#481 – Cut/daily Meets... Bugonia Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis
Editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis has been the creative partner of Director Yorgos Lanthimos for nearly 25 years.
In that time, YM has twice been nominated for an Oscar, BAFTA, and ACE Eddie for Poor Things (2024) and The Favourite (2019).
Briefly selecting from his 124 (!) other credits of features, numerous shorts, music videos, and TV episodes, reveals titles such as:
- Bugonia
- Kinds of Kindness
- Light Falls
- Poor Things
- Siege on Liperti Street
- All The Pretty Little Horses
- The Favourite
- The Lobster
- The Sentimentalists
Discover more editorial wisdom here.
Bonus Questions
You've worked with Director Yorgos Lanthimos for nearly 25 years. What do you remember as some of the most important milestones in your working relationship?
Editing his first commercial, our collaboration on Dogtooth, and editing The Favourite all marked the start of a new phase in our working relationship.
While most of the cast has worked on Lanthimos's films before, he has mentioned that working with street-cast, neurodivergent actor Aidan Delbis was an 'unpredictable gift'.
What challenges and opportunities does working with an actor on their first professional job present an editor?
Working with Aidan presented exactly this: the challenge of his unpredictability.
It was a matter of finding how to use it in the edit. It’s precisely this unpredictability that gives depth to his genuine, authentic depiction of Don, Teddy’s loving and tragic cousin.
This BFI article credits your formidable work ethic as a key to the success of his films:
“Mavropsaridis’s legendary work ethic may be the secret ingredient to Lanthimos’s aesthetic success, although the latter (YL) joked that, aside from an hourly walk each day, “he’s a workaholic… he’s not well.”
After so many years in the editing chair, what maintains your enthusiasm for the craft and what new challenges did you surmount on Bugonia, that kept it interesting?
It’s been challenging and extremely rewarding to work with Lanthimos all these years. He creates a very special working environment, where what drives the editing is solely to tell the tale in his own very personal language.
With each new film, the film’s distinct ‘language’ has to be re-invented but still be part of the Lanthimos world, and this is what makes our work together challenging and at the same time exciting.
I can assure you, he works even more than me and I do exercise walking every day for an hour at least.
In Bugonia the edit had to make sure the viewer would feel empathy for the intriguing protagonists and their ideological battles. And as his knowledge deepens scene after scene, to make the viewer doubt about the certainty of this knowledge, and about what is it that really motivates their actions.