far as our dialogue about how we will shoot it, it always becomes apparent when we’re filming it. He gave me a list of films to watch, and this is a rare film where I was able to do a lot of prep. I was able to do around 12 weeks of prep for a 12-week shoot, so I really got in depth in that period of time.

We were also all working together on this one campus, and we were the only people making a film on this campus in a studio. So, we were able to own it, and it felt like a university almost — just kind of hanging out with all the different departments and seeing how they’re all getting on. It was a very collaborative and creative space to be in. Everything always felt like it was going in the right direction in that respect. Yorgos is a man of few words sometimes, so if you have to ask a question, hopefully he’ll give you an answer and not look at you disdainfully and go, ‘Why did you ask me that question?’ [Laughs]

Awards Daily: You talked about Yorgos having ideas on different cameras. What kind of cameras did you use for the film, and what did that selection drive within the film itself?

Robbie Ryan: After The Favorite, Yorgos and I were both very big film fans, celluloid being what I mean when I say film, so we were always intending to shoot on film. What’s great about that is these days, there is a finite amount of film cameras to use, so if you’re shooting 16, then you’re probably going to use an ARRI 416. If you’re shooting 35mm, then we prefer the ARRICAM ST or an ARRICAM LT. Because the aspect ratio is 1:66, Yorgos suggested shooting on the VistaVision. The cobwebs were still on the cameras that I’d ever heard of for a VistaVision. I’d heard that they used them for Star Wars back in the day, but I didn’t imagine they were used anymore. But we found one, and it was a bit like a Frankenstein camera. The results from it, though, were really beautiful, but because it was a very noisy camera, we only used that for certain scenes, for example the re-animation sequence because it didn’t have any dialogue in it. That was a new camera that we hadn’t used before. That was exciting to us.

Awards Daily: You mentioned when you started having the prep work conversations with Yorgos that he gave you a list of films to watch for reference. I have to imagine that something along the lines of James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein had to be there because those black and white sequences remind me of early German expressionist camerawork. Are you tapping into that as a reference?

Robbie Ryan: It definitely was looked at. We all looked at that together. It was funny because, when we were making the reanimation scene, we tried to get the technology they used in Bride of Frankenstein. It’s impossible to do that on a film set in 2023 because you’re not allowed to have that much electricity close to the camera. If you look at that film, there’s literally sparks falling everywhere. I really think they used high voltage a lot on the original scene. We were really struggling to have anything that even represented a spark, so that was, ironically, a lot more difficult to shoot than the James Whale one. But the black and white for sure was a reference. I think a lot of black and white films were referenced.

But, you know, the one that we all talked about mostly was Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula because there are a lot of miniatures used in that and a lot of process shots and a lot of old techniques that were updated to 1990. Yorgos was definitely keen to try and update that to 33 years later. He wanted to use the technology of our time, mixed in with miniatures and all the stuff from the 30s in the silent era.

Awards Daily: Earlier, you talked about the collaborative environment when prepping for the film. Tell me a bit more about that collaboration with other departments. 

Robbie Ryan: We were always falling into each other’s departments. I’d go to the art department an awful lot and hang out with them. We were working from a software program called Blender and Unreal Engine so you can create a complete three dimensional set on a computer. You’re able to see every nook and cranny of every set before it was built. That worked very well for things like the ship. I remember being involved with a lot of that. The great thing about filming in the studio is you do have that capability of making it. You’ve got that little bit of a heads up as far as what you do in the prep work to get it right.

Awards Daily: What was your most challenging sequence to film?

Robbie Ryan: Although we were in one studio for most of the filming, the studio for the Lisbon sequence was in another place two hours away. So I always found that a bigger challenge because I couldn’t just walk in like at all the other sets as it was being built. It was the biggest set of all of them, so that was very challenging. It also was meant to be a very sunny place, so I had to use a lot more light. Yorgos likes to be able to film 360, so trying to create a sunlight for a certain scene, you have to second guess what way that’s going to shot. It was a lot more challenging.

Poor Things is now playing nationwide.