Speaker
Yorgos Lanthimos
Appearances over time
1 episodes
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1
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Quotes & moments
Dogtooth was made for roughly €250,000 with about 10 friends, most of whom worked for free or for very little money.
Lanthimos directed at least one commercial a week for several years before moving into feature films, giving him a deep technical grounding.
Lanthimos made Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Bugonia consecutively without a break, which he believes contributed to Bugonia being his most stressful production.
Emma Stone has won two Academy Awards, one of which was for Poor Things directed by Lanthimos, who was given only the printed winner card.
An advertising boom fuelled by mobile phone companies and cheap bank loans inflated the Greek economy before the 2009 financial crisis, which Lanthimos credits with funding his early commercial work.
Dogtooth was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film but did not win; Lanthimos called even the nomination itself a win.
Lanthimos said he has never made a film without total creative freedom and has turned down Hollywood offers specifically to preserve that.
Lanthimos confirmed that the refugee situation on Greek islands including Lesbos is ongoing, noting the camps are now called 'hospitality centres' but conditions remain rough.
Lanthimos lost his mother at 17 and was largely raised without his father, formative experiences he links to his recurring cinematic suspicion of family structures.
Will Tracy, a Succession writer, wrote the Bugonia screenplay, which was already fully developed when Lanthimos came on board via Ari Aster's production company.
David Lynch saw Dogtooth exactly as Lanthimos intended — as a comedy. The tone critics dismiss as bleak or harrowing is, for Lanthimos, fundamentally funny, and Lynch's endorsement remains one of the highest validations he has received.
The opening montage of Dogtooth shows a tape machine playing redefined words — 'sea' means armchair, 'excursion' means toaster — a neat encapsulation of how the father controls his family by controlling language itself. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymis Philippou built these puzzles to establish the film's rules without explaining them.
Viewers who desperately wanted Dogtooth's protagonist to escape literally fabricated a detail — a screwdriver she was supposedly holding — that is not in the film. Lanthimos sees this as one of the great revelations about how audiences watch: they project their own desires onto ambiguous endings and then remember those projections as fact.
Emma Stone told an interviewer that Lanthimos is 'really miserable' while filming, and confirmed it has gotten worse over time, not better. Lanthimos admits it: he has complete creative freedom, which means every failure is entirely his own fault, and the weight of that is genuinely crushing even if it looks absurd from the outside.
Lanthimos never tells actors why their characters behave as they do. His reasoning is precise: if he and an actor agree on a motivation beforehand, they both unconsciously defend that choice even if it isn't working on screen. By staying silent, he preserves genuine critical distance and lets actors arrive at richer, more unpredictable interpretations.
Emma Stone revealed that Lanthimos sometimes demonstrates bad line readings in an affected accent to show her what not to do. Far from being insulting, the technique is now a source of in-joke intimacy between them — and Lanthimos admits he does it more often precisely because he knows it winds her up.
Before his debut features, Lanthimos spent years directing at least one commercial per week in Athens. Louis Theroux compares it to the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour rule: Lanthimos mastered technical filmmaking in the commercial world, then applied that accumulated expertise to making features with almost no money.
Lanthimos has always explored political themes obliquely — through family dynamics, power structures, and social rules. But with the refugee crisis ongoing in Greece, right-wing populism rising, and Gaza on his mind, he admits he is now seriously considering making something more directly political, and hasn't ruled out a documentary.
Lanthimos actively avoids reading positive criticism — it makes him uncomfortable and offers nothing new. He occasionally seeks out savage reviews because they can be instructive, especially when a critic's frustration reveals that they simply wanted a different kind of film. That distinction — wanting a different film versus saying a film is badly made — he finds genuinely fascinating.
Bugonia was the most stressful film Lanthimos has ever made, and the reason is straightforward: he made Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Bugonia consecutively without any break between them. By the third film, the accumulated pressure with no recovery time had become genuinely overwhelming.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won an Oscar for The Lives of Others, then went to Hollywood and made The Tourist — a film even its own creators acknowledge was a failure. Lanthimos uses this as his clearest illustration of what happens when an auteur surrenders control to studio machinery.
After Dogtooth's Oscar nomination, Lanthimos briefly and genuinely considered directing a Bourne film — a callback to his mainstream teenage tastes. He quickly realised that in Hollywood, studios want your name but not your vision, and that accepting would mean surrendering the creative freedom he had just established.
Bugonia follows two men — one of them autistic, a casting choice Lanthimos added himself — who kidnap a powerful Silicon Valley CEO convinced she is an alien. The film is less about conspiracy theory mechanics and more about power dynamics, emotional control, and the strange composure of those who hold power even when it is stripped from them.
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