After 'The Favourite,' Yorgos Lanthimos could do anything. He went wilder than ever
LOS ANGELES — In 2010, following the success of his breakout film, "Dogtooth," Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos came to a fork in the road.
A bizarre, absurdist dark comedy about three siblings kept confined at home by their controlling father, "Dogtooth" had stunned audiences at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival with its deadpan perversity, earning an Oscar nomination for foreign language feature. Always on the lookout for exciting new talent, Hollywood producers, agents and executives wanted to see what Lanthimos, who'd made a handful of eccentric features and shorts in his native language, was all about. So the director flew to Los Angeles to make the rounds.
It was an awkward fit.
"It just felt strange," the 50-year-old Lanthimos, who is a connoisseur of strangeness, recalled on a recent rainy morning in L.A. "People want to meet you because the film is nominated. But do they really?"
Eventually, his reservations got the upper hand. "I was toying with the idea of maybe finding a project," he says. "But when it came down to seriously consider it, I always had my own stuff. And as time went by, I realized I just can't make anything without having total creative freedom."
While another director might have leveraged the career heat to try to sign onto a franchise, Lanthimos continued to was an arguably even weirder comedy set in a dystopian near future in which single people are forced to find romantic partners to avoid being turned into animals. Instead of bending to suit Hollywood, Lanthimos let Hollywood come to him, as stars like Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Olivia Colman and Emma Stone eagerly signed on for the chance to work with the audacious, boundary-pushing filmmaker.
