When director Yorgos Lanthimos mentioned to Tony McNamara on the set of The Favourite that he was considering adapting Alasdair Gray’s 1992 book Poor Things for his next film, McNamara knew it wouldn’t be an easy task. “It’s quite a massive book and it’s about a lot of different things,” he tells Vanity Fair.

Not only would it be McNamara’s first adaptation—he previously wrote the script for Lanthimos’s The Favourite, would later cowrite 2021’s Cruella, and is the creator of Hulu’s popular series The Great—but he quickly noticed that the story was told from the perspective of the men who come into and out of the main character’s life, not from Bella Baxter herself. And to both Lanthimos and McNamara, Bella was the key to making this film work. “That was sort of the biggest challenge, but it was also kind of a freedom,” he says. “Her internal experience of what was happening was kind of the big invention of the script, as well as the language.”

In the film, Bella (played by Emma Stone) starts out with the brain of a baby that has been put into her adult body by an eccentric surgeon whom she now views as her father (Willem DaFoe), named Godwin but literally called “God.” As she grows, the sheltered Bella decides to go on an adventure across Europe with her new boyfriend, Duncan (Mark Ruffalo), where she explores new sights, has a whole lot of sex, and learns about how the world works in many ways.

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McNamara’s script is a rich, wild adventure with unique characters and colorful, playful scenes that always keep Bella at the center of this coming-of-age tale. The Australian writer and Oscar nominee for The Favourite spoke to Vanity Fair about creating Bella’s world, taking inspiration from Fellini, and why he writes so well about women. Plus, McNamara annotated two pages of his incredible script for a deeper dive into Bella’s wild night out in Portugal.

Vanity Fair: Poor Things, The Great, and The Favourite all have this invented style of language that seemingly combines classic style and a modern sensibility. How do you do that?

Tony McNamara: I love language and I love dialogue. It’s one of the most exciting things about writing a script for me. We knew it was a big world and I knew Yorgos had a vision for a big world that was also a fantasy. But I was also aware because it’s period, and we were telling this young woman’s story, that I wanted you to be able to access it as a modern audience. So the idea was, yes, the language had to nod that it was a period thing, but it also had to allow the audience to enter her experience. It had to be period enough that you bought the world, but contemporary enough that the audience could access her emotionally. And then this third part of it was her particular way of speaking was a constant evolution, which is not, I guess, normal in a film. You don’t normally have a character who changes the way they speak every 15 minutes.

What was your approach to the way Bella’s language develops?

In the end I mapped out how old she was at certain points, and so I mapped out when we start, she’s three. By the time she leaves for Lisbon she’s like 16, 17. And by the time she leaves Lisbon and goes to the boat, she’s like 21. And that was her college years where she discovers books and politics. And then Paris was like mid-20s of making a lot of bad decisions and thinking they’re good decisions. And then you kind of feel like you have to go home and metabolize your past.

It’s a person who doesn’t know words and she hasn’t been taught words for things. So she would just call stuff things because she saw it and had a response to it. So it was tricky. It was a lot of work to hone each section of what it would be. And you’re still trying to just make it funny, as well as make it reflective.

“Furious jumping,” which is how she describes sex, is one of my favorite phrases.

That was what I meant about the words thing: I didn’t want her to know words we knew because she wasn’t educated in that way. She was educated in science but not in the world. She has a very instinctive reaction to everything that happens to her, and that was kind of very much the story of the film was this person going on this instinctive adventure through life.

When you’re adapting something like this, what do you do for research beyond the book?

In my head there was a Fellini feel to the movie, and Yorgos, he sent me And the Ship Sails On. I’m a huge Fellini fan, so for me that was something I thought about. I watched a few old French movies from the ’70s, and then Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder. You’re not watching for anything literal—it was just the feel of certain things.

How did you approach Bella’s sexual exploration, especially in the Lisbon part of the story?

Lisbon was the beginning of her coming into her sexuality, and I knew it was shame-free, and there’d be a joy that she would find in it. And then in terms of how much there was, there was never going to be a sex scene to have a sex scene. I have this philosophy, which is that I don’t write sex scenes—I write character beats where people are having sex. And that’s what it felt like. I knew why the first scene with Duncan was that, and I knew why, even when she gets to the brothel, all of that’s an investigation by her and then a rebellion by her, and then it’s disillusionment by her. It was something I knew was in the film, and it was really important it was in the film. That was probably that idea of those ’70s European films where there was a kind of embrace of that as just part of human life in a quite unapologetic way.

Was there any part of Bella’s journey that ended up being sort of the hardest to get right?

The third act. The book does have a third act, but it’s not what we did. In the third act the ex-husband comes back, and there’s a sort of fight, but he kind of kidnaps them more or less. We had a sort of ending like that for a couple of years, and then we had lunch one day and we were talking about it and we sort of realized neither of us liked the third act. I went away and rang Yorgos and I said, “What if she decides to go with him?” As a character that’s who she’s: she’s curious. She’s not scared of experience and it’s the one thing she hasn’t kind of metabolized is who she was.

And it’s a satire, and it’s a Frankenstein movie, and it’s a drama, and it’s a comedy, and it’s a journey movie, which are hard. So making that all unified was hard.

When I look at The Great, The Favourite, and now Poor Things, you have this incredible knack for putting women at the center of your stories. Why do you gravitate towards that?

I always feel like it’s a bit of a coincidence, but it probably isn’t. The woman’s experience is different, and for some reason I find it richer and more difficult. I guess my character’s journeys are difficult and they’re partly difficult moving through this sort of landscape where men and other things are in their way. From Catherine the Great to even this, in a lot of ways, it’s a satire about control. And that’s just not to do with men—it’s to do with everybody trying to control everybody: our ideas and bodies and thoughts.

"The design of the scene was twofold: it firstly centered around Bella’s assumption that Duncan meant what he said philosophically, was Bella confused by the fact she was just living a philosophy Duncan himself espoused, not realizing people just talk the talk sometimes. For Duncan it was the realization he had become something he hated, and then from there it was to continue the scene but turn it physical with Bella responding to the moment. The scene is built as a cascading of more and more chaos with Bella acting freely merely responding to each moment, the music she likes, the man winking, the invitation to go dancing, as Duncan despite recognizing and loathing himself for it is unable to stop trying to control her and the situation ending in their relationship way more volatile and her angry for the first time at him."