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Director Yorgos Lanthimos
says he is not trying to provoke with his new film Kinds of Kindness.
On the contrary, he and script writer Efthimis Filippou say their aim is the
exact opposite:
“If we come up with things
that feel too provocative out of context, an idea that goes a certain way
that’s not consistent with the rest of it, we might do away with it,” Lanthimos
tells Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire. “We don’t write thinking
about the effect it has on our audience.
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“We just see
how it feels to us, and what’s instinctive on our side, and what feels right
and what we both feel comfortable. We don’t know how people are going to
react.”
The director,
who is lauded for recent movies The Favorite and Poor
Things, is one of those artists who doesn’t necessarily like to tell an
audience what to think or what his movie is about, preferring that they draw
their own conclusions or come to the story with their own emotional response.
Kinds of Kindness is a trio of stories
with a total run time of more than 160 minutes, each featuring some of the same
actors (and a troupe familiar from his other work) including Emma Stone, Willem
Dafoe and Jesse Plemons.
There are
consistent themes of physical or psychological violence and body-modifying and
have had critics trying to divine a through line. Some see a political allegory
about ceding control and becoming blindly loyal. Other see more of
psychological tale of co-dependency.
Lanthimos
isn’t giving anything away. Perhaps, as seems likely, he is less interested in
directing the audience one way or another and more interested trusting in an
instinctive and organic approach to creation that encompasses collaboration
with the likes of Stone, DP Robbie Ryan, editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis and
composer Jerskin Fendrix
“We don’t work
in an analytical way, so we don’t know what the theme is,” Lanthimos told
Lattanzio.
“It is just a
creative process that is not analytical. It’s not like, OK, the theme of faith
or the theme of control, or whatever. It never starts like that. And I think
even by the time we finish, we don’t even think about that.”
The 50-year-old filmmaker
began to put together what eventually became Kinds of Kindness after
making The Killing of a Sacred Deer in 2017. His starting
point was Caligula, a play by Albert Camus, which he had just read.
“I started thinking about
how much power one person can have over other people, and what would that mean
in our contemporary world and what it would mean also in a more personal
level,” he told FilmWeek’s Larry Mantle in a podcast. “That’s
how the inspiration for the first story came about.”
Originally, there were 10
stories that they pared down to three. Lanthimos and Filippou considered making
the stories run parallel and to interconnect, as in Robert Altman’s Short
Cuts.
of Kindness.” Cr: Yorgos
Lanthimos/Searchlight Pictures
“You would
follow the stories in parallel, but then this idea stuck in my head that I
wanted the same actors to play different roles in his story,” the director
explained to Lattanzio.
“Parallel
stories would’ve been very confusing, so we decided to separate the three
stories so that it was clear that the characters changed, but the actors were
the same.”
He elaborated in interview
with IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt: “When we separated them we felt that
they became even stronger as entities one after the other. It [wasn’t] just to
do with the themes and the story itself, but it’s also like a tone or duration
thing. It was more like how you compose music.
It just felt like that’s
how the stories should be, in that kind of order.””He elaborated in interview
at Cannes with IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt: “When we separated them we
felt that they became even stronger as entities one after the other. It
[wasn’t] just to do with the themes and the story itself, but it’s also like a
tone or duration thing. It was more like how you compose music. It just felt
like that’s how the stories should be, in that kind of order.” of Kindness.” Cr: Yorgos
Lanthimos/Searchlight Pictures
Lanthimos says
that he himself prefers films that treat him respectfully, “in a way like I
have my own ideas and experiences. So I can apply all that to what it is that
I’m watching and experiencing. It’s the same with music or [any other art].”
He suggests
that trying to cater for a particular audience or subset of an audience is
futile. “You can’t cover every human mind that exists. So the balance that you
strike needs to feel right, according to your own understanding of the world.”
The director
makes a similar argument with Mantle, that he tries to construct his films in a
way that allows for that kind of thought process by the viewer.
“We didn’t
have a very clear, distinct through line. We just very instinctively felt that
the stories kind of belong together. That they’re not so heavy handed in
telling you exactly how you must think of these stories or characters.
“There’s room
for every person with their own individual personality and backgrounds to have
their own space, engaging with the film to act in an active way and make a
sense of it all.”
Lanthimos’
influences as a filmmaker range from watching Bruce Lee films to the verité of
John Cassavetes and the groundbreaking choreography of Pina Bausch.
“They’re also
vastly different… between them they are very dark or ridiculous or absurd. If
we don’t find humor in every kind of situation, we’re kind of missing the
entirety of the human experience. So I can’t avoid to include that in way I
make films.”
Even as the budgets have
grown, Lanthimos has retained final cut of his work. “I was always lucky to
have this creative freedom,” he tells James Mottram for The
Independent. “Searchlight just saw the potential in this film as well. It’s
very straightforward. They know the kind of filmmaker I am, and they know that
this is what you get. And they wanted to be involved.”
The film is considered
more divisive than his two previous Oscar-winning works The Favorite and Poor
Things.
“The abstraction is
presented with even more cloying cuteness, the sadism is more juvenile and
purposeless, and the humor is stomach-turningly glib,” commented Slant critic
Ryan Coleman.
Promoting a film that
resists easy interpretation, Lanthimos is equally reluctant to put definitive
labels on it. Like the idea that freedom is a prison.
“Well, I guess it raises
those kinds of questions,” he told The Independent. “It is
showcasing, I think, the complexity of relationships and it asks questions of
whether we even know what we want when we’re free, or if that’s the best for
us.
“Or if having
some kind of structure and rules in our lives is actually beneficial. Or is it
beneficial to also break from them?”
Kinds of Kindness feels like the most
nihilistic film of his career. “Not having any hope?” he asks, “I don’t know… I
just made a film that had a happy ending.”
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