Interview (Written): Yorgos Lanthimos
The co-writer/director of the movie “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”.
The co-writer/director of the movie “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”.
The Greece native Yorgos Lanthimos received a 2016 Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for the movie he co-wrote (with Efthymis Filippou) and directed The Lobster. This year, his latest movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer — also co-written with Filippou — has opened to great acclaim.
IMDb plot summary: Steven, a charismatic surgeon, is forced to make an unthinkable sacrifice after his life starts to fall apart, when the behavior of a teenage boy he has taken under his wing turns sinister.
In this Atlantic interview, Lanthimos talks about Sacred Deer as well as his screenwriting and filmmaking process:
David Sims: I have to tell you, I saw the film a few days ago, and I had very strange dreams that night.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Good, so we went straight to the subconscious, then.
Sims: Did you first come to The Killing of a Sacred Deer thinking about this terrible choice Colin Farrell’s character has to make?
Lanthimos: I think the initial thoughts were around the oddity of a very young person (Martin) trying to get revenge over something an older person has done. And that kind of dynamic, that a teenager can actually terrorize someone grown-up and mature. And, also, the themes of justice and the ambiguity of the situation we choose to put [Farrell’s] character in. He’s a doctor, and whether or not there was any fault, that kind of ambiguity, leading into impossible questions and dilemmas. It’s hard to say one particular thing that sparked the idea, because I work very closely with Efthymis [Filippou]; we write the scripts together, and it’s mostly a dialogue. We start discussing a situation, one says one thing, one says another thing, and it just progresses around ideas we’re interested in.
Sims: That first shot of The Killing of a Sacred Deer, of open-heart surgery on an operating table, really announces the film in a particular way. What were you thinking when you decided to open the film that way?
Lanthimos: I wasn’t thinking, really. [Laughs.] It just felt right — a film about a heart surgeon opens with a heart. And as you get into it, you think about the most impactful way of doing that, and the simplest way, at the same time. At the beginning, we wrote this scene that was much more elaborate, with many shots of the doctors, and scalpels, and the machines in the operating theater. But we shot the actual operation first, the shot that is in the film, a few days before principal photography started, because it took a lot of preparation, and there’s a lot of protocol, and everything had to be sterilized. It was the first shot we did, it was the first shot of the film, and as soon as I saw it I just felt that I didn’t need to shoot anything else.
A trailer for the movie:
For the rest of the interview, go here.