Just wanted to record a very compelling segment of a deep-dive article the NYT did on one of my favorite directors Yorgos Lanthimos - can read the full thing here. I love the idea that the director creates an atmosphere of almost zen-line now-ness wherein the actors can’t connect to anything to far ahead or behind them in their character’s arc. It’s “completely instinctual.” The actors go on to talk about how they have no sense of the work they’ve just done after the production is completed.
Really exciting that Lanthimos is delving into new territory with “The Favourite” in that he’s directing someone else’s script.
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The atmosphere he creates has more in common with an experimental theater troupe than a typical multimillion-dollar movie set. Lanthimos works to bring an actor’s instincts to the surface — and he shrugs off questions about a character’s psychological motivation, back story and context as effortlessly as he does questions about himself. “If you want to [expletive] annoy him, ask him character back-story questions,” Colin Farrell told me, laughing, of his first experience working with Lanthimos on the set of “The Lobster,” where Lanthimos refused to tell him what happened in the scene before the one they were filming. “He doesn’t really feel the need, you know. For him a story is born and dies between the first and last page.” Lanthimos is “trying to give space to mystery,” Ariane Labed, his wife, told me. “Yorgos does not explain things, even to the actors really, and they’re not used to that. But then they go through this experience, and they discover that having gaps in their characters’ journeys, they actually have more room for their own imaginations, [their] own mistakes, [their] own doubts, and I think that’s why actors are amazing in Yorgos’s films. They’re on the line.”