CANNES – They may have already collaborated on three feature films and a short, but get one thing straight. Emma Stone isn’t Yorgos Lanthimos‘ muse. It’s the other way around. As the two-time Best Actress winner noted with a sly wink during the “Kinds of Kindness” press conference, “He’s my muse.”
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Stone was joined by co-stars Jesse Plemmons, Willem Dafoe, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, Hunter Schafer, Margaret Qualley, and Mamoudou Athie to discuss “Kinds” with the global press, but the subject kept coming back to Lanthimos. And as Alwyn initially responds, it’s “impossible” to describe how to get in the mind of the Greek filmmaker.
“Trust him, trust him, trust him,” Alwyn says. “In reading the script, it’s bizarre and strange and bonkers and special of course, but to try and unpack it too much, I think you’d just get stuck in your head. And the same thing watching it. One of the reasons I love this film is you feel it first rather than try and intellectually unpack it. And so I just trust the world that he’s building and follow whatever direction he gives and feel like to be.”
Hong Chau succinctly notes, “I showed up to work every day and just tried to say yes more than I said no.”
For Dafoe, who, like Alwyn, Stone, and Qualley, is a veteran of Lanthimos’ productions, it helps that the director gives his actors “a great set up.”
“You go there, you try to apply yourself, the words, the actions where you are. He watches you, he thinks about it,” Dafoe says. “It’s not always clear what he wants or what you want, but that’s the process. And there’s a call and response and it’s real pleasure because it’s very concrete. I mean, I’m always struck that he is always reaching and teaches you to reach without being pretentious, without pointing out things. Things are what they are and there’s beauty and strength in things you are doing.”
Plemons, who gives another stellar performance as three very different characters, jokes that his experience with Lantimos is to disagree with his fellow actors’ opinions. He adds, “No, it is a very slow, gradual process that obviously starts with the script, and as Joe said, you feel many different things before you understand why. And a lot of it has to do with trust. The rehearsal process really helps to bypass to intellectualize it in any way, and yeah, the script and the story and sort of immersing yourself, and it just sort of seeps in without you even necessarily asking it to it. I mean I remember even early on after reading the script, a few having the story inside me, but I know where to replace it in my head should be very unsettling place to be. But there’s a lot of trust, and yeah, following your own instinct.”
The rehearsal process is a major part of any Lanthimos film. That’s true for many directors, but in Lanthimos’ case, that’s where the physicality of the characters in his movies takes shape.
“It always starts with us with physicality and trying things and doing things instead of intellectualizing things,” Lanthimos says. “And I think when you have a very solid structure and story and characters, you just need to do it basically. You just need to physically create what ends up being the film in our case. So it is very important for me body, I don’t know, I certainly don’t mistreated at least practically. I think it’s just observing life and a lot of it is dark and hard and also ridiculousness and awkwardness and so we just try incorporate all that.”
Stone reinforced the point that they often don’t discuss what is happening Intellectually.
“He’s very physically oriented, and he really loves dance, obviously, and I really love dance too,” Stone says. “So, even doing ‘Poor Things,’ the things that we would discuss at length were the way she walked and moved, not what was happening underneath the surface. That’s my part of it. And so I think a lot of my relationship, at least to Yorgos in his films, is that, in a way, it’s sort of physicalizing an interior feeling all the time. It’s like Bella’s expression happened through her body. A lot of that expression happens through their body, even when it’s violent or when it’s sexual or whatever might happen. Instead of explaining it, instead of saying it, you’re showing it and hopefully feeling more under the surface our job as actors to bring more to all that physicality.”
After a beat of awkward silence, Stone snaps the room into laughter with, “I don’t know how to button that up.”
A dark triptych centers on characters who either need control in their lives or are trying to escape it; Lanthimos reveals that he and co-screenwriter Efthymis Filippou began working on the script many years ago. And “R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich,” the first chapter in the movie, came to them first. And a notorious Roman Emperor had a hand in it.
“I think my first inspiration was reading about Caligula and just thinking how a man can have such power over other people and other individuals that he came into contact with,” Lanthimos says. “And I just started imagining in our contemporary world, someone who would have complete control over this other person from what time he wakes up, what he eats, if he can get married, sex has an accident, die, all of these things.”
The Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner continues, “During that process we also kind of felt the need to try something different in terms of form to what we’ve done before. So, we decided to make it a triptych. So we made this list of other ideas that we had and we just tried to select two more that again instinctively kind of felt that they belonged in the same world with the first story that we were writing.”
“That’s a mystery, I’m not going to tell you. To our mind, it is the same character. It is the only person who appears in all three stories and you can do what,” Lanthimos says. He then admits, “He’s not a professional actor. So, he loves eating. He was happy to eat and loved to learn to fly a helicopter.”
“Kinds of Kindness” opens in limited release on June 26.