Willem Dafoe On Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘Kinds Of Kindness’: “It Makes You Question Social Conditioning” – Cannes Studio

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness premiered on Friday at Cannes, and earlier that day, in an interview at the Deadline studio, the director explained his vision for his new anthology film, written with his The Favourite collaborator, Efthimis Filippou:

“We told each other, should we try a different structure for a film? And we thought about making an anthology, and actually in the beginning, you were supposed to follow the three stories in parallel, but then I had this idea of the same actors playing different characters in the different stories, but that would have been very confusing. And we decided to see how it would work if we separated the stories, and actually they became even stronger.”

Kinds of Kindness follows three separate groups of characters in the three separate storylines as they navigate romance, outlandish control issues, and some body horror along the way.

“It’s like three short stories, basically,” Lanthimos said. “So just by its nature there’s not so much information for the characters or their backstory. Apart from the fact that I like that anyway, to throw people into a world, into certain situations, and to try and figure that out, I find it more engaging.”

The project sees Lanthimos reteaming with Poor Things‘ Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, and bringing in Hong Chau (The Whale), Mamoudou Athie (Underwater) and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria).

For Dafoe, regrouping with the Poor Things team was a pleasure. “Every movie is different and what you need to do, how you’ve got to fold into the world is different and this was so different. But I was happy to see Emma and Yorgos, it was a nice reunion in that respect, but it was also very different, a contemporary thing, three different roles.”

Dafoe’s costumes were a particularly stand-out experience, he said. At one point, in a cult storyline, he sports a speedo with a pink sweater over it. “I don’t think I’ve ever done so many fittings,” he said. “And it wasn’t so much about the cut or anything, or the fabrics, it was more about stuff that was pulled to help figure out who this character might be… that was a very important part to distinguish each character for me.”

Chau said she “didn’t do a lot of thinking, to be honest” to parse out her different roles within the anthology. “I just showed up every day and tried to say yes and work off of what everybody else was doing, and tried to play with what was in front of me… I didn’t want to be analytical… because you’re going to get something different each time you watch the film, and then just doing different takes you get something different… I think when you get a little bit too brainy about it, it just dies.”

“The beautiful thing is there’s recognizable aspects of it,” Dafoe said, “but it’s a little skewed… for me it makes you question social conditioning and certain things that we just take as a given. It’s not perverse, it’s just playing with transposing things.”

For Qualley, the experience of Kinds of Kindness was much more expansive than her shorter time on the set of Poor Things.

“For Poor Things, I was just there for a couple of days, so I was really just like a fly on the wall observing everything… [on Kinds of Kindness] you look at someone like Willem for example. I really admire the way that he does it… if he’s going to be in a scene that day, he’ll be there probably all day, just watching everything else, in his costume, he’s already done his Ashtanga practice for 60 minutes in the morning, he’s just prepared and ready and then you’ve got Emma and she and Yorgos have this really intense relationship and shorthand. It very much feels like they’re making these movies together.”

Athie added, “I keep on describing this movie as a fever dream and that was kind of the experience of making it for me as well, because I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know what’s going on. But there was a lot of honesty I felt like, between the people we were working with. And it was just very open in a way.”

Schafer said the call to join the cast came out of the blue. “I got an email one day from Yorgos and he just said, ‘I have this small role in this movie, we’ve been making, we’re almost done with it, do you want to come and play in New Orleans for a day?’”

The movie called for some nudity, but both Qualley and Schafer felt comfortable, they said.

“Aesthetically, you’re co covered. He’s a true aesthetic genius, so at least from that perspective that’s nice,” Qualley said. “But I guess for me it’s a bit like ‘Eh F–k it.’ I’ve already brought shame upon my family, she joked. “This is better than a lot of shameful things.”

The Deadline Studio is presented by Neom.