Yorgos Lanthimos is known for his distinctive visual style, transporting us to unique worlds in his films The Favourite, Poor Things, and most recently, Bugonia. But it’s not only moving pictures that he loves. The Greek auteur has developed a passion for still photography, which he now uses to compliment and contrast his film work. He estimates that he’s amassed around 70 or 80 cameras. “I guess there is a little bit of an addiction thing there,” he says with a laugh. “But I love them. Especially when you’re traveling, it’s always a struggle [to decide] how many and which ones [to take].”
Lanthimos started taking photos on film sets back when he was working on smaller movies and there wasn’t a budget for a behind-the-scenes photographer. Then he discovered it was an artistic endeavor that could be in conversation with his filmmaking. “I started concentrating mostly on making images that were not a representation of the film but what was around it, or moments in between, shooting in black and white,” he says.
In Budapest, while filming the Oscar-winning Poor Things, Lanthimos set up his own darkroom, where he and his frequent star Emma Stone could develop photos. “We just got a huge kick out of it,” he says. He did the same while filming Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans, and photos from both those shoots were featured in two photography books, along with an exhibit, “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs,” in Los Angeles earlier this year.
For Lanthimos, photography is a way to temporarily escape the intensity of a film shoot. “You don’t have to think about all the stuff that is going wrong. Or if you’re waiting around for something, then you can do something creative,” he says. “So it does relieve some of the stress, which is a lot on a film set.”
Though Lanthimos says Stone would rather hang out in the darkroom than take photos herself, the director did teach Bugonia star Jesse Plemons about photography on the set of Kinds of Kindness. “Jesse’s really good at it. He shows me a lot of his family and his kids,” says Lanthimos. “He takes really beautiful pictures.” On Bugonia, he also gave writer Will Tracy the photography bug. “I gave him this little camera, and he got very excited,” says Lanthimos. “And then he went back to New York and he started asking me all those questions.”
