Inside the Poor Things Set

In just a few years since “The Favourite” premiered in 2018, Yorgos Lanthimos has gone from idiosyncratic independent filmmaker to full-fledged industry darling, racking up Oscar nominations and other accolades for his bold, distinctive work. He’s become a true auteur, and like many great auteurs, the Greek director has taken his new caché to explore brand new mediums, via an emerging side-passion in still photography.

Last year, Lanthimos published two new photography books, “i shall sing these songs beautifully” and “Dear God, the Parthenon is Still Broken.” Each book consists of photos taken during the production of his last two films, “Poor Things” and “Kinds of Kindness,” and features many of the actors from both films modeling for him. Now, Lanthimos has hit another milestone in his nascent photography career with an exhibition of his work at MACK + Webber at 939, an art gallery in Downtown Los Angeles.

To celebrate the exhibition, Lanthimos attended the opening, which took place on March 29. Also in attendance was Lanthimos’ frequent collaborator Emma Stone, who starred in both films and was featured in many photographs showcased in the gallery. During a conversation moderated by Michael Mack, the filmmaker spoke about what drew him to photography, his evolution with the artform during production of both films, and where he intends to take himself in the medium next.

Talking about his work, Lanthimos said he had no real background in photography before he began experimenting with it on the “Poor Things” set, as he didn’t learn about the medium at all while attending film school in Greece “But I guess  the first thing you learn when you are interested in making film is that, you know, it starts from photography. It’s like 24 frames per second,” Lanthimos told Mack at the exhibition. “ So you have to figure out how you can take the, you know, each frame, uh, one at a time. So. I think, you know, you just realize you have to learn the technique. So that’s how I first started, like got a camera and started to understand how it works and how film is exposed and what it looks like and all the mistakes that you make.”

As Lanthimos began his career as an independent filmmaker in Greece, he began practicing photography for largely a practical reason: He didn’t have the money to hire an on-set photographer and needed to take publicity stills himself. It wasn’t until “Poor Things,” when he actually could hire a set photographer, that he began to play with taking photographs as stand-alone art, with their own aesthetic and mood different from his films.

“ I’m very stressed on set and it is a very stressful experience making films,” Lanthimos said. “It kind of makes you forget that for a moment. Cause you put your mind somewhere else.”

While taking photographs on the “Poor Things” set, Lanthimos used a large format camera, but counterintuitively worked very quickly in between runs of scenes and setup changes. He also took photographs of the sets being built and taken apart on the soundstage he shot the film in, including the Baxter house which is the main setting for the film’s first act. After not being satisfied with the results from developing the photos in a Budapest lab, Lanthimos recruited Stone to help him process the negatives in his bathroom — a process he referred to as “nerve-wracking” but also calming, helping both unwind after 12-hour shoot days.

After he wrapped “Poor Things” in 2021 and moved on to working on the anthology picture “Kinds of Kindness” in 2022, Lanthimos was inspired to keep working on his photography and expand upon it. While the “Poor Things” photographs — having been taken almost entirely on the film’s soundstage — are recognizably from the same aesthetic as the Victorian sex fantasy, “Kinds of Kindness” and the stark Black-and-white photographs taken feel far more distinct from the movie they come from. Many of them were shot not on a soundstage but around New Orleans, where the project was filmed.

“ I was in a city that I’ve never been before. I just look around and just take pictures of the street or people or trees or whatever,” Lanthimos said. “So that gave me more freedom to be open to that and see how whatever was happening inside could actually maybe be transferred into the world instead of like me reproducing the world of the film.”

Although all of the work shown in the exhibition come from the “Poor Things” and “Kinds of Kindness” sets, Lanthimos also revealed that he has been working on photographs of the islands of his native Greece, after moving back to Athens following 12 years living in London. “ I saw it from a very different perspective by being away, that distance enabled me to see what I considered ugly and unattractive and was driving me away, to see the beauty in that and the uniqueness in that,” Lanthimos said. The work he’s done in Athens and its architecture has, he said, been focused on capturing the “violence” of the city’s landscapes.

Lanthimos has a new film with Stone called “Bugonia,” a remake of the South Korean dark comedy “Save the Green Planet,” releasing in theaters November 7. During a Q&A with the audience, when asked if he intends to continue producing photography books based on his film projects, Lanthimos revealed that he did take photos during the production.

“So we’ll see if anything comes out of that when we get there,” Lanthimos said. “But I’m not sure.”

“Yorgos Lanthimos Photographs” is open at 939 from March 29 – May 24, 2025. “i shall sing these songs beautifully” (2024) is published by MACK and “Dear God, the Parthenon is Still Broken” (2024) is published by Void.