The 2017 David Lean Lecture: Yorgos Lanthimos

THE 2018

DAVID LEAN LECTURE

DELIVERED BY YORGOS LANTHIMOS

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The Lobster is probably LanthimosÕ­ most absurdist film to date Ð packed with unsettling metaphors and dark allusions Ð but it is also one of his most comedic.

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OVERVIEW

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t’s lazy criticism to compare creators and their works, but that doesn’t seem to stop commentators too often calling Yorgos Lanthimos the ‘Greek Lars von Trier’ or the ‘Greek Michael Haneke’. It’s meant as a compliment, of course, but it undermines the individualism that Lanthimos, and indeed von Trier and Haneke, bring to their films.

Perhaps the only real correlation between the three is that their voices are all conspicuously provocative, often cryptic and always unique.

Lanthimos’ first feature is his most conventional comedy, a co-directorial job with Greek funnyman Lakis Lazopoulos, called My Best Friend (2001). Conforming to a more traditional story structure and featuring archetypal comic characters, My Best Friend is an unabashed sex farce. It was a major hit with its home crowd but saw little exposure outside of the Greek Isles.

If My Best Friend was like being hit on the funny bone with a satirical hammer, Lanthimos’ next and first solo outing as director was more like having your rib tickled with a razor. Kinetta (2005) is an exhausting, kinetic car crash of bleak comedy, cryptic storytelling and surreal images – all reoccurring tropes in Lanthimos’ films. It shocked many festival-goers at the time, while also winning various festival awards.

More importantly, it announced Lanthimos to a broader audience.

However, it was Dogtooth (2009) that became Lanthimos’ first international hit.

The film won the Un Certain Regard and Youth prize at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as an Oscar nomination, cementing Lanthimos as an exciting new voice in world cinema.

He would make only one more film in his homeland, the wonderfully absurd Alps (2011), before choosing to relocate to the UK. He blames the lack of infrastructure and available

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by Toby Weidmann

training for young talent for the move, telling The Guardian in 2012, “I learned about [making films] by watching films... Even today I’m not sure why I make films or what makes me want to make films. I think it’s other people’s films.

Whenever I see a really great film, I think, ‘I want to make a film like that.’ And then I never do.”

The very many fans of Lanthimos’ next film would disagree with that final sentiment.

The Lobster (2015), his first film in the English language, is the director’s most popular film to date, with critics, audience goers and awards organisations alike. This surrealist black comedy won the Jury prize, as well as receiving a Palme d’Or nomination and a special mention under the Queer Prize banner, at Cannes. It was also nominated for both a BAFTA and an Oscar. The Lobster is probably Lanthimos’ most absurdist film to date – packed with unsettling metaphors and dark allusions – but it is also one of his most comedic.

His most recent release, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), was again nominated for the Palme d’Or and won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival. Many critics believe it is the director’s most accomplished work yet. A quite ridiculous, tragic and yet bitingly funny horror story about revenge, obsession and family, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is, like many of Lanthimos’ films, a subversion of genre into something provocative, something cryptic and something unique. Simply put, Yorgos Lanthimos is the Greek Yorgos Lanthimos.

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IN HIS OWN WORDS ON HIS GENERAL FILMM AKING PHILOSOPHYÉ From Electric Sheep Magazine

To me, it looks fake if you try to be too involved in the way you film things and if you ask your actors to get really emotionally involved. As much as I don’t like forcing feelings onto my actors, I also don’t like forcing them onto the audience. I prefer to keep the film open to allow people to get engaged in their own way. So I try to not guide people to conclusions too much, but rather expose things and have the audience react to what is happening on screen. For me, it is also a way of avoiding being too didactic in my films.

ON HIS FILMSÕ STORIESÉ The Independent

It starts from different places. It’s a fragment of a story or a situation that we observe – it builds from there and two years later I’m

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trying to remember where it all started from… Hopefully, we’re creating films that are a thing unto their own and don’t belong in any genre. We don’t know how to make a straightforward comedy or a straightforward thriller or horror film. This is what we know how to do.

ON HIS SHOT SELECTIONÉ The Atlantic

There’s much more movement [in The Killing of a Sacred Deer] than in any of my previous films. I never think about it much, the visual aspect of it, until we start making the movie.

I don’t really think about it when we write.

When we finish, and I start putting the film together, and we pick the locations, I do think about that a lot. On this one, I just felt the need for the camera to be almost like another entity, in some ways. Like there’s another, otherworldly presence – very discreetly.

I thought of these high angles, or very low

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angles, with the camera following people around, creeping from below or above.

That was the initial feel that I thought was fitting to the whole story. And then you face actual hospitals, they have long corridors, so obviously you work with that. What you thought of as an initial approach takes shape because of your surroundings.

present in the moment, and not trying to get through particular ideas in the scene, or in the moment. That approach limits the resonance of scenes in general. So I do try to stay away, as much as possible, from having too many detailed discussions about what it is, and what the character is. Definitely no background story – all I know is what’s on the page.

ON HOW HE WORKS WITH ACTORSÉ

BFI

The Atlantic

I try not to say too many things with the actors. Not to analyse too many things about the film, because I think it’s better for the process. The way I work, and the material we work with, I think if you analyse too much and have too many specific ideas, it just becomes a little bit too superficial, and then performances might become too self-conscious and project relatively narrow things. Whereas I cherish ambiguity, and surprise, and actors that are

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ON AUDIENCE REACTIONÉ I always expect people to be torn when they see one of my films and divided in some way. And I’m sure that there are people who really like what we do and others who don’t. But it [is] great to meet people who appreciate what we are doing on some level and get recognised for it… I wouldn’t be making films if I just wanted to express some specific ideas, then I would be writing essays or something. I just think it’s interesting to start a dialogue.

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BREAKING WITH CONVENTION

THE FILMS OF YORGOS LANTHIMOS

From best friends to sacred deers, stuart barr delves into the ambiguous world of Yorgos Lanthimos

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don’t know how to make a straightforward film.” Writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos made this proclamation to The Independent during the promotion of The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017). It was not an idle remark. While his films play with genre tropes and conventions, they also defy easy categorisation. His films provoke and infuriate, repel and attract in equal measure. They make us laugh, and then make us feel queasy about laughing. They have such a complex and unique flavour, almost immediately you can tell you’re watching a Lanthimos film.

His feature-length directorial career began with My Best Friend (original title: O kalyteros mou filos, 2001), which he co-directed with star and writer Lakis Lazopoulos. A comedy

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of farce, it is perhaps Lanthimos’ most ‘straightforward’ movie, working more as a feature film vehicle for the hugely popular Greek comedian, Lazopoulos. Here, he plays a businessman who returns home unexpectedly to discover his wife and best friend in bed together. Rather than confront them, he slips out of the house and maintains the pretense that he is away on business, so as to discover more about their infidelity.

If My Best Friend is of the more conventional sex comedy ilk, Lanthimos’ solo directorial debut, Kinetta (2005), is far from typical. It begins in arresting fashion: a man (Aris Servetalis) calmly approaches a car accident as a ballad plays on the soundtrack.

Ignoring the prone body of the driver trapped in the wreckage, he reaches inside and ejects a cassette from the player, cutting off what was apparently the film’s opening title song.

Kinetta takes place in and around a Greek hotel during off-season, with three characters ineptly filming re-enactments of attacks on women. Unsurprisingly, the film confounded festival audiences on its release, but now, put into context, Kinetta is clearly the chrysalis from which the director’s consistent obsessions began to emerge.

Dogtooth (2009) was Lanthimos’ international breakthrough, the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with screenwriting partner, Efthymis Filippou. Where Kinetta

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His films provoke and infuriate, repel and attract. They make us laugh, and then make us feel queasy about laughing.

was sparse in dialogue and characterisation, Dogtooth was downright verbose. The film concerns an emotionally detached, manipulative father (Christos Stergioglou), who has raised two daughters and a son isolated from society at large. Home-schooled by their mother, they have received a deliberate miseducation that keeps them ignorant of, and unprepared for, the world outside. They have been taught alternate meanings for common words, so that although they sound completely comprehensible to each other, from the audience’s perspective, their dialogue is like a surreal stream of consciousness. When the eldest of the now adult children (Angeliki Papoulia) begins to defiantly push back against her father’s boundaries, the film introduces an acute sense of jeopardy with catastrophic change inevitably heading the family’s way.

In Alps (2011), Lanthimos took a premise that could have been mined for melodrama and sentiment – a group of people, called the

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Alps, impersonate the recently deceased to aid relatives through the grieving process – and instead used it for absurdist comedy. Right from the start, this group’s actions are not portrayed as altruistic, rather the ‘actors’ seem to be seeking to fill emotional voids of their own. Alps further developed Dogtooth’s strain of surrealism, with the troupe’s attempts to impersonate the recently deceased based on limited information leading to misunderstandings, social awkwardness and dark humour.

The Lobster (2015) was Lanthimos’ first film in English and marked something of a departure, not least in its application of surrealist comedy. The reality that characterises Lanthimos’ work in the Greek language – Kinetta, Dogtooth, and Alps – is contemporary Greece, with the surrealism born out of the absurd behavior of their characters. However, while the world of The Lobster may look very much like ours, it clearly isn’t.

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Here, the world is an emotional dystopia, where people are required to co-habit in binary romantic relationships and being unmarried is illegal. Courting becomes a tortuously formal process, based on finding arbitrarily shared characteristics. After reaching adulthood, or following the death of a partner, singles are taken to a hotel and required to endure a series of exercises designed to pair them off.

If at the end of their allotted period a partner has not been found, they are transformed into an animal.

Meanwhile, a resistance of ‘outlaw singles’ eke a survivalist existence outside the cities. An inverse of the couples’ mainstream lives, they have stringent rules of their own: romantic relationships are strictly prohibited and infractions dealt with harshly. The couples and singles groups are mirror images of each other, each as oppressive and prescriptive as the other.

Lanthimos brilliantly illustrates this through visual metaphor: in the hotel, the couples are forced to dance with each other, adults reduced to awkward teenagers; while the singles have ‘silent discos’, where they each wear headphones and dance alone together.

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David (Colin Farrell) moves from one faction to the other, somehow managing to become an outcast in both, by failing to find ‘love’ where it is demanded and finding it where it is outlawed. It’s a remarkable performance from Farrell, who sloughs off his film star skin to play a doughy, shuffling lead and demonstrates a real skill for the mannered enunciation required by Lanthimos and Filippou’s specific dialogue.

Farrell is equally good in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a film which took the idiosyncratic director closer to genre than ever before.

Inspired by Euripides’ play Iphigenia at Aulis, the film is a psychological horror story. Farrell plays Steven Murphy, a surgeon presented with a horrifying choice by Martin (Barry Keoghan), the son of a former patient who holds Murphy responsible for the death of his father after he died on Steven’s operating table. He inflicts a curse upon Murphy’s family:

his children, Kim and Bob (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic), and wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), will each in turn suffer paralysis followed by a slow death unless the surgeon elects to sacrifice one of them. As Martin chillingly explains to Anna, “It’s the only thing I can think of that’s close to justice.”

The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a near perfect distillation of Lanthimos’ previous themes. The claustrophobic locations that corralled characters of previous films are here transformed into their own bodies, as Martin’s ‘curse’ paralyses the Murphys both physically and mentally. Family bonds are scrutinised and subverted, as the Murphy family both accept the curse and then set about facing its consequences. Then there’s Martin’s clumsy attempt to match-make his mother (Alicia Silverstone) and Steven by having them watch Groundhog Day together. This excruciating scene highlights another Lanthimos motif, acts of intimacy being twisted into awkward shapes.

Whether this is a film that draws a line under a phase of Lanthimos’ career is unclear. Next up is The Favourite (2018), a bawdy period drama about two rival women’s quest for power in the Royal Court of 18th century England. It boasts an all-star cast, including Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman, Nicholas Hoult and Mark Gatiss. On paper, its story sounds somewhat conventional – perhaps because its the first film Lanthimos has directed from a script that he has not also co-written since My Best Friend. But when Lanthimos is involved, nothing is ever straightforward.

Stuart Barr is a freelance film and entertainment writer and critic

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AWA RDS A N D NOM INATIONS BAFTA NOMINATIONS 2016 Outstanding British Film, with Ceci Dempsey, Ed Guiney, Lee Magiday, Efthymis Filippou The Lobster OTHER

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Acade my Award s Nom i nati on s 2016 Writing (Original Screenplay), with Efthymis Filippou The Lobster 2011 Foreign Language Film Dogtooth briti sh i nde pe nde nt f i l m award s nominati on s 2015 Best Director; Best Screenplay, with Efthymis Filippou The Lobster canne s f i l m f e stival 2017 Best Screenplay win, tied with Lynne Ramsay; Palme d’Or nomination The Killing of a Sacred Deer 2015 Jury prize win; Palme d’Or nomination; Queer Palm special mention The Lobster 2009 Un Certain Regard win; Prix de la Jeunesse win Dogtooth

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YORGOS LANTHIMOS FILMOGRAPHY 2018 The Favourite 2017 The Killing of a Sacred Deer* 2015 The Lobster * 2013 Venice 70: Future Reloaded (short) 2011 Alps * 2009 Dogtooth * 2005 Kinetta * 2001 My Best Friend * Also co-writer or screenplay

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THE DAVID LEAN LECTURE

WITH THANKS

The Academy’s annual David Lean Lecture is generously funded

by The David Lean Foundation. The lecture series serves to continue the legacy of the great director David Lean, one of the founders of the British Film Academy (as it was then known) in 1947 and a continuing inspiration to many through his exceptional body of work.

Yorgos Lanthimos WITH SPECIAL THANKS The David Lean Foundation Matthew Bates

Previous David Lean Lectures have been given by: 2015 David O Russell 2014 Lone Scherfig 2014 Paul Greengrass 2012 Pedro Almodóvar 2011 Errol Morris 2010 Peter Weir 2009 Atom Egoyan 2008 Lean Centenary Celebration

2007 David Lynch 2006 Oliver Stone 2005 Woody Allen 2004 John Boorman 2003 Ken Loach 2002 Robert Altman 2001 Sydney Pollack

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Tonight’s lecture will be available to view at guru.bafta.org Join the conversation on Twitter: @BAFTAGuru #YorgosLanthimos EVENT PRODUCTION Film Programme Manager Mariayah Kaderbhai Event Producer Pelumi Akindude PR and Learning Campaigns Manager Niyi Akeju Director of Learning & New Talent Tim Hunter Learning & New Talent Officer Julia Carruthers Learning & New Talent Interns Abigail Teflise, Kambole Campbell, Lydia Heathcote Production Manager Ryan Doherty Photography Director Claire Rees Event Photographer Jamie Simonds BROCHURE Editor Toby Weidmann Design Joe Lawrence

Images courtesy of Element Pictures, Yorgos Lanthimos. Cover image by Despina Spyrou Although every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this publication, the Publishers cannot accept liability for errors or omissions.

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