Giorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth is a startlingly distinctive and darkly comic film about extreme, authoritarian parents who keep their grown-up children locked up in the house, and continually lie to them to shield them from the outside world.  Amongst other awards, it has won the Un Certain Regard prize at 2009’s Cannes film festival and is courting a great deal of praise and attention from critics. Here, Lanthimos sits down with Sound-Screen to discusses his film, the state of the Greek film industry and what irks him so much about being compared to contemporaries like Michael Haneke.
Were there any real-life events that influenced you to tell the story in Dogtooth?
No, not really. It started from an idea – what if in the future there were no more families? I then had the idea of these parents that want to keep their family together forever, they think that they’re doing the best for their children in raising them far away from the rest of the world, but of course that wouldn’t really work. It came from that and from the real stories we heard later while we were rehearsing, the Austrian [the Josef Fritzl] story; it was very different to what we were trying to do, it was very dark, with the dungeons and incest. I wanted to do something much brighter, in comprison, and more beautiful. I wanted to show that these parents have the best intentions in mind although it doesn’t really work that way.

It is a dark film but there’s also a lot of humour in it, for example when the parents tell their kids their grandfather is Frank Sinatra. Was the humour an important aspect for you?
Yeah, it was very important but I guess it always is in the things that I do. I feel that, especially in a story like this, you can get much deeper if you take a humourous approach.  If you get too dramatic or melodramatic you force people to think a certain way instead of allowing them to think for themselves and to be engaged in different ways. If you can walk a line between all these things, between the tragedy and violence and the humour as-well, then it’s easier for people to be more open about thinking for themselves.

You have described the film as a reaction to the traditional greek family…
Yes, it’s inspired by the clichés of a Greek family.

Like the dominating father?
Yeah, but also this mentality about the son being entitled to have sex while the girls should never do anything like that. And also the fact that in Greece children stay with their parents until they’re really old, families stay really close and there’s always support even if the child is 30 years old or something.

How did the casting of Mary Tsoni, Anna Kalaitzidou and Christos Passalis, who play the older children, come about?
I worked with Anna and Christos before; they have their own theatre group and they write their own plays and direct them. Mary Tsoni is really not an actress, though, she’s a singer in a group [punk performance band Mary and The Boy].

The way the family talk is quite unusual. How did you achieve the performances the cast give?
I didn’t really come up with it. We did a lot of rehearsals and what I tried to do was to make them forget about any way of approaching the role as an actor, analysing parts and all this. I tried to make them act like children and forget whatever they had in mind about the movie, the part, or the script. There weren’t really directions to speaking this way or to do this or that other than dealing with the role physically and reacting in an honest way.

It is interesting that you put movie quotes in the film, for example the scene where the older sister is forced to make love to the brother and then afterwards quotes a line from Rocky. What influenced this aspect of the script?
The whole idea was that the world was opening up to the sister through these videotapes that she’s getting from Christina. Seeing a film for the first time would make a huge impression on you if you were 25 or older. So it’s something that’s stuck in her head, all these words she hasn’t heard before  and these people she hasn’t seen before, and it’s something that she uses to cope with things.

How much room did you leave for improvisation in the film?
We did a lot of improvising during rehearsal which created a base for the cast to be able to work around while shooting. The first scene, for instance, is completely improvised, what they’re saying and everything else, but  it was based on what they had done during rehearsals. I had them creating games and speaking the way they do in the film the whole time, so on the one hand it was completely improvised but on the other it was something they were really used to doing.

The father is quite a cold character and you never make his motivations that clear, what were your intentions there?
I didn’t want to find excuses for what the father does, because that would be a very different film. It would be a film about him whereas I wanted it to be a film about the consequences of what he does – the effect it has has on these people and where that can lead to.

The character of Christina, an ‘outsider’ who is allowed into the family compound to appease the son’s sexual urges, is interesting because she seems to be both the victim (forced to have sex with the son) and the perpetrator (exploiting the sisters), why is this?
She’s very interesting because she has this power over them and she chooses to take advantage of them.  I think anyone would be tempted if  they got into such a situation, to really fool around with these people. The fact that she feels so powerful against them, that they don’t really know anything and that she can fool them into doing things, that was very interesting to me.

In the film the children are constantly being asked to compete with each-other, what is your intention with this aspect of the film?
It’s the notion of the parents trying to make the children better. They feel really proud of themselves for following the rules and getting them competing to be the best son or the best daughter. But the children also feel really good doing what their parents ask of them, and they know that they will be rewarded for following the rules.

What do you think are the biggest challenges for Greek filmmakers working today and how has the current financial crisis effected things?
It has always been very difficult to make films in Greece because they are Government funded and there’s only the Greek Film Centre that runs film production. Up to three or four years ago it was almost impossible for young people to make films, all the money available went to the older directors, but it has changed because there have been a couple of young Greek filmmakers that have been acknowledged internationally, with their films receiving acclaim at international film festivals.

Interview by Priscilla Eyles.

Dogtooth is out now courtesy of Verve Pictures