“Kinds of Kindness” looks like another solid art house win for the increasingly prolific auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. After the Oscar-winning and box office success of “Poor Things,” his second feature in six months debuted in limited release this past weekend with the best per-screen averages of the year, a cool $70,000 in just five theaters. His third big-screen collaboration with Emma Stone so far, “Kinds” is an anthology film with three separate stories where the same actors play different roles in each chapter. But, it turns out it almost took a different road.
“At some point, we were actually writing the three stories in parallel,” Lantimos says during an interview with The Playlist late last week. “They weren’t individual one after the other. And actually, that helped when they became standalone stories because writing them in parallel and seeing two scenes of one story and then two scenes of the other story, and then two scenes of the third one, it made us think more about how they were connected. But then when we separated them, that kind of stayed in without it being obvious and it felt that it made the three stories stronger and more solid. So things like that, I think over time help with how you structure a script.”
Over the course of our conversation, Lanthimos reveals why he enjoys collaborating with the same actors, why he wanted to cast eventual Cannes Best Actor winner Jesse Plemons, if that Emma dance moment was always meant for the end of the movie, what made him want to select a remake of “Save The Green Planet” (now titled “Bugonia“) as his next movie, and much more.
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The Playlist: Where did the inspiration for this particular movie come from?
Yorgos Lanthimos: Well, this, we started writing the first story three years ago, I guess right after we finished “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” with Efthimis [Filippou]. We probably started writing this one, and my initial inspiration was having just read Albert Camus’ “Caligula “and I just started thinking about how much power one person can have and how that relates to the contemporary world and what it means if it’s on a very personal level. So, we started writing this first story with Efthimis and then I guess we had some time off and I was doing other things and he was doing other things. And then when we got back together to continue writing the script, we just felt that we’d be interested in exploring different forms and structures as well. So, we decided that it would be interesting to make it like an anthology film with more than one story. So, we then started exchanging ideas, things that we had in our mind, and we made a list of things that we were interested in and then kind of instinctively chose a couple of those to develop further that felt that they belonged to the same world. So, then we started developing all three of them together.
Out of the three, was there one that was more difficult to land on?
I mean, they all had different challenges, I think. And we did spend a lot of time ironing them out and trying and figuring them out. And I find that quite beneficial. On one hand, it takes a lot of time to materialize a screenplay. At the same time this way of working, having other things and filming other things, and then going back to what we were working before, it kind of helps me look at it with a more clear mind. And I think this kind of duration and just keep coming back to things over time, I think makes them mature in a way that I’m comfortable afterwards into bringing them into life. So, that was the case with this one as well. It just felt that it needed this time for us to figure everything out, every detail of the characters, the stories. At some point, we were actually writing the three stories in parallel. They weren’t individual one after the other. And actually, that helped when they became standalone stories because writing them in parallel and seeing two scenes of one story and then two scenes of the other story, and then two scenes of the third one, it made us think more about how they were connected. But then when we separated them, that kind of stayed in without it being obvious and it felt that it made the three stories stronger and more solid. So things like that, I think over time help with how you structure a script.
If you had gone in that direction where the storylines were intertwining throughout the whole version of the film, would you have still used the same actors for every role?
No, that’s a good question. Because at some point I started thinking about this idea, the same actors playing one character in each story, I decided that it would have been too confusing and complicated to do that no matter how different they might look or how much they’d change. So, at that point, I think we decided to test the structure of the film with three individual stories, which we liked and appreciated. And then I was able to go ahead with the idea of having the same actors playing different characters.
You’d worked with Margaret, you’d worked with Willem, and, obviously, Emma before. What made you want to bring Jesse into this ensemble?
I’ve been following him for years and I think he is one of the greatest actors of his generation, and I always wanted to work with him, and we did try in the past or I thought about him, but it never really happened. So yeah, it was a great opportunity to finally get to work with him, and he just, him and Hong [Chao] and Mamoudou [Athie] as well, which are the newcomers in the troop that we’ve created. And Hunter Schafer who had just one scene but quite prominent, they were able to blend in with the troop very quickly just because of having worked with the same actors before. The fact that they come and meet another group that already has a sense of each other and they feel comfortable with each other. It enables the new actors that come in to acclimatize quicker and become a group quicker than if it was all new people that I’d never worked with before.
I was going to ask you about that. Does working with actors you’ve worked with many times before sort of lower your stress levels going into shooting a new movie? Does it make you feel more comfortable going into the next project?
It does now that there has been some history and there’s been quite a few people that I’ve worked with before, the same way that it does with other departments like [cinematographers] or editors. There’s always kind of a balancing act of working with some of the same people that you have some kind of base and are grounded in some way with the people that you know really well and you know that you don’t have to try too much in order to be understood or they know that they can bring in their ideas and feel comfortable doing that. And then to infuse this group with new energy people that you’re interested in working with that will take you in different directions? That’s also very viable. And so it is just about balancing those things, kind of maintaining this kind of security and bringing in all these new ideas, people energy that can unlock new things in your work.
Some filmmakers tend to stay in sort of the same genre. Maybe they do a lot of organized crime movies or period pieces. But with every film, you seem to try to challenge yourself, whether it’s the structure of “Kinds” or doing something out of the box like “Poor Things.” It’s never the same. Is that something you are consciously thinking of when you’re thinking of your next project?
To a certain extent. I mean, it’s like, I do think the same way I described us getting to the point of making “Kinds of Kindness” an anthology film. I think that came into it that the fact that we had worked already with a theme on a few things and we started writing this script, and then we just kind of felt the need that we wanted to do something different in terms of form. So, we try something new, but at the same time, it’s not the ultimate goal. I just try to find material that I’m interested in. And if it happens to be like a period film or a fantasy film or whatever, or a novel or ideas that are original and come from me or whatever that is, it’s more about feeling that there is something new to explore rather than the genre itself or trying in every way to make the film different to what we’ve done before. But of course, it does come into it when you’re making decisions.
You’re about to shoot “Bugonia,” a remake of a Korean Sci-Fi film. Again, something intriguingly different than you’ve ever done before. What about this story makes you want to make it your next film?
Well, actually just this one is one of the few times that I read a script that I hadn’t generated or I hadn’t been developing for a long time, and I was immediately drawn to it. And then I did a little bit of work with the writer Will Tracy in order to make it a little bit more my own. It’s just one of these things that something clicks in the story, in the tone. Again, something you probably haven’t done before, working with the same actors, like working with Emma again and Jesse, it’s just exciting to get into it, do something different, but also with that kind of familiarity.
Fans are now expecting an Emma dance scene in all your collaborations. Was the one in the movie the only one you shot? Or did the script always say her character dances at the end of the film?
Yeah, that’s how it was. I mean, it was a later edition, I think because I saw Emma dancing while we were filming “Poor Things.” I just saw her dancing for fun in her downtime, and it was so incredible that I went, “We have to put this in a film.” And then it just made sense to use it in our next film. So yeah, that was it.
“Kinds of Kindness” is now playing in limited release. It expands nationwide on June 28.