Nikos Papatakis: The director Yorgos Lanthimos is “obsessed” with
Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the most obsession-worthy directors working today. The Greek filmmaker started out on sets amidst dancers and thespians, honing a distinctive dramatic style that would define his own visual storytelling. With the dawn of the new century, he made a shift into feature filmmaking that would become an essential part of the contemporary cinephile’s canon.
Between the disturbing tale of 2009’s Dogtooth, the uncomfortably funny satire of The Lobster, and the modern tragedy of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos set himself apart from other directors. His name guaranteed transgressive subject matter delivered through eerily straightforward dialogue and clean cinematography, the blend of which quickly endeared itself to a new crop of film fans.
In 2018, Lanthimos took the style he had established for himself and softened it a little for The Favourite. Adopting a period setting and a slightly less off-putting style, Lanthimos secured a wider audience and geared up for his most fantastical offering yet. Released late last year in the United States, Poor Things marks the pinnacle of Lanthimos’ cinematic scope and strangeness so far, following Bella Baxter across a retrofuturist vision of Europe.
With not even ten feature films to his name, Lanthimos has proven his place as one of the most innovative directors working today, his popularity sparking wider discussions of a “Greek weird wave” of cinema. “People feel the need to identify certain periods, countries, and territories in cinema,” Lanthimos observed during a conversation with Bomb Magazine.
“I don’t know the root of the desire to discover something like a wave or a movement,” he added. “Certainly the filmmakers themselves cannot identify it. We just make the films we want to make and try to progress, and then it’s the other people’s job to speak about that.”
Rather than considering his own work and that of his peers as a movement, Lanthimos was more keen to share delight at the increasing number of films and filmmakers coming out of his home country. “But what I think is very positive is that there are many more films being made in Greece now with the advance of technology and thanks to the sudden attention to Greek films,” he added.
“I think there are just very distinct filmmakers in Greece, each with their own unique voice,” he concluded before shouting out one of them in particular – the late Ethiopian-Greek filmmaker Nikos Papatakis. Lanthimos admitted his obsession with the director and deemed him “quite a figure”.
Papatakis had an impressive career which included collaborations with John Cassavetes and six of his own feature films. Infused with as much drama, surrealism and satire as his own output, it’s easy to see why Lanthimos is such a fan.
