By the time and director Yorgos Lanthimos were doing the rounds of publicity for , in which Stone played a crudely reincarnated adult woman with the brain of a baby, they had already shot their next movie. was shooting, in fact, while the requisite special effects were being added to Lanthimos would shoot by day and review their work by night. It sounds crazy, Stone agrees.
“But you have to understand! We were like, ‘We have to go make this movie right now because everyone is going to think is insane. Definitely!’” Once was released, they reasoned, they might not get the money to make anything else. As it turned out, Stone as best actress for her tour-de-force performance as Bella Baxter, the stitched-together experimental subject made by Willem Dafoe’s mad scientist Godwin in .
The film played at the Venice Film Festival in September to huge ovations, became an arthouse hit and went on to win a slew of awards. “Every single day after making that film, after work or after rehearsal, I would say to Yorgos, ‘How’s it going on ?’” says Stone. “And he would say, ‘It’s a colossal disaster.
’ And then the response was just mind-blowing. But actually, is a great example of the fact that there is no way to gauge anything.” By the time screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the question was whether the new film would measure up.
Was it actually weirder than ? consists of three stories, each played by the same group of eight actors – Jesse Plemons, .