In any year, some successful directors carve out artistic identities through a distinctive visual vocabulary, or by repeatedly mining particular themes. But it’s rare, even among highly acclaimed filmmakers, for a director to establish a new cinematic language. Yorgos Lanthimos is on his way to doing just that.
The Greek-born director will be honored Jan. 5 with PvNew’s Creative Impact in Directing Award for his stirring body of work, which includes his latest effort, “Poor Things.” Star Emma Stone will present Lanthimos with the award during PvNew’s annual Directors to Watch and Creative Impact Awards brunch at the Palm Springs Intl. Film Festival.
From psychological thrillers to absurdist comedies, Lanthimos’ movies all tend to land as social commentary, steeped in both keen observation and probing curiosity about the world. They exude social currency and emotional resonance, even as they plumb strange, sometimes anachronistic, sometimes parallel worlds where different rules and logic can apply.
Following its Venice Film Festival premiere, where it picked up the Golden Lion, “Poor Things” has been named to both the AFI and National Board of Review lists of the year’s Top 10 films, and it recently received seven Golden Globe nominations, including musical or comedy film and director. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel of the same name and anchored by a bravura turn from Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, the film is a singular work, a wickedly funny fairy tale riff on Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” that recasts it as a warped, sexually charged coming-of-age story.
“I’d never read anything like it before, and I was drawn to the characters, the themes, the humor and the complexity of it,” says Lanthimos. “I was even drawn to it visually because Alasdair was also a painter and did his own illustrations. Immediately you interpret the book as something very visual and complex.”
It was a project more than a decade in the making. Lanthimos first met with Gray in the author’s hometown of Glasgow in 2012; after spending a day together, Gray gave Lanthimos his blessing to tackle “Poor Things,” although he died before the movie made its debut.
The challenges of the material proved considerable. “I explored options with other producers, but it didn’t go anywhere,” Lanthimos says. “A story about a woman’s freedom in all aspects of society, humanity, or however you want to put it, wasn’t something that interested people a lot.
“I think some people found it a little too much in terms of Bella’s freedom around sexuality,” he continues. “The setup itself — a grown woman with the brain of a child — people didn’t know how to respond to it.” But he believes we’ve come a long way since then, “and it opened up the way to being able to tell stories like this.”
“Poor Things” isn’t the director’s first film set against a historical backdrop. “The Favourite,” a sav- agely amusing female love triangle that marked Stone’s first collaboration with the director, took place in the 18th century court of England’s Queen Anne (Olivia Colman).
The film was a major awards season player, racking up 10 Acad- emy Award nominations and a trophy for Colman, and grossed $96 million at the global box office. The movie’s success helped solidify Lanthimos as a name-brand auteur with breakout potential — something his previous work had hinted at.
“Dogtooth” gave Lanthimos an international foothold. The film won the top Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2009 and went on to secure an Oscar nomination for foreign language film. His next effort, “Alps,” played in competition in Venice, where it won an award for its screenplay.
His first two films in English, 2015’s “The Lobster” and 2017’s “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” each made splashy debuts at Cannes. With them, Lanthimos graduated to a major arthouse player — and earned a litany of star collaborators who praise his talent.
“I saw ‘Dogtooth’ and was so blown away by how the preposterous became almost banal, but no less riveting and fearsome for it,” says Colin Farrell, who starred in “The Lobster” and “Sacred Deer.” “All the worlds he’s created since are as demented as they are unique, but for me, there’s always the truth of some deeply human essence at play: loneliness, control, abandon, fear, death, powerlessness and fate.
“In ‘Poor Things’ it’s empowerment — not to distill it to one theme, he’d hate that — a kaleidoscopic world of misadventure and one beautiful spirit finding her joy and truth in that place where the carnal meets the spirit, and abandon becomes the journey home,” he continues, calling Lanthimos a visual master.
His next effort will be “Kinds of Kindness,” an anthology film re-teaming him with distributor Searchlight Pictures. Lanthimos is in post-production now with longtime editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis on what feels poised to likely to make a high-profile bow on the festival circuit later this year.
Lanthimos doesn’t have a particularly fixed methodology, according to the filmmaker himself. “I look at the world and I notice things that I’m interested in exploring, to shine a light on and let them reveal whatever it is beyond the surface,” he explains. “So I don’t start with a default attitude or approach — or at least I try not to.”
