With Teeth
Tara Brady talks to Greek director Yorgos LANTHIM about his shocking and riveting new film Dogtooth, which caused quite a stir at Cannes.
Tara Brady, 27 Apr 2010
Dogtooth, an astonishing new work from Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, re-imagines the family unit for a post-Fritzl era. The film, a major award winner at Cannes and the recent Dublin International Film Festival, is by turns, shocking, riveting, repugnant and very, very funny. Recently, we caught up with the writer-director to ask him how on earth one comes up with a movie like this.
Where did the initial idea come from?
It started with me just wondering about the family unit and how it might change in the future. Will it become extinct? Will it always be necessary to raise children in the way we do now? The family unit is unquestionably changing. So will there be people out there who are so desperate to hang on to the traditional notion of the family that they will do anything to maintain that structure, including shutting out the outside world?
They speak in their own language where telephone means salt; how did you devise that?
Mostly, the language came about as a solution to a practical problem. When you start making up a story and thinking it through, you start to wonder how the parents would control the situation to the extent they do. Language is a weapon for them and a means of hiding things.
You ask Aggeliki Papoulia to do some extraordinary things on camera; how did you build up that kind of trust?
Well, firstly, I choose well. The actors I worked with were delighted to do something so different. Most of the actors in the film have their own theatre company so they only work with other people when they really want to. We rehearsed a lot and we mainly focused on forgetting that they were actors in favour of playing games and being totally blank.
Many people have drawn parallels with the Josef Fritzl case in Austria. But you had already started shooting as that story broke, hadn’t you?
Yes. That’s a very different case. Our film is funny and ridiculous and contradictory. It’s bright and pretty, in contrast with the drama and secrets of the house. The Fritzl case is very different. It’s just horror. I understand why people have seen certain parallels but we are coming from somewhere else. We worked hard on maintaining a balance between violence and humour and the surreal. We wanted people to get involved in the film by giving them lots to things to think about and laugh about.
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