Thirteen years ago, Yorgos Lanthimos made a micro-budget film called Kinetta. Filmed in the shakiest hand-held style, it featured three actors mooching around hotels and hospitals in a rundown Greek coastal town, sometimes enacting fight scenes that resembled avant-garde choreography rehearsals. There was barely any dialogue, except when one character barked detailed directions at the others. Oh, and there was the occasional go-karting sequence. Even for those of us who like our art films bleakly inscrutable, Kinetta was a tall order.
Back then, you might have concluded that Lanthimos was the director Least Likely To. Least likely to be a magnet for actors of the starry calibre of Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz. Least likely to be one of the names that first arise when film people talk about the exciting new developments in Europe. Least likely to make a sumptuous period piece that’s a scabrous, subversive addition to the prestigious costume lineage of Tom Jones, The Draughtsman’s Contract and Barry Lyndon. And least likely to find himself seated in a vast, stately reception room – green, gold and imposingly Georgian – in Dublin’s Merrion hotel to discuss the film in question, The Favourite.
Set in England in the early 1700s, in the reign of Queen Anne, The Favourite is a behind-the-scenes tale of female desire and ambition, filmed largely in the authentic vastness of Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, lavishly furnished with magnificent gowns and vertiginously towering wigs, and starring an eminent cast headed by Colman, Weisz and Emma Stone. Since its premiere at Venice film festival in September, where Colman’s performance as Anne won her the best actress prize, it has been garlanded with praise; last week it was nominated for five Golden Globes and scooped a record 10 gongs in the British independent film awards, including best director for Lanthimos.
How on earth did Lanthimos get from Kinetta to this? He quietly sidesteps the question by pointing out that he never expected to be making films in the first place.
“Starting in Greece,” he says, “you couldn’t really say, ‘I’m going to become a film-maker.’ A 15-year-old boy in Greece in the 80s and 90s? There was nothing like that happening.” The idea was so unthinkable, he says, that he never even considered it when signing up for film school; he just hoped to make commercials. “It felt like it would be a real job, instead of being in marketing or something. I thought: it’s not going to be film-making, but it’s going to be close.”
As things turned out, Lanthimos ended up not close to cinema but with a prime position on the map of contemporary auteurdom. Since his extraordinary second feature, Dogtooth (2009), Lanthimos has been notorious for a wild imagination and a sometimes aggressive form of absurdism. In this brutal but grimly comic piece, a despotic father keeps his adult children imprisoned at home and systematically misinformed about the outside world and the meanings of everyday words. Lanthimos’s first English-language film, The Lobster (2015), which proved a significant art-house hit, is set in a world where single people must find partners or be transformed into animals. Its follow-up, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), is an unforgivingly bleak, bloody revenge drama infused with classical mythology – and in which characters keep having long, farcically mundane discussions about wristwatches.
By contrast, The Favourite is less troubling than mischievous, although it too is dark, as well as very moving. Based on fact, it is the story of two women vying for the attention of Queen Anne – established confidante Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) and her cousin Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), a disadvantaged outsider who came to displace Sarah in the queen’s regard (and, the film suggests, in her bed). But this is a film that gleefully flouts your expectations of period cinema: the witty, salacious script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara is outrageously spiked with non sequiturs and anachronisms (“career suicide”, “no pressure”). Then there are the bizarrely athletic dance sequences, diverse business with ducks and pomegranates, and a closing tableau of rabbits that shifts the film into an entirely different zone of poetic strangeness.
Lanthimos was offered the project by producers Ceci Dempsey and Ed Guiney, based in the UK and Ireland respectively; it was while The Favourite was in development that he showed them his outline for The Lobster, and he ended up making that film, then The Killing of a Sacred Deer, before The Favourite. Dempsey had already been developing Deborah Davis’s original script for The Favourite for 10 years. As Guiney tells me, Lanthimos was approached on the strength of Dogtooth, not least because of his gift for claustrophobic scenarios in which “you put a small group of people in a hothouse situation and watch them react”.
Lanthimos, 45, is soft-spoken and a little bear-like – more teddy than grizzly – with a gentle, somewhat impassive face that doesn’t give too much away. Cordial but quietly reserved, he hardly comes across like an international maestro of the extreme. Wearing beige trousers and a blazer-like navy jacket, he’s more like a thoughtful, conservatively styled academic – the disarming sort whose work turns out to focus on themes of transgression, violence and madness.
When he first read The Favourite, Lanthimos says in impeccable English, he knew nothing about the times it depicted. It wasn’t the period that interested him, but the story: “It was just reading about these people, these women, how they related to each other, their personal history, especially Anne’s, and what she went through as a person.” (She suffered chronic ill health, and lost 17 children.) He was also fascinated by the fact that the drama focused on three women. “I can’t pretend that I thought we need more women represented in a certain way, it was just an instinctive thing. I was interested in that which I hadn’t seen very often.”
The Favourite is a bold portrayal of female power, in which women’s emotional and sexual bonds with one another move the gears of history as much as the political manoeuvres of men. Did Lanthimos worry that the current moment was a delicate time to be a man directing a film about women that focuses on their sexual desires, and often submitting them to comic treatment that might be regarded as cruel, even sadistic?
“I had a fear initially,” he admits, “and I think I overcame it by saying ‘it doesn’t matter that they’re women’. It is interesting because of that, but it should be made as if it isn’t an issue. I’m a man and I’m going to tell this story about these women, and I obviously don’t know much about it – but if they’re shown as human beings, there’s no judgment.”
One thing The Favourite does decisively is consolidate Lanthimos’s status as a distinctive director of actors. Where his previous work favoured highly stylised, anti-realist acting, this has a much looser, comedy-of-manners exuberance, resulting in an ensemble of boldly raffish performances, not least from Nicholas Hoult as a viperish statesman. Colman and Weisz – who both also appeared in The Lobster – are superb, which comes as no surprise. The revelation, however, is Emma Stone, whose extraordinary range of facial responses as an ingénue conspirator takes her into a new realm of finely tuned comic acting, and – you’d have thought – way out of a Hollywood performer’s comfort zone.
“I don’t think she’s out of her comfort zone yet – she has a lot of room there. I’m not sure how I knew that, but I kind of knew it,” says Lanthimos, who got Stone attached for the role even before her tour de force in La La Land. “She was very confident from the beginning – physically, she was immediately on it from the rehearsals.”
Ah, the rehearsals. Lanthimos has acquired some notoriety for an unusual approach to rehearsals and auditions. Actors in The Favourite have talked about being asked to speak their lines while panting as if giving birth, or grappling mentally with invisible force fields. About your method… I ask, and Lanthimos chuckles. “I think I do things that are more common in theatre.” Films normally skimp on rehearsal time, he says, but on The Favourite he had three weeks to follow his own method, which involves physical exercises. For example, he’ll get six cast members to hold hands and start moving around the rehearsal space: “They get entangled, and they have to figure out how to get untangled, and while they’re doing that, they might be doing their lines, so the lines get distorted.” It allows him, he says, “to infuse the scenes and actors with an unpredictability that I find is there in real life, but isn’t there when you sit down and intellectualise a scene or a role”.
This physicality has always been part of Lanthimos’s work, including occasional forays into theatre. Footage from his 2011 National Theatre of Greece production of Platonov looks nothing like any Chekhov performance you ever saw: it features muscular ensemble moves, set to a funereal chant of the Bee Gees’ How Deep Is Your Love. An aficionado of modern dance theatre, the director particularly admires choreographers such as Maguy Marin, Sasha Waltz and Dimitris Papaioannou, an associate of Pina Bausch’s company.
Dogtooth and its equally eccentric follow-up, Alps, brought Lanthimos attention as the flagbearer of what came to be dubbed Greece’s “weird wave” – a generation of film-makers all making very different works that were sometimes but not always anti-realist, and some more outré than others, although they shared a proudly anti-commercial ideology. His best-known contemporary is writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari; she produced Dogtooth and Alps, while Lanthimos acted in and produced her magnificently freaky Attenberg (2010), a film that at moments suggested Jean-Luc Godard moonlighting on a set of Monty Python sketches.
Critics have puzzled over the wave’s emergence, some identifying it as a response to Greece’s economic crisis, with a nothing-to-lose ethos freeing the creative imagination. In reality, says Lanthimos, the participants had little in common other than that “we were able to access a lot of art cinema, more than previous generations. But obviously there is a cultural thing: it’s maybe Mediterranean, but there is a culture that is more open to certain things, with less restrictions and taboos, which maybe Anglo-Saxons and other cultures aren’t.”
But how did Lanthimos’s own imagination become so strange? His film-watching seems nothing out of the ordinary: he has talked about growing up on John Hughes, Bruce Lee and Indiana Jones, before discovering Tarkovsky, Cassavetes… the usual canon. What was he reading at a formative age? “Kafka, Beckett, Céline, normal stuff. Camus, Dostoevsky...” He was also a fan of the late British playwright Sarah Kane: her Phaedra’s Love, classical myth retold in unvarnished modern language, was something he drew on for the tone of The Favourite. As for reading today, he gives a weary chuckle. “I don’t have time to read much. I’m trying to read The Brothers Karamazov again, for a year now – I keep getting halfway, and then there’s a lot of work and I forget it and I have to go back to the beginning.”
Born in Athens, Lanthimos was brought up by his mother after his parents separated. She died when he was 17, at which point he had to look after himself, although he had a close aunt. That must have been a seismic experience for him, but he plays it down. “You just have to deal with it and you don’t really think about it too much, because you have to find work, you have to pay for your rent, you have to study. I guess it did have a huge impact on me, but it was very unconscious – you just keep going, and all of a sudden you’re 24 and doing other things.”
What he was doing at the time was studying – marketing at first, before switching to film – and then making commercials with Efthymis Filippou, whom he met in an ad agency and who became his long-term co-writer. Among the ads they made were “these little strange films about people taking their work back home with them – like a butcher on the subway, all covered in blood, with his hatchet, and people start screaming”.
Made on tight budgets, Kinetta and Lathimos’s other Greek films taught him to work economically, and he has stuck to that principle. To this day, he avoids artificial lighting and doesn’t use makeup – unless, as in The Favourite, the actors are playing characters who are themselves manifestly slathered in powder and rouge.
But the necessity of doing ads for a living, Lanthimos says, meant that film-making was still “like a hobby”. International attention persuaded him that it was time for a new start. Making a decision he now says was “kind of naive”, he moved to London in 2011, before any definite projects were in place. “It wasn’t as easy as I thought.”
Lanthimos now lives in north London with his wife, Ariane Labed, whom he met when she was acting in Attenberg: she has since starred in Alps and The Lobster, as well as appearing in mainstream productions such as Assassin’s Creed, and playing the lead in seabound French art film Fidelio: Alice’s Journey. Originally a theatre performer, Labed came to Greece with her theatre company and ended up staying. “She was born in Greece, but she’s French and she’s lived in Germany. She’s a bit of a nomad.”
How do Lanthimos and Labed feel about living in the UK on the brink of Brexit? “We are quite perplexed about it, and we do talk about it a lot – about whether we should stay in a place that has this kind of vibe. Unfortunately, things are going dark in many European countries, so what do you do – go from one to the other depending on where the climate is better?”
While The Favourite shows a more accessible, even joyous side of his film-making, Lanthimos can still expect to remain notorious for some time as someone who specialises in taking viewers to difficult, occasionally frightening places, an auteur regularly cited alongside the confrontational likes of Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. He never wants to shock, he insists, but when I use the word “provocative”, he nods thoughtfully.
“Provocative… I used to be defensive about it, but in the end I realised it’s exactly right. It’s what we’re trying to do – to provoke thought and discussion and, you know, shake people up to start thinking about things in a different way. I’m interested in messing with what they think is the norm.”
The Favourite is out 1 January