A biography for Yorgos Lanthimoshasn’t been written yet.
“I work very closely with my co-writer, Efthimis Filippou. Ideas either start from him or me, and then the other one develops it, and it's a constant conversation.”
“I make films to explore concepts and raise questions, not tell the audience what to think.”
“The best way to watch a film is to not know anything about the person who made it.”
“The actors bring their own stuff and thoughts, and most of the time, I don't want to know what they are. It allows me to have more distance and observe what they're doing without having the knowledge of what they have in their minds, so I can see clearly how that feels to me.”
“Most acting is very melodramatic. It's not what you see in people.”
“If you use music boldly at the front of a scene, it creates another level.”
“I always try and decide what I'm interested in, and I just do that.”
“I want all the mistakes to be mine, and I want to take responsibility for everything even if I fail. Whatever the project is, I need to have the final say.”
“I think I do things that are more common in theatre.”
“It's hard not to be political.”
“The most important thing is to allow gaps and openings for people to make up their own minds - I don't want my film to be pretending to have one important truth to tell anyone.”
“When I look at my films, all I see is everything that went wrong.”
“I will not become analytical about my work.”
“The way I work, and the material we work with, I think if you analyze 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.”
“Uncertainty helps keep actors on edge.”
“By employing a certain sense of humor, you essentially get more serious about things and show conflict more effectively than if you were overly dramatic or only violent because that's a one-way approach that just forces audiences to watch something appalling.”
“The first time I was paid was with 'The Lobster,' because with the Greek films, we just had to pay ourselves - work for free while making commercials in order to survive.”
“I am not interested in representing reality. Actually, I am interested in representing reality, but that doesn't mean a naturalistic approach, which I think is kind of impossible.”
“All of us have been through relationships; there have been periods of time when we've been single. It's something that everyone experiences. It's a matter of making that observation and then start to ask questions about it: Why is it like that? And why do we feel that? And why are we organized this way? Isn't there any other way?”
“I feel kind of offended when I watch films, and everything is explained to me - you know, laying out how I should feel from one scene to the next.”