“I have become the thing I hated, the grasping succubus of a lover,” sulks Duncan Wedderburn, the charming rake played by Mark Ruffalo in a scene set in a belle epoque Lisbon restaurant midway through Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” which is nominated for 11 awards at Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.
Bella Baxter, the film’s heroine played by Emma Stone, doesn’t seem to hear him. She is captivated by the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the orchestra serenading the dinner guests. As if possessed, she follows the beat to the dance floor, where she lets loose with a joyous, primitive and sublimely wacky dance that has become one of the year’s defining screen moments.
For Constanza Macras, the film’s choreographer, that scene was about more than just having fun. “It’s a moment that defines the relationship,” explained Macras, 53, who hails from Argentina and is based in Berlin.
“It’s the moment that she starts to go free from Duncan,” Macras said of Stone’s character — a woman reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant. Duncan has whisked her on a trip around the world in the hopes of debauching her.
Instead, the Lothario finds that he can’t keep up with her in the bedroom or, as the scene under discussion reveals, on the dance floor. When Duncan leaps to his feet as well, he tries to save the situation and assert his control. “He’s trying to constrain her, he’s trying to show her how to dance normally,” Macras said.
“Their entire relationship is contained in that dance,” Ruffalo, who received a best supporting actor nomination for the Academy Awards for the role, wrote in an email. “And it’s incredibly fun and funny.”
Though meticulously rehearsed, the dance scene in “Poor Things” exudes an antic, anarchic energy that makes the moment seem spontaneous. Macras previously worked with Lanthimos on “The Favourite” (2018), in which Stone also starred. Macras’s contributions to that film included a skewered courtly dance for Rachel Weisz and Joe Alwyn and a playful tussle in the woods for Stone and Alwyn.
“What is great about Yorgos is that dance is a ‘pivot moment’ in his movies. It has a very strong dramatic impact in the film itself,” Macras explained.
“He uses dance, for me, in one of the most meaningful and smartest ways I’ve seen in film,” she continued, pointing to other moments in Lanthimos’s films where dance plays a crucial and memorable role, including the silent disco in the woods in “The Lobster” (2015) and the climactic living-room dance scene in “Dogtooth” (2009), the director’s international breakthrough.
Macras was speaking to me the morning after her production of “Carmen” premiered at Theater Basel, in Switzerland. Like Bella, the heroine in Bizet’s opera refuses to be controlled by men.
In Macras’s staging of the classic work, Carmen is not a sultry man-eating vamp, but an activist who champions the cause of women’s emancipation.
The production includes allusions to Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist classic “Metropolis,” American Western films, circus elements and lots of dancing from both the singers and members of her Berlin-based troupe, DorkyPark. It bears the unmistakable artistic signature of Macras, who loves to combine high and low references.
“I work a lot with quotations. I use dance as a function, as a language. I use music and text,” she said of her integrated approach to dance and to theater.
Lanthimos, who keeps tabs on contemporary artists in many disciplines, is a fan of her work. The director, who could not be reached for comment, said in a 2018 IndieWire interview that he drew inspiration from “dance and theater and all of those kind of things.”
“I knew that physicality would be very important in order to create the film in a way that would feel like its own world,” he said later in the interview about selecting Macras to work with him on “The Favourite.”
Benedikt von Peter, artistic director of Theater Basel, approached Macras about doing “Carmen” after reflecting that opéra comique, the genre Bizet was working in, was a revue-based entertainment. “I thought: ‘OK, that’s her!’” von Peter recalled.
“She’s mixing political discourses with entertaining manners and dance,” he continued, adding that he half-expected Macras, whose résumé does not include much opera, to turn down such a popular title. But he recalled that Macras surprised him by accepting. “She said, ‘Yes, I like pop.’ Because when it comes to opera, it doesn’t get any more pop than ‘Carmen.’”
In all her work, be it for the stage or the screen, Macras said she aims to a create “space for the interpreter to do something that they feel that this material is theirs because otherwise it feels mechanical and strange.”
Before filming, the choreographer and two of her dancers rehearsed intensively with Stone and Ruffalo. Ruffalo said that Macras showed up with a solidly worked out version of the dance, which then evolved during the rehearsal process.
“From there we started to play with it and collaborate on it,” he said. “Yorgos would point out that a part of it didn’t feel right to him and then we would all start trying some other things to get it to a place of his liking,” he continued.
“In the end, what Yorgos was looking for was a structure that we could be free within. He wanted to see the relationship physicalized. It was really a fantastic collaboration with Constanza and her colleagues,” he said.
Macras also worked with Stone and Ruffalo on the zany fight that erupts shortly after the dance, when Duncan confronts a dapper older gentleman who is making eyes (winking, to be exact) at Bella. The brawl seems propelled by the manic energy unleashed by Bella’s unrestrained dance.
“He likes a dance. He likes a slap as well,” said Robbie Ryan, the film’s BAFTA and Oscar-nominated cinematographer, with a laugh.
Speaking on a video call from Edinburgh, where he’s shooting a new film, he described Macras as an open, creative person and claimed that her sensibilities translated well to Lanthimos’s approach, which is artistically serious while embracing absurdity and even downright silliness.
“Obviously her style is kind of in the name DorkyPark,” Ryan, who also shot “The Favourite,” said.
“It’s always a bit like, you know, not goofy, but it’s definitely an interesting take on normal contemporary dance and she pushes the boundaries very much in a, kind of, almost fun way,” he said. “So I think that lands with Yorgos’s sensibilities,” he added.
Macras said she feels that choreographing for the screen gives you something “that you never get in theater.” Naturally, cinematography plays a central role. “The camera is really a choreographic work as well,” she explained.
Ryan said that when it came time to shoot the dance scene, the actors’ preparedness made his job reasonably easy. “We found our way of being able to dance around them,” he said, adding, “I was worried about hitting them with the dolly all the time, but we negotiated that.”
Things got hairier in the fight, though. Ryan filmed the scene hand-held and at one point Stone whacked the wide lens of the camera with her boot.
Luckily no one got hurt. For Ruffalo, working with Macras allowed him to discover a different side of himself as a performer. “I realize that I can dance, and that I can do broad, physical comedy in a way that is funny, but also rooted in honesty,” he said.