Why You Won't See The Lobster Director Making A Generic Genre Film

The Lobster is a film about love and relationships. But it sure ain't a rom-com. Instead, it's the latest film from Yorgos Lanthimos, the maker of the masterful, mystifying, horrifying Dogtooth and prime export of the Greek weird wave. It marks the 42-year-old filmmaker's English-language debut, shot on location in Ireland with a cast including Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, John C Reilly, Ben Whishaw, and Lea Seydoux. It takes place in a near-future — or alternate reality, really — in which single people are rounded up in a rural hotel and given 45 days to find a mate. If they fail, they're turned into animals, and released into the wild.

"We felt The Lobster demanded a complete world, its own world, because it's a larger, universal theme," says Lanthimos, this collective 'we' he and co-writer Efthimis Filippou, with whom he co-wrote Dogtooth and 2011's Alps. "We wanted to do something about relationships and love, but push the initial idea to extremes, because we're not very interested in just representing reality on film."

Like all Lanthimos' films, it's delivered with absurdist deadpan, and functions as open-ended parable. "The ending is loose enough that it allows people to discover whether they're optimistic about love or pessimistic," Lanthimos says. "I always try to construct my films in a way where people are asked to think about the themes, and form their own opinions. None of these films should be taken a single way."

"I always try to construct my films in a way where people are asked to think about the themes, and form their own opinions."

This began with Lanthimos' first film, 2005's Kinetta, which was little-seen upon its release. But his career changed with Dogtooth, which won two prizes at Cannes in 2009 and received an Oscar nomination in 2010. All of which was a surprise to Lanthimos. "It was a very small film, [so] the most that I could hope for would be that it would show in Greece, and maybe a few film festivals," Lanthimos says. "I guess there are some artworks that just resonate with people. And chance plays a huge part, so does being in the right place at the right time. The 'why' of it is not something you could easily identify."

He's also unwilling to attribute a 'why' to the rise of the Greek weird wave, and dismisses the popular notion that it was an artistic response to local economic meltdown. Growing up in Athens, Lanthimos was obsessed with '70s American cinema (Cassevetes, Scorsese, Coppola) and went to film school, but never thought filmmaking a plausible career. Dogtooth was made from Lanthimos' own savings, from money he earnt directing commercials. "There was no structure to support this kind of filmmaking," Lanthimos recounts, "but that way of making films with friends is also incredibly positive: you're just doing it because you love films, and you can obviously do whatever you want."

After finishing Alps, Lanthimos moved to London, in part because he hoped to make films with more resources behind them. With its movie stars and English dialogue, The Lobster will surely be his most widely-seen film, but it's a sure sign that Lanthimos's signature style isn't going anywhere, no matter what commercial opportunities come his way. "Making a genre film that's straight-up generic, that's something I'd never do," Lanthimos says. "But if I was allowed to do a big genre film with my own approach? Yeah, sure! Why not?"