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TThirteen years ago, Yorgos Lanthimos directed a micro-budget film titled Kinetta. Filmed by hand, it features three actors walking around hotels and hospitals in a dilapidated Greek coastal town, sometimes playing battle scenes resembling repetitions of avant-garde choreography. There was hardly dialogue, except when a character barking detailed instructions from others. Oh, and there was the occasional karting sequence. Even for those of us who love our extremely unfathomable art films, Kinetta was a big challenge.
At the time, you might have concluded that Lanthimos was the least likely director to be. The least likely to attract actors of the starry caliber Nicole Kidman, Colin Farrell, Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz. This is probably not one of the names that appear the soonest when filmmakers talk about exciting new developments in Europe. The least likely to make a sumptuous period piece that constitutes a scabrous and subversive addition to the prestigious lineage of costumes of Tom Jones, The designer's contract and Barry Lyndon. And the least likely to be sitting in a large and majestic reception hall – green, golden and imposing Georgian – at the Merrion Hotel Dublin to discuss the film in question, The favourite.
Located in England in the early 1700s, during the reign of Queen Anne, The favourite is a behind-the-scenes story of female desire and ambition, filmed largely in the authentic vastness of Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, richly furnished with stunning gowns and dizzying wigs, and featuring a prominent cast led by Colman, Weisz and Emma Stone. Since her premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September, where Colman's performance as Anne has earned her the Best Actress award, the film has been crowned with praise; last week, he was nominated for five Golden Globes and landed a record 10 titles at the UK Independent Film Awards, including Best Director for Lanthimos.
How the hell did Lanthimos get Kinetta for that? He gently bypasses the issue by pointing out that he had never expected to make movies.
Watch a trailer of The Favorite.
"In Greece," he says, "you can not really say, I'm going to become a filmmaker." A 15-year-old boy in Greece in the 80s and 90s? There was nothing like it. The idea was so unthinkable, he says, that he had not even considered it when registering for a film school; he was just hoping to do commercials. "I had the impression that it would be a real job, instead of being in marketing or something of the sort. I said to myself: it will not be cinema, but it will be close. "
In the end, Lanthimos was not close to the cinema but occupied a place of choice on the map of the contemporary author. Since his extraordinary second feature, Tooth of dog (2009), Lanthimos was known for his overflowing imagination and sometimes aggressive nonsense. In this brutal but sinister comic book, a despotic father keeps his adult children in prison at home and consistently misinformed about the outside world and the meaning of everyday words. The first film of Lanthimos in English, Lobster (2015), which has had great success in the performing arts, is in a world where singles must find a partner or be transformed into animals. His follow-up, The killing of a sacred deer (2017) is a bloody and ruthless revenge drama, steeped in classic mythology – and in which the characters continue to have long banal discussions about wristwatches.
On the other hand, The favourite is less disturbing than malicious, even if it is dark too, and very moving. On the basis of the facts, it is the story of two women fighting for the attention of Queen Anne – the established confidante Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) and her cousin Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), a unfamiliar stranger who came to replace her the consideration of the queen (and, suggests the film, in bed). But it's a film that scoffs at your expectations of vintage cinema: the witty and salacious scenario of Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara is scandalously embellished with non sequencers and anachronisms ("professional suicide", " no pressure "). Then come the strangely athletic dance sequences, various duck and pomegranate activities, and a rabbit fence that tilts the film into a totally different zone of poetic strangeness.
Lanthimos has been proposed the project by the producers This Dempsey and Ed Guiney, based respectively in the United Kingdom and Ireland; it was during The favourite was developing that he showed them his plan for Lobsterand he ended up doing this movie and then The killing of a sacred deerbefore The favourite. Dempsey had already developed Deborah Davis' original screenplay for The favourite for 10 years. As Guiney tells me, Lanthimos was approached with the force of Tooth of dog, especially because of his gift for claustrophobic scenarios in which "you put a small group of people in a greenhouse situation and watch them react".
Lanthimos, 45, has a soft voice and looks a bit like a bear – more stuffed than a grizzly bear – with a soft, slightly impassive face that does not betray too much. Cordial but discreetly reserved, he hardly looks like an international maestro of the extreme. Wearing beige trousers and a navy blue jacket, he looks more like a conservative-minded academic – the disarming genre whose work is centered on the themes of transgression, violence and madness.
When he read for the first time The favouriteLanthimos said in impeccable English, he knew nothing of the moments that he was portraying. It was not the period that interested her, but the story: "It was just reading about these people, these women, their relationships, their personal story, especially that of Anne, and what she has lived as a person ". (She suffered from chronic illnesses and lost 17 children.) He was also fascinated by the fact that the drama was centered on three women. "I can not pretend that I thought I needed more women represented in a certain way, it was just an instinctive thing. I was interested in what I had not seen very often. "
The favourite is a bold portrayal of feminine power, in which the affective and sexual bonds of women between them move the gears of history as much as the political maneuvers of men. Did Lanthimos fear that the present moment is a delicate moment for a man who makes a film about women that focuses on their sexual desires, and often subjects them to a comic treatment that could be considered cruel, even sadistic?
"At first, I was scared, he admits, and I think I overcame that fear by saying," It does not matter if they're women. " It's interesting for that reason, but it should be done as if it was not a problem. I am a man and I am going to tell this story about these women, and I do not know anything about it, but if they are presented as human beings, there is no judgment. "
A thing The favourite decisively consolidates Lanthimos' status as a distinctive director of actors. Where his previous work favored a highly stylized and anti-realist play of actors, he has a much more cowardly and comical exuberance, culminating in a set of daring performances, most notably Nicholas Hoult as a man-of-war. State viperian. Colman and Weisz – both of whom also appeared in Lobster – are superb, which is not surprising. The revelation is Emma Stone, whose extraordinary range of facial reactions as an ingenuous conspirator leads her into a new world of comically rigorous comics, and – you thought – coming out of the comfort zone of an artist Hollywood.
"I do not think she's still out of her comfort zone – she has a lot of room there, I'm not sure how I knew it, but I knew it a little bit," says Lanthimos, who attached Stone to the role even before his tour de force La La Land. "She was very confident from the start – physically, she immediately participated in the rehearsals."
Ah, the rehearsals. Lanthimos has gained notoriety for an unusual approach to rehearsals and auditions. Actors in The favourite talked about asking them to say their lines, panting as if they were giving birth, or struggling mentally with invisible force fields. About your method … I ask, and Lanthimos laughs. "I think I do things that are more common in the theater." Movies usually skimp on rehearsals, he says, but The favourite he had three weeks to follow his own method, which involves physical exercises. For example, he will ask six cast members to hold hands and begin to move through the rehearsal space: "They are entangled and have to find a way to break free, and while they are in the room. they do it, they could do their lines are distorted. This allows him, he says, "to infuse scenes and actors with an unpredictability that I find real in real life, but that does not exist when you sit down and internalize a scene or a movie. role".
This physiognomy has always been part of Lanthimos' work, including occasional forays into the theater. Pictures from his 2011 production of the National Theater of Greece Platonov Looks like no Chekhov performance you've ever seen: it's muscled movements on a funeral song from Bee Gees' Deep Is Your Love. Passionate about modern dance theater, the director particularly admires choreographers such as Maguy Marin, Sasha Waltz and Dimitris Papaioannou, a partner of the company Pina Bausch.
Tooth of dog and his eccentric follow-up, Alps, has drawn the attention of Lanthimos as the standard bearer of what has been dubbed the "strange wave" of Greece – a generation of filmmakers who all make very different works that are sometimes, but not always, anti-realistic, and some more unusual than others, although they share a proudly anti-commercial ideology. His best-known contemporary is author-director Athina Rachel Tsangari; she produced Tooth of dog and Alps, while Lanthimos acted and produced his magnificent freaky Attenberg (2010), a film that sometimes suggested Jean-Luc Godard au noir on a series of sketches by Monty Python.
Critics have puzzled over the emergence of the wave, with some identifying it as a response to the Greek economic crisis, with a philosophy of nothing to lose that liberates the creative imagination. In reality, says Lanthimos, the participants had little in common if it was "we were able to access a lot of art cinema, more than previous generations. But it is obvious that there is a cultural element: it may be Mediterranean, but there is a culture more open to certain things, with fewer restrictions and taboos, which may not be the case. Anglo-Saxons and other cultures. "
But how did Lanthimos's imagination become so strange? There is nothing extraordinary about watching movies: he grew up on John Hughes, Bruce Lee and Indiana Jones before discovering Tarkovsky, Cassavetes … the usual canon. What was he reading at the age of the training? "Kafka, Beckett, Celine, normal stuff. Camus, Dostoevsky … "He was also a fan of British playwright Sarah Kane: The love of Phaedrus, classic myth told in a modern unvarnished language, he was inspired by the tone of The favourite. As for reading today, he gives a tired little laugh. "I do not have time to read a lot. I'm trying to read Brothers Karamazov again, for a year now – I'm coming half way, 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 raised by his mother after the separation of his parents. She died when he was 17, how much he had to take care of himself, although he had a close aunt. It must have been a seismic experience for him, but he understates it. "You just have to take care of it and you do not really think about it because you have to find work, you have to pay your rent, you have to study. I guess it had a huge impact on me, but it was very unconscious – you keep going, and all of a sudden you're 24 years old and you're doing something else. "
What he was doing at the time, it was studies – early marketing, before moving to film – and then advertising with Efthymis Filippou, whom he had met in an agency and who had become his long-term co-author. Among their ads, there were "those strange little movies about people taking their work home – like a butcher in the subway, all covered in blood, with his hatchet, and people start shouting".
Made on tight budgets, Kinetta and the other Greek films of Lathimos taught him to work economically, and he sticks to this principle. To this day, he avoids artificial light and does not use makeup – unless, as in The favouritethe actors play characters who are themselves obviously covered with powder and red.
According to Lanthimos, the need to advertise for a living meant that filmmaking was still "like a hobby". International attention persuaded him that it was time to make a fresh start. Making a decision that he now says as being "a bit naive," he moved to London in 2011, before no specific project was in place. "It was not as easy as I thought."
Lanthimos now lives in North London with his wife, Ariane Labed, whom he met while she was playing Attenberg: she has since played in Alps and Lobster, as well as in mainstream productions such as Assassin's Creedand play a leading role in the French art film at sea Fidelio: Alice's Journey. Originally a theater performer, Labed arrived in Greece with his theater company and ended up staying. "She was born in Greece, but she is French and she lived in Germany. She is a little nomadic. "
What do Lanthimos and Labed think of living in the United Kingdom on the eve of Brexit? "We are quite puzzled about this and we talk a lot about it – whether we should stay in such a lively place. Unfortunately, the situation is dark in many European countries. So, what do you do – go from one to the other depending on the best climate situation? "
While The favourite Lanthimos can expect to remain known for a while as an entertainment specialist in difficult, sometimes scary places, a writer regularly quoted alongside Michael Haneke, a controversial man Lars von Trier. He never wants to shock, he insists, but when I use the word "provocative," he nods thoughtfully.
"Provocative … I was defensive about it, but in the end, I realized that it was all right, that's what we're trying to do: to bring about the reflection and discussion and, you know, make people think differently, I'm interested in playing with what they think is the norm. "
The favourite was released on January 1
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