{"id":311166,"date":"2026-03-03T16:01:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T16:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/311166\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T16:01:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T16:01:09","slug":"director-yorgos-lanthimos-stepping-back-from-movies-to-focus-on-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/311166\/","title":{"rendered":"Director Yorgos Lanthimos Stepping Back From Movies to Focus on Photography"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AYorgos Lanthimos <\/p>\n

Yorgos Lanthimos, one of Hollywood\u2019s most compelling directors<\/a>, says he\u2019s stepping back from making movies to focus on photography, \u201cfor now, at least\u201d. <\/p>\n

Lanthimos, an analog photographer, has already released a couple of photo books<\/a> and is about to open an exhibition in his hometown of Athens, Greece, at Onassis Stegi. <\/p>\n

\u201cTaking photos has become an important thing in my life other than filmmaking; it is so much freer,\u201d Lanthimos says. \u201cIt feels like there are fewer rules tied to conventional narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ATaken while shooting Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans. \"AThis landscape is part of a series Lanthimos has on Greece. <\/p>\n

Lanthimos studied photography while at film school and he would shoot photos behind the scenes of his early productions in the 2000s. But as he became successful, on-set photographers were hired as Lanthimos focused on directing. <\/p>\n

Lanthimos tells The New York Times<\/a> that he picked up his camera again while on the set of Poor Things<\/a> in Hungary in 2021. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m particularly interested in how landscapes are affected by humans, and the kind of contradictions that arise when these beautiful places are touched by the human hand \u2014 when they become a little bit strange,\u201d Lanthimos says. <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

Many of the photos he takes on set complement the movie he is making, and some feature the well-known actors he works with like Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, and Jesse Plemons. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we were changing a setup, I would shout \u2018Portrait time!\u2019\u201d Lanthimos tells The Times.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t find a good lab for the pictures in Budapest, so I thought: Why don\u2019t we just process the negatives ourselves? We built a little dark room in my hotel bathroom. I\u2019d go there after the shoot, and Emma [Stone] would help me process the film and top up the chemicals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs<\/a> is curated by Michael Mack and commissioned and produced by Onassis Stegi. It opens March 7 and runs until May 17. To coincide with the exhibition opening, Yorgos Lanthimos will launch his new photo book viscin (2026). <\/p>\n

\u201cYorgos Lanthimos is a singular talent in the use of a camera lens to build narratives, and this exhibition establishes his flourishing capacity to elicit emotional and intellectual leaps of faith beyond the frame of a still photograph,\u201d curator Michael Mack says. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe ongoing series of black-and-white works made in Greece away from his filmmaking practice marks a new departure, a turning inwards to a known landscape. Emerging within a long tradition of photography applied to document the man-altered landscape, it also reflects an era of self-reflection and of his advanced progress in developing his own language in photography.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Yorgos Lanthimos Yorgos Lanthimos, one of Hollywood\u2019s most compelling directors, says he\u2019s stepping back from making movies to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,20370,501,3936,169398,156,6669,4223,88969,111,139,69,149187,169399,88971],"class_list":{"0":"post-311166","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-athens","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-director","15":"tag-emmastone","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-greece","18":"tag-hollywood","19":"tag-motionpicture","20":"tag-new-zealand","21":"tag-newzealand","22":"tag-nz","23":"tag-photoexhibition","24":"tag-photoshow","25":"tag-yorgoslanthimos"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}