Director Yorgos Lanthimos has made a career for himself showing us, as Beetlejuice's Lydia Deetz would put it, the strange and unusual. From his sophomore feature Dogtooth onward, Lanthimos has taken a sick and, frankly, sensational sense of pride in giving the world a harsh bite of intolerable cruelty, the crushing blows of connection, and what can come from fate’s unforgiving hand. But in the filmmaker’s eyes, this is all par for the course. His spotlight on the disturbing is not the window dressing, but the window itself.
“I just can't help it,” Lanthimos tells IGN. “I just find it normal to be preoccupied with what is very evident in our daily lives and in our world. And it's weird for me to see that other people do not delve [into] these kinds of issues and matters. It's a matter of how you approach it and how you do that. But other than that, I don't find my films strange.”
You, dear reader, will probably find Lanthimos’ new picture Kinds of Kindness to be at least a little bit strange. It’s a decidedly darker turn than the last film he made, Poor Things, which followed a sheltered young woman trying her hand at exploring the world and what life has to offer (to put it as mildly as possible). But the writer-director laughs when I mention the notion that Poor Things was more, well, normal.
“It’s funny to me—in a positive way—that people say Poor Things is less of that because I was trying to make it for 12 years and everybody thought I was crazy,” Lanthimos explains. “Now that it is kind of successful, everybody goes like, ‘Yeah, but that's more your normal stuff.’ What the heck!”
As for getting back into the darker, more horror-tinged sandbox from whence he came, the Greek filmmaker feels that ultimately he never left. “There wasn't a conscious decision because we just keep working on stuff,” he says. “We were working on Kinds of Kindness for years and it was going on right after The Killing of a Sacred Deer, so as soon as we’d finished something, we started writing something new. … [Co-writer Efthimis Filippou and I] always meant to keep working together and be making those kinds of films. I just try to develop all the stuff that I'm interested in and whatever comes first and feels more mature to go into production, we just go ahead and do that.”
Kinds of Kindness (review)—which stars an exciting ensemble cast consisting of Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chao, Joe Alwyn, and Hunter Schaefer—is a sadistic set of three parables, an absurdist and surrealist anthology film that tests the audience’s limits both physically and emotionally throughout an almost three-hour runtime. To delve too far into plot points of any of the three stories would spoil the lush wave of discomfort that comes with experiencing these fables for the first time. But also interesting is how these ideas came to be in the first place.
“There was a long process, especially in the writing of the film, that kind of informed the rest of the changes as well. We started writing the film as one story. Quickly we decided with the themes that we wanted to also experiment a little bit with form, so we decided that we would include more than one story,” Lanthimos said of finding the film’s structure. “Then I had the idea of having the same actors playing different parts in each story, one different part in each story, so that kind of led us to write the three stories, individually, in sequence instead of blending them and following them in parallel. When we [knew we] wanted to make it a triptych and find other stories, we just sat down and told each other certain ideas we had that were very simple ideas, setups, or things that have gone through our heads. We followed the process that we do all the time with the things we’ve just started: One started building on the other's idea and giving him feedback or other ideas, and it grew from there.”
Lanthimos says that while those changes were happening to the stories, they were also working on the previously mentioned different projects. That gave him and Filippou the opportunity to come back over time and look at Kinds of Kindness from a different perspective.
“[We realized we wanted] to do something different with it, and time allowed us to be more creative in a sense and distill what it is that we wanted to do and get there in the end,” he says. The film’s title, which was originally simply the SEO nightmare word And, was one of the elements that shifted for the better. “I think we arrived at something that represents the film in an interesting, intriguing way, without giving away too much.”
But in the midst of all those shifts and changes over time, Kinds of Kindness always had one central constant: a mysterious man known only as RMF. Lanthimos tenderly describes the character, who was originally intended to be the lead of a short film he and Filippou never got to make, as a “preoccupation of [theirs].” RMF almost seamlessly slotted himself into a small yet crucial part of the anthology’s first story, which led the writers to consider a bold concept: “It would be interesting to have one person that doesn't have a huge part in each story to be the link [between them all],” Lanthimos mused. The character—who is played by Yorgos Stefanakos, a humble notary public and dear friend of Lanthimos and Filippou—is a highlight among many bizarre moments in the weird and tragically wonderful world Lanthimos invites us into.
“They were all complicated and difficult,” the filmmaker says of creating the three stories. “Although because it's a contemporary film, it seems much simpler, and that's what we were thinking in the beginning. Coming out of Poor Things, we had a lot of complex sets and lighting and setups. We went, ‘Oh, [now] we're going to make a contemporary film that's going to be different.’ But then you go on location and there are alligators, or tornadoes, or the owner of a house that changes their mind and they're not giving you their house anymore. So everything is complicated,” the filmmaker explains.
“But I love working with some of the same people and some of the new people that came on board. I couldn't separate one [story] from the other. It was kind of exciting to go from one to the other, actually, just for these subtle changes that we made with the actors. It's just a joy to go through that.”
And to find the joy in the bonkers and brutally beautiful Kinds of Kindness, well, that takes one special creative mind. Luckily for us, Lanthimos is just that.
