Vasilis Marmatakis on the strangely traditional ways he creates Yorgos Lanthimos’ film posters

“But I loved college. It was my favourite place on Earth, and my portfolio was very, very experimental because Camberwell at that time was one of the most experimental places to study art,” he tells It’s Nice That. “We had projects like visualising the journey to the bottom of the ocean, really abstract stuff.”

Vasilis’ first job, however, reflected little of his experimental portfolio. While completing his duty as a sailor in the Greek navy, part of the mandatory military service for all Greek men, he landed a job at the advertising agency UpSet! as a junior art director. Amid all the avant-garde things he had learnt at Camberwell, he had missed one: computers. “I remember sitting in front of a huge Mac to design a logo, or rather, an attempt at a logo for a Greek TV station. I didn’t even know how to switch it on. It took me days to figure out how to get the curves in the logo right,” he pauses, then adds, “I’m still struggling with curves.”

The creative director of UpSet!, on his very first day, had predicted that Vasilis would not last long. The prediction proved true when he quit a year and a half later. Yet, in many ways, this first job set the stage for his artistic life. The screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, who would later go on to co-write Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Kinds of Kindness with Yorgos Lanthimos, had also joined the agency as a junior copywriter on the same day. Vasilis recalls how Yorgos was already around then, working as one of the best ad directors at the time. “We all met for the first time at UpSet!. Yorgos and Efthymis went on to create Dogtooth, and by the time the film was finished, I had already left advertising and started my own studio (MNP) with a friend, Katerina Papanagiotou, while remaining very close to Efthymis. So when the time came for the poster and title design for Dogtooth, it was only natural for us to collaborate, not as a formal commission, but as friends, since it was our friend’s film.”

With design, much like life itself, Vasilis says that his posters are his honest reactions to the films. He always presents multiple proposals, each exploring a different dimension of the story. “They all somehow share a common thread, but each takes a slightly different approach,” he explains. “For example, with Bugonia, there’s a film in there about ecology, one about trauma, another about the extraterrestrial, conspiracy theories, and Americana. So there are various aspects for me to explore and work with. But I think they all share an underlying connection, something I can’t quite pinpoint, but it’s there.”

The same approach runs like a red thread throughout his work, each poster leaning a little too heavily into one of the film’s themes. With Poor Things, the first poster is an extreme close-up of Emma Stone’s brightly lit face, her lipstick and eyeshadow deliberately smudged. Look closely, and the distortion of the makeup is not as random as it first appears. The lipstick is streaked in the shape of a falling Mark Ruffalo, while the other two men in her life – the characters played by Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef – seem frozen within the splash of purple and blue eyeshadow across her eyelid.

“To me, this poster explores the childlike aspect of her mind, the sense that she’s a child becoming an adult. With the presence of men on her face, you don’t really know – they could be making her look better, or uglier, but they’re there,” he says. “In the second poster, her body is half-emerging. That one, to me, is more about revealing who you truly are, being yourself, even when that truth is uncomfortable or unpleasant for others. And finally, the third poster explores the moment after she has become fully herself. It’s when she expresses without restraint, and everything flows out of her literally in waves, like an overwhelming surge of emotions.”

In Bugonia, Vasilis consciously restricts superfluous elements and allows the frames to breathe. Before working on any draft, the studios send him tens of thousands of film stills. Then the cutting begins: Emma Stone’s ears from one image might be joined with her face from another. It all needs to fit just right without appearing overly precise or neat. With Bugonia, Vasilis has also worked on the title design for the credits, and already the use of a strange geometric type, seemingly brutalist, has defined the film’s visual language: Churchward Roundsquare, created by the Samoan-born graphic designer Joseph Churchward, who passed away in 2013.

“I was looking at his fonts and remembered this very sharp one. I found the archetype of it at the Museum of New Zealand, so I asked if we could digitise it,” he says. “They told us to speak with his daughter, and she permitted us. I love this font because it feels monumental yet sharp, even a little threatening. It struck me as futuristic, but in a very analogue way, which is, in a sense, exactly what the film itself is.”

All the type Vasilis works with, including Churchward Roundsquare, is created by hand. He first prints the letters, then splashes water onto the wet ink to create a subtle smudging effect. After scanning the results, he digitises them. In the film’s credits, he explains, only the middle letter is set in Churchward Roundsquare; the rest is in Adobe Garamond. With multiple names stacked in the end credits, the large blocks of Churchward, when read vertically, almost form a gibberish word of their own. That was a conscious choice.

“I don’t like things looking too sharp. I don’t really know how to use Photoshop, so for me, the easiest way was just to water it down – literally put water on the letters with a brush.” But there will always be different versions until he gets the right one. “For example, in the credits, if there is a name like Emma Stone, I might do six different ‘waterings’, because you never know which one will work. Sometimes it gets too messy. So, with me, all the typography is really DIY.”

Because of this manually labour-intensive process, Vasilis has a massive doorstopper of a book with every type and word he has ever worked on. On our Zoom call, he holds it up for me to see, flipping through the pages. Behind him, there are posters by the iconic Spanish graphic designer Yves Uro, who defined the party scene of Ibiza between 1977–1990: of the club town drenched in sunlight, of men and women dancing in futuristic athleisure. Vasilis also owns the original poster Uro designed for the 2002 music album Romantica by Luna, a tropical dreamscape at dusk.

Beyond posters, he has also worked on the set design and visuals for the play Eau de Cologne by the National Theatre of Greece, once again collaborating with his friend Efthymis Filippou, with whom it all began. The play centred on a laboratory that enabled the living to communicate with the dead. Everything on the set – from the perfume bottles and the actors’ masks to the images falling from a roller – was designed by him. The play allowed him to go beyond words and images.

“I loved how interdisciplinary the process was, even the rehearsals,” Vasilis recalls. “Even designing can be so interdisciplinary. I’m always grabbing screenshots, using scissors, cutting things up, listening to music, watering and scanning.”

It helps that Vasilis works away from the din of Hollywood, at a cautious distance. He keeps abreast of everything that is going on in the design world, but in the safety of his house by the sea with his two dogs, Ben and Lola, in the town of Thymari, an hour’s drive from Athens, where he grew up. “I enjoy being here where there is enough space for my dogs and I don’t miss anything,” he says.