Shaping up to be one of the most fruitful director-actor pairings of the last few years, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone collaborated for the first time with 2018’s The Favourite. They followed it up with the 30-minute film Bleat, which will finally hit North American shores at the 61st New York Film Festival next month, followed by Poor Things, which Stone also produced and is earning the most acclaim of their respective careers following its Venice and Telluride premieres. For their fourth outing they shot the anthology feature AND last year co-starring Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Joe Alwyn, which will get a release in 2024. Now, a fifth collaboration has been unveiled.
Speaking to Cineuropa, Lanthimos revealed he directed a new movie in secret, this time returning to his native land of Greece. Led by Emma Stone and shot by Robbie Ryan (The Favourite, Poor Things), he didn’t reveal much about the untitled project, only that it was “much simpler and very different in comparison to Poor Things because that story needed that particular style.” (And for those thinking it may be misinterpreted he was discussing AND, that film was shot in New Orleans––not Greece.) Here’s hoping we get more details soon on the project, which sounds like a return to a Dogtooth-esque scope, as Poor Things tours the fall festivals ahead of a December release.
Luke Hicks said in his Poor Things review, “Screenwriter Tony McNamara (in his second collaboration with Lanthimos and third-in-a-row with Stone) deserves a heap of praise for the gradual development of Bella’s diction, the early phases of linguistic chaos showcasing a mastery over precise language in the lack thereof. Sentence construction is all over the place, but terminology is more set at times. For example, she calls sex ‘furious jumping’ the whole time, a callback to the misnaming of things in Lanthimos’s Dogtooth protagonists. But the dizzying words would be nothing without Stone, whose explosiveness, attention to detail, and humanization of an otherwise totally outlandish character brings them to life in a fearless, side-splitting, all-consuming performance. Notice how her walk changes and keeps changing beyond the obvious, or how she mathematically evolves the composure in her voice over time while having to play in nearly every scene. As one of four lead producers, she knew the project inside and out; it shows.”