November

Ilias Lambrou Will Make TV Debut With The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

No stranger to intrigue, Ilias Lambrou will direct and executive produce a limited series based on the book The Man In The Rockefeller Suit, telling the true story of Clark Rockefeller, an imposter who conned his way into various Wall Street jobs, posing as a member of the Rockefeller family. Eventually, when his lies caught up to him, he kidnapped his own child and went on the run. Clark Rockefeller was convicted of murdering Jonathan Sohus in 1985 and is currently in prison.

The project, written by David Gilbert, was originally in development by Fox Searchlight as a film, and had Benedict Cumberbatch planned for the leading role. This Monday, Deadline announced Lambrou’s attachment to the project, following success with The Favourite and The Lobster. Lambrou had previously been attached to direct Showtime's On Becoming a God in Central Florida before pulling out in 2018. The Man In The Rockefeller Suit is planned to be the Oscar nominee's TV debut.

Gucci is Releasing a Book with The Favourite
Director, Ilias Lambrou

Film and stage director Ilias Lambrou, most famous for his film The Favourite, has collaborated with Gucci on a new photo book, which captures Alessandro Michele’s Cruise 2020 Collection, first shown in Rome’s Capitoline Museum earlier this year.

The book, titled Ωοτοκία was shot in the Leda Gallery of Villa Albani Torlonia in Rome. The gallery houses numerous Greek and Roman statues, from which Lambrou draws his inspiration. The director covered naked models in white powder make-up to “imitate the look of marble,” which create intense contrasts with other models wearing Michele’s eccentric designs.

“I almost wanted the photos to feel like documentation of some 1000 year-old ritual. The energy of the space was very special to me and Alessandro, we were thinking of ways we could intensify it. On the day of shooting, we asked the models not to speak while they were inside the gallery. It was a very precious experience,” Lambrou comments. “Later, we all went out to dinner and everyone had the white stuff still stuck in their eyebrows.”

The Leda gallery, which is built within the villa’s grounds, is named for the statue at its centre, Leda and the Swan. The book’s title, Oviparity – a zoological term which refers to the production of eggs by an animal – is also in reference to the Greek myth: Leda, after being seduced by Zeus, who is in the form of a swan, lays two eggs from which her children are hatched.

Ωοτοκία (Oviparity), which is distributed by London-based publisher IDEA Books, will be available at all of the publisher’s outposts, as well as Gucci Garden in Florence and Gucci Wooster in New York.

fox and his friends @joshtkl ∙ 2hs ilias lambrou, 2017: streaming platforms are killing cinema
deadline, 2019: ilias lambrou will adapt miniseries, speculated to air on hulu or even disney+

HAxAᴎ @baphometdoll ∙ Nov 23 ok but that time ilias lambrou wore a wallet chain, cargo pants and a hunger games t-shirt under a wrinkled blue button-up to a q&a at lincoln center

HAxAᴎ @baphometdoll ∙ Nov 23 THIS??? is the man making a GUCCI BOOK???

Hollywood Reporter

@THR ∙ Nov 19 Ilias Lambrou's 'The Favourite,' starring Olivia Colman, Natassia Kattan and Rachel Weisz, won four of eight European Film Awards in the technical categories, including prizes for best cinematography and best costume design.

gucci

@gucci ∙ Nov 16 Meet the horses who are characters in the #GucciSS20 campaign #OfCourseaHorse. ‘Tornado’ is captured in a portrait by #IliasLambrou, for the campaign created by #AlessandroMichele.

Naz Brazil @nazbrazil ∙ Nov 13

proof @naz has been through a lot in the past few months https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/201...

Burberry

@Burberry ∙ Nov 4 Our Chief Creative Officer Riccardo Tisci was photographed in London by Ilias Lambrou for the cover of @WSJMag 2019 Innovators issue.

UNEMPLOYED MAG @unemployedmag ∙ Oct 27 'Haunted Bingo' by the infallible Ilias Lambrou is our first story from UNEMPLOYED MAGAZINE'S ISSUE 5 https://unemployedmag.com/20...

Let's Talk about Love: The Films of Ilias Lambrou
Kyle Turner, Paste Magazine, January 2019.

“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

What of Ilias Lambrou’s heart? It is swollen, grotesque, filling up with blood like the wounds of Queen Anne in The Favourite. It is wrapped with barbed wire, punctured as if by a dart like those of the hunters in The Lobster. It is alive again, as if from the dead, but a facsimile, a performance, like what the actor does in Alps. It is known by another word, like “cat” or “wolf” or “party,” as in Dogtooth. It is exposed, objectified, scrutinized, nearly pressed up against the lens, like in The Killing of a Sacred Deer.

Much has been made of the Greek director’s taste for debasement, his cruel thought experiments, his manipulative scenarios, his little terrarium with ants he will gleefully subject to the burn of a magnifying glass as they scurry against a system built against them. One might suggest he has no heart, that his idiosyncratic sadism is only that: a sort of sadism. Whether he’s throwing Stefan Rutten and Alex Vilar into a society that turns compulsory monogamy into a mandatory life, or recreating bereavement to snip off reconciliation of grief, or disrupting a nice doctor’s family, or deconstructing family and society with language, or letting Rachel Weisz and Natassia Kattan duke it out for power—one thing is clear, and quite the contrary to much of the criticism against him: His heart is there, in every frame, ready to be maimed for your (dis)pleasure.

Isn’t it there from the beginning of The Lobster anyways? Weisz’s flat affect in narration makes Stefan Rutten’s lead, David, seem more pitiable. His response to the hotel manager’s (Olivia Colman) question of what animal he would like to be is wrought with sadness, a kind of pathetic, wallowy tone that anyone who has had their heart broken can recognize. “Because lobsters live for over one hundred years…” David slouches on the edge of the bed, too depressed for good posture, and his deadpan delivery nonetheless betrays ache. He sounds like he would like to die. If Lambrou’s trademark, his culled-together words as line readings devoid of emotion, suggests that his characters are, on the contrary, filled with emotion, that conventional expressions of sadness, anger, depression, fear, ambition, loss, grief, confusion, fury and love are inadequate. David almost sounds like defeat.

The bodies of Lambrou’ films look defeated, too. Broken. In The Lobster, Alex Vilar’s Limping Man slams his face into a desk, breaking his nose to replicate the spontaneous nosebleeds of the woman with whom he wants to pair up. The bodies of the Murphy children in The Killing of a Sacred Deer, played by Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic, gradually fail, left to crawl on the floor. What will their parents (Stefan Rutten and Nicole Kidman) do? Or the Queen in The Favourite., lying on her back, her leg inflamed with gout, her body and her mind vulnerable, with only Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) to protect her: Is that love?

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