Louis Theroux opens this bonus episode with characteristic self-aware gusto, introducing Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos as a BAFTA and Golden Globe-winning visionary whose films include Poor Things, The Favourite, and the newly released Bugonia. He attempts short summaries of each — Poor Things as 'surrealist steampunk Frankenstein', The Favourite as the one with fisheye lenses and lobster-racing — before catching himself sounding like a bad film critic. He provides a quick tour of Lanthimos's wider catalogue, notes his coterie of collaborators including Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone, and previews the themes of the conversation: conspiracy theories, toxic relationships, and the emotional texture of his films. A warning about strong language closes the intro before the interview itself begins.

The episode proper begins with an unexpectedly warm exchange: Lanthimos admits he is a fan of the Louis Theroux Podcast, a confession Louis finds both flattering and slightly baffling given the gap in public profile. Louis then observes that Lanthimos has very few Instagram followers for someone of his stature, prompting Lanthimos to explain that he only recently created an official account after discovering a fake one had been circulating for years. The exchange sets up a dynamic of mutual respect laced with gentle comedy that runs throughout the episode.

Louis and Lanthimos spend an extended segment unpacking Dogtooth's internal world-building mechanics. Louis had rewatched the film the previous evening and leads Lanthimos through the opening montage where a tape recorder plays redefined words — 'sea' means armchair, 'excursion' means toaster — explaining how the parents suppress any curiosity that might make their grown children want to leave. ^{[1] — Yorgos Lanthimos "The opening montage of Dogtooth shows a tape machine playing redefined words — 'sea' means armchair, 'excursion' means toaster — a neat enc…" 05:20 Play} Lanthimos explains that he and co-writer Efthymis Philippou invented these details as practical puzzles the parents would have to solve, such as explaining the planes overhead by throwing model aeroplanes into the garden. He credits the film's genesis to observations about Mediterranean family culture, particularly in Greece, where adult children historically stayed with parents well into adulthood. David Lynch's characterisation of Dogtooth as 'a fantastic comedy' — cited by Louis — serves as the touchstone for the idea that the film has always been read wrong by critics who focus only on its darkness.

Louis raises the film's climactic sequence in which the oldest daughter, having knocked out her own tooth to fulfil the escape condition her father set, hides in the boot of a car — and nothing happens. Lanthimos describes how viewers desperate for her to escape began insisting she had been holding a screwdriver or hammer, an object that categorically does not appear in the film. ^{[1] — Yorgos Lanthimos "Viewers who desperately wanted Dogtooth's protagonist to escape literally fabricated a detail — a screwdriver she was supposedly holding — …" 12:20 Play} This fabrication, Lanthimos says, was one of the most revealing things he ever learned about how audiences watch: they project their emotional needs onto ambiguous frames and then remember those projections as fact. Louis draws a parallel to the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction — another beloved unresolved mystery — and the two discuss the A.O. Scott New York Times critique that accused Lanthimos of being 'as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it.' Lanthimos reframes provocation as a necessity rather than a flaw: how else do you move people's minds?

Lanthimos recalls that in the early years he bristled at being labelled provocative, finding the characterisation reductive. Over time, he came to understand that provocation is the mechanism by which art dislodges people from their habitual viewpoints — it is not a personality trait but a tool. He also addresses the inevitable divisiveness of his work: films that are different, relatively original, and culture-specific cannot possibly appeal to everyone across the globe, and wanting universal approval would be a sign that something had gone wrong. Lanthimos says he made peace with having detractors early on, and that this acceptance freed him considerably.

Lanthimos traces his path from a childhood watching Indiana Jones and Back to the Future through a small private film school in Athens where he discovered Tarkovsky, Bresson, Cassavetes, and Buñuel. He entered advertising because it was the only viable career adjacent to filmmaking in a country where the concept of being a filmmaker barely existed — a handful of established directors like Theo Angelopoulos had a lock on the Greek Film Center's resources. The advertising boom of the early 2000s, fuelled by mobile phone companies and cheap bank loans, gave Lanthimos years of intensive commercial work — sometimes a commercial a week — which Louis compares to the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour rule. ^{[1] — Yorgos Lanthimos "Before his debut features, Lanthimos spent years directing at least one commercial per week in Athens. Louis Theroux compares it to the Mal…" 20:05 Play} By the time Lanthimos and his friends decided to make Dogtooth with €250,000 and no infrastructure, he already had complete technical command of the craft.

Louis asks Lanthimos to contextualise the 2009 Greek financial crisis for listeners who may not remember it, prompting a brief but substantive exchange about its causes. Lanthimos points to the bubble of cheap bank loans, mortgage debt, and advertising spend from telecoms companies flooding the market as the core driver. Louis raises the popular narrative that overspending on the 2004 Athens Olympics played a role; Lanthimos partially endorses it but emphasises the broader credit bubble. The conversation highlights the irony that the same economic conditions which funded Lanthimos's commercial career were the precursors of the collapse, and that by the time the crisis hit, he had already moved his career to Britain.

Lanthimos recalls the disorientation that followed Dogtooth's international breakthrough — a film made with friends for almost no money suddenly attracting global festival attention and an Oscar nomination. He characterises the Hollywood meetings that followed as largely superficial, with studios eager to attach his name to projects while retaining full control themselves. Rather than finding validation in the noise, Lanthimos says he had a weird, almost negative reaction to the sudden attention: he felt the excitement around him was largely fake and that the system had little interest in what he actually wanted to make. This realisation set the course for everything that followed.

In one of the episode's most revealing exchanges, Lanthimos admits that after Dogtooth's Oscar nomination his agents asked what he wanted to do next, and he said — only half-joking — that he might make a Bourne film, a callback to his action-movie-watching teenage self. ^{[1] — Yorgos Lanthimos "After Dogtooth's Oscar nomination, Lanthimos briefly and genuinely considered directing a Bourne film — a callback to his mainstream teenag…" 27:00 Play} He didn't pursue it beyond a vague expression of interest, but the thought was real. Louis offers the example of a talented documentary filmmaker who was offered Dude, Where's My Car? 2, and Lanthimos raises the case of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the Oscar-winning director of The Lives of Others, who went to Hollywood and made The Tourist — a film even its creators acknowledge as a failure. The lesson Lanthimos drew was that studios want your name but not your vision: you can be the marquee director while they retain all meaningful creative authority. Having established total creative freedom over his own films, accepting those terms was never really a live option.

Louis surfaces a quote from Emma Stone confirming that Lanthimos grows more miserable on set with each successive film, a characterisation Lanthimos accepts without much resistance. He explains that the suffering is not physical hardship — it's the weight of responsibility that comes with total creative freedom: every decision is his, every failure is his, and unlike someone doing an objectively gruelling job, he chose this and cannot redirect blame elsewhere. He acknowledges the absurdity of calling filmmaking hard when compared to real-world suffering, but insists that within the logic of his own life and values, it genuinely is hard. The stress has compounded rather than diminished with experience.

Asked whether Bugonia was specifically his most stressful production, Lanthimos confirms it was, offering a concrete reason: he made three films back-to-back with no recovery time between them. Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, and Bugonia were produced in rapid succession, meaning the accumulated emotional and creative toll of each fed directly into the next without any pause for recuperation. Louis notes that this might be more forgivable if the films were mediocre, but all three are outstanding, prompting Lanthimos to accept the compliment with a sardonic observation about Louis's own earlier film-knowledge gaps undermining his credibility as a judge.

Louis and Lanthimos reconstruct Bugonia's journey from concept to screen. The screenplay, written by Will Tracy — a Succession writer — was fully developed by the time it reached Lanthimos via Ari Aster and Lars Knudsen's production company; Aster had been drawn to it by his love of the 2003 Korean original, Save the Green Planet!, which Lanthimos himself had never seen. Lanthimos's contributions were structural and casting-based rather than a rewrite: he cast Aidan, an autistic actor, in a role not written as autistic, feeling it enriched the film's internal logic and comedic texture. Louis describes Emma Stone's character as a hyper-composed Silicon Valley CEO — Sheryl Sandberg energy as alien — whose odd composure even while being kidnapped deliberately prevents the film from becoming trauma porn. Lanthimos confirms that he did not research real conspiracy theories because the screenplay was already strong enough.

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Louis asks whether Lanthimos reads his reviews, and the answer is: not the positive ones. Lanthimos finds praise uncomfortable and says he has little to gain from it — by the time a film is out, he has a general sense of how it is landing through promotion and awards season conversations. Bad reviews are different: he sometimes clicks on particularly savage ones to see whether they contain something truthful, and more often finds they reveal a viewer who wanted a different kind of film rather than a genuine diagnosis of failure. He also admits that too much critical analysis of his own work makes him uneasy, because he works instinctively and over-explanation of his methods risks undermining that process. ^{[1] — Yorgos Lanthimos "Lanthimos actively avoids reading positive criticism — it makes him uncomfortable and offers nothing new. He occasionally seeks out savage …" 40:00 Play}

The conversation broadens into a meditation on what filmmaking — and documentary-making — actually is as a practice. Lanthimos articulates the core paradox: you make thousands of decisions in the belief you are controlling the outcome, but the finished work is then released into a world of radically different people who will process it through entirely different lenses of experience, humour, culture, and personal history. The only honest response to this is to let go. Louis draws a direct parallel to his documentary work, where he frames his approach in terms of holding tensions — between empathy for troubling subjects and moral accountability — rather than resolving them into neat conclusions. Both men identify this productive irresolution as the thing that makes the work valuable.

The episode's richest stretch on craft examines how Lanthimos works with actors. He explains that his reluctance to explain character motivation is not mysticism or a power play — it is a precise strategy for preserving directorial objectivity. If he and an actor agree on a reason for a behaviour before shooting, they will both unconsciously defend that interpretation even when the camera reveals it is not working. By staying silent, Lanthimos keeps himself genuinely open to being surprised, and gives actors the freedom to arrive at richer, more personal interpretations than he could have scripted. ^{[1] — Yorgos Lanthimos "Lanthimos never tells actors why their characters behave as they do. His reasoning is precise: if he and an actor agree on a motivation bef…" 46:20 Play} He notes that Emma Stone no longer asks why — the implicit trust between them now runs deep enough that she brings her own internal logic to scenes without needing external sanction. He also discusses his infamous habit of performing deliberately bad line readings to show an actor what to avoid, a technique Stone has publicly said she finds irritating — which is precisely why he now does it more.

Louis asks what separates a great actor from a merely good one, and Lanthimos offers a deceptively simple heuristic: a truly great actor is still watchable in a bad film. Their quality is material-resistant. Lanthimos confesses that he watches Hollywood output — 'inadvertently', he says — partly to monitor the state of the industry and partly because it is occasionally where he spots performances that outrun their vehicle. He stops short of naming names in this context, but the principle becomes a framework for the conversation about whether he watches Marvel films (largely no), superhero reboots (the odd one), and the films of directors like Paul Thomas Anderson and Kelly Reichardt (enthusiastically yes).

The conversation sweeps through Lanthimos's sense of the current cinematic landscape, touching on Quentin Tarantino — held up as a model of omnivorous film consumption but also gently implicated in the recent Paul Dano controversy, which both men decline to pile onto. Lanthimos expresses his warmest enthusiasm for Kelly Reichardt, whose films he thinks are not nearly well-known enough, and for Paul Thomas Anderson, though he notes Anderson is popular enough not to need his endorsement. He speaks warmly about the Safdie brothers — Josh and Ben Safdie of Uncut Gems and Good Time — whom he has known since both Dogtooth and their debut Daddy Longlegs screened at the same festivals in 2009. He also references their recent solo projects: Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme and Ben Safdie's The Smashing Machine.

Louis handles the most personal section of the interview with care, noting that Lanthimos grew up without his father significantly present and lost his mother at 17, and has never become close to his father since. He asks whether Lanthimos has a suspicion of family life, and Lanthimos offers a measured but honest 'I guess so.' He acknowledges that these experiences may have seeded something like Dogtooth — a film about the violence of family control — and that they inform his decision not to have children, though he also cites the state of the world as a separate reason. The admission is rare in its directness from a filmmaker who usually defers such questions back to the work.

The final section opens onto Lanthimos's political anxieties. He names the refugee situation on Greek islands — still ongoing, the camps now rebranded as 'hospitality centres' — Gaza, and the global rise of right-wing populism as his top concerns. ^{[1] — Yorgos Lanthimos "Lanthimos has always explored political themes obliquely — through family dynamics, power structures, and social rules. But with the refuge…" 1:02:40 Play} Louis notes that Lanthimos's films have always been political in an oblique, structural way — exploring power, control, and social conformity — but Lanthimos himself says he is now seriously questioning whether he needs to address these things more directly, and has not ruled out making a documentary. Louis then records a brief solo outro monologue reflecting on the interview: he admits he was occasionally out of his depth (Lanthimos called him 'illiterate' for confusing Daddy Longlegs with Longlegs), discusses the positive and negative reception of his own recent Netflix film Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, and plugs Lanthimos's 2026 photography exhibition at the Onassis Foundation in Athens. Credits follow.