Irish producer Ed Guiney of Element Pictures has said they would love to work with Emma Stone again after their rich collaboration on the Oscar-nominated Poor Things.
Guiney and Andrew Lowe, the founders and co-CEOs of the Dublin-based production company, produced Poor Things alongside director and longtime collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos and the film's leading star Stone. The film has gone on to land 11 nominations at this year's Oscars, a record for an Irish produced film and the second most nominated after Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.
Having worked alongside one another on 2018's The Favourite, co-produced by Element, Lanthimos and Stone struck up a strong creative partnership which led naturally into their latest project.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment about Stone's producing role on Poor Things, Guiney said: "Her interest and attachment to the project is one of the reasons it got made.
"That and the success of The Favourite, they were the building blocks. Having a star of her magnitude commit to a film like this makes so much difference because it's quite a hard sell on paper."
The producer complimented Stone's enthusiasm and dedication to a project.
"She's all in. She's one of those people that's 100% in on anything she does," he shared. "If she's acting in it, she wants to know about costume, she wants to know about design, she wants to know about all the other actors and the script. And so that curiosity meant that we were having all these great conversations with each other.
"It was very clear that she would be a really positive contributor as a producer, both during the development phase and then in post-production and distribution.
"She's a very experienced movie star, she's worked on a lot of big movies, she's seen how they’ve gone out into the world and been successes or not. There's an awful lot of expertise that she brings to bear in terms of how you put something out into the world. She has a lot to offer as a producer."
"It was very lovely between myself and Andrew and Yorgos and herself as producers, that was very constructive and a little producing brain trust. We'd love to work with her again in that capacity."
He added: "For all of the team, it was a really challenging thing and bigger than any of us had done before. But we did pull together as a team.
"There's great satisfaction in having come through a very challenging production and out the other side of it, with friendships and relationships intact and mutual respect for everybody. It isn't always that way."
Poor Things is out in cinemas now.
Our full interview with Element Pictures' Ed Guiney will be published on Sunday, 3 March.
