Daniel Day-Lewis, Richard Linklater, Yorgos Lanthimos and Tessa Thompson are among the stars set to participate in the BFI London Film Festival‘s Screen Talks program this year.
Celebrated filmmakers Jafar Panahi, Lynne Ramsay and Chloé Zhao will also join for sessions at the 2025 festival, opening Oct. 8 with Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.
Day-Lewis, the only person to win three best actor Oscars, is best known for his era-defining roles in such diverse films as My Beautiful Laundrette, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, My Left Foot, The Age of Innocence, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln and Phantom Thread. He is due to make his return to acting in the upcoming film Anemone, which also serves as his directorial debut.
Lanthimos’ work has established him as one of the most renowned directors of the 21st century. His frequent collaborators include Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, who star in the recently-premiered Venice feature Bugonia. Among his most famous projects is Poor Things, The Favourite, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Dogtooth.
Linklater will make an appearance at LFF to discuss his wide-ranging filmography, from Dazed and Confused, Me and Orson Welles and Everybody Wants Some to the comedies School of Rock, Bad News Bears and Hit Man and the beloved Before trilogy. His latest film, the Cannes feature Nouvelle Vague, follows the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1959 Breathless, one of the first projects to usher in the wave of experimental French cinema.
Panahi, whose body of work has critiqued Iranian society and had a real-world impact on his life, will be welcomed to discuss his classics The White Balloon, The Circle and Offside as well as the more recent films including Taxi, No Bears and Closed Curtain.
Since her 1999 feature debut Ratcatcher, Ramsay has produced Movern Caller, We Need to Talk About Kevin and You Were Never Really Here followed. She debuted her latest film, Die, My Love with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Thompson will be best known for her stint in the MCU, especially in Thor: Ragnarok. She’s also starred in Veronica Mars, Westworld, and Sorry to Bother You, and was nominated for a BAFTA for her turn in Passing. She will discuss her wide-ranging career at the LFF event in October.
Zhao is an Oscar winner for her work on the Frances McDormand-starring Nomadland and comes to the festival to talk about portfolio so far, including on Marvel’s Eternals. She premieres Hamnet with Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley at TIFF this year, lauded by THR as “a tremendously acted heartbreaker.”
The Emma Corrin and Charli xcx-starring 100 Nights of Hero will close the BFI London Film Festival 2025.