‘We pushed each other’: Yorgos Lanthimos’s alternate view of Poor Things – in pictures

The maverick director and Emma Stone reflect on how they took their creative collaboration to the next level – by developing a brilliantly bizarre photobook

Yorgos Lanthimos: ‘The title of the book Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken comes from a postcard that the character of Bella Baxter was to send to her father, God, from Athens. The scene was cut from the final version of the film.’ Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken by Yorgos Lanthimos is available to pre-order from VOID. All photographs: Yorgos Lanthimos

In reaction to the fast-moving creation of the film, Lanthimos embraced the opportunity to use a large-format camera to make these images, focusing on stillness, tonality and light. Deciding on a composition and not changing this until the exposure was complete, each picture provided him with a meditative time of focus

The creative process of making the images extended to collaboration with the actor Emma Stone who played the role of Bella Baxter in the film, for which she was awarded an Oscar. Through working together on previous projects, Lanthimos and Stone have developed a unique creative partnership. After a busy day of filming, they would develop the colour 6x7 negatives and the black and white 4x5 sheet film together in a makeshift darkroom in a bathroom. This alchemic act offered them both a creative outlet beyond the realm and constraints of the film

The negatives were developed by Lanthimos and Stone in Budapest: ‘The creative complicity I have with Emma added to the excitement of the task,’ he says. ‘One would push the other no matter how tired we were after a full day of filming to process the negatives in the evenings’

The photographs drift between black and white and colour, giving the impression of a waking dream between past and present, while multiple layers between reality and fiction are gradually revealed

Emma Stone: ‘I was pretty amazed by the large format and the beginning of his learning to process negatives. One day I asked if I could try to load some negatives in the little tent Yorgos had set up, then moved on to the chemicals, and I became obsessed. The high-stakes meditation of it is very special to me – you have to remain in control, you don’t want to screw up the pictures, and sure, they’re only pictures, but they’re his pictures, his art, not my own’

Emma Stone: ‘I remember accidentally clipping a beautiful portrait too low in the drying process and to this day I see the marks I made. It’s of course all I can focus on because it was a mistake’

Emma Stone: ‘Or when I loaded the film wrong and a few pictures came out with an inch-long black bar. But it’s an instantaneous reminder that all of this – photography, films, life – is full of mistakes and human error that can also end up being very beautiful and alive’

The book also opens with a previously unpublished poem by Patti Smith, inspired by the film

The characters populate imagined cities while the precarious screens, scaffolding, rigs, lighting and crew are divulged on the periphery of the images. Lanthimos has intentionally widened the frame to show the workings of the construct, fabricating a new story within the story. To mirror this, the publication is designed with foldouts to reveal these constructs within the cast of characters – the reader opens a book within a book

Void’s designer João Linneu writes: ‘Yorgos is a creative genius. And a very meticulous one at that. Photography is one of the tentacles of his creative expression. He is technically very precise, he is also very good at making his sitters comfortable in front of him, and he is very prolific. That’s a formula for compelling photographs’

Yorgos Lanthimos: ‘I always hoped that I would manage to get enough decent pictures to make a book out of them – a body of work that could exist on its own, independent of the film. I didn’t know if we had achieved this until we started seeing the initial edits and sequencing of the book’