Kinds of Kindness, the latest film by world-renowned Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, co-written with Efthimis Filippou, premiered at Cannes Film Festival on Friday.
Presented by Searchlight Pictures in association with Film4 and TSG Entertainment, the Elements Pictures production features a three-story narrative, starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie and Hunter Schafer.
Casting 5 étoiles sur les Marches 🌟 5 stars casting on the Steps
KINDS OF KINDNESS – YÓRGOS LÁNTHIMOS🔎 Emma Stone, Joe Alwyn, Hong Chau, Willem Dafoe, Yórgos Lánthimos, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer#Cannes2024 #Competition… pic.twitter.com/veDF1o8Yel
— Festival de Cannes (@Festival_Cannes) May 17, 2024
The film’s creators and stars walked the red carpet of the world’s most prestigious film festival on the French Riviera in one of the most anticipated premieres of the institution’s 77th edition.
Lanthimos’ new film is an anthology of stories
Kinds of Kindness saw Lanthimos work with key people who have always shared his vision and he has already achieved great accomplishments with them.
Producers Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe of Element Pictures have produced all of Lanthimos’ English language films; and with co-writer Efthimis Filippou, Lanthimos has collaborated on multiple Greek and English language projects, including Dog Tooth, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and The Lobster, which earned them both an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay.
As about cast, this is the director’s third feature-length film with his muse Emma Stone, the two of them having collaborated in the artistic short film Bleat as well. For the new movie, they also reunite with Willem Dafoe – who, as Lanthimos states, simply loves the art of filmmaking.
Described as a triptych fable, Kinds of Kindness follows “a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.”
According to Lanthimos, the idea for the film had taken on multiple narrative forms over the years, eventually evolving into an anthology as they wrote it with Filippou.
“We had started out with one story, but as we were working on it, we thought that it might be interesting to make a film that has a different structure to what we had done before,” Lanthimos explains. “As we identified the subsequent stories, we wanted to keep a thematic thread, so it felt as if it all belonged under the same umbrella.”
“With an anthology, you bring whatever you’ve been thinking about from the first story into the next. It is more complex and more engaging. Different people identify different themes, which is a hugely interesting structure,” the director added.
Lanthimos’ return to “a simpler form of filmmaking”
Lanthimos’ new film marks his return to a simpler form of filmmaking, very different from the period setting of his most recent box office hits, The Favourite and Poor Things.
Producers Guiney and Lowe had a number of films in development with the director but saw Kinds of Kindness as a more straightforward project.
“On the face of it, this felt like a less complicated film because it is location-based, with natural lighting and contemporary costumes,” says Guiney. “We took a chunk of time from the Poor Things post-production process and went off and made this reasonably quickly.”
“A window opened up and Yorgos focused on editing while we turned our attention to figuring out how we shoot for a budget, and where,” adds Lowe.
Lanthimos himself was also pleased by the switch, which set him free from relying on studio builds and extensive lighting.
“It was a huge weight off our shoulders, notwithstanding the other usual complications that come with filmmaking. It felt good to be able to go around and look at locations, not having to think that things need to be built from scratch,” he stated.
Nonetheless, Lanthimos’ filmmaking ingenuity still shines through in his new film, and one will notice among the most intriguing aspects of the film, in terms of directing, the concept of the same actors playing a different character in each story, “to build a sense of familiarity for the audience”.
From one character to the next, the actors have subtle visual differences, in hair and makeup, and in their behavior and mannerisms.
“Having the same actor go from one story to the next adds a sense of continuation on a subconscious level. It was more about the actors changing speed and energy than anything else,” Lanthimos believes.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ movies become box office hits
Born in Athens, Greece, Lanthimos began his career directing several dance videos in collaboration with Greek choreographers, in addition to TV commercials, music videos, short films, and theater plays.
His first feature film, Kinetta, premiered at the 2005 Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals to critical acclaim, but it wasn’t until 2009 that Lanthimos launched to international attention with his second feature film, Dogtooth, which won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival and nominated him for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
The director’s first English language feature film The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, won the Jury Prize at the 68th Cannes Film Festival, earning Lanthimos and co-writer Filippou an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
His next film, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, also starring Colin Farrell plus Nicole Kidman and Barry Keoghan, was nominated for the Cannes Palme d’Or and won Best Screenplay while it also received multiple Independent Spirit and European Film Award nominations.
Lanthimos’ most recent feature film Poor Things, written by Tony McNamara and adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, grossed over $115 million at the global box office.
Having won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival, where it world premiered, it was nominated for 11 BAFTA and 11 Academy Awards, eventually winning five BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, and four Oscars.
Similarly, Lanthimos’ previous film, The Favourite, written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara and starring Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone, was also a critically acclaimed box office hit. It received 10 Oscar nominations -earning Colman the Best Actress award- plus 12 BAFTA nominations and seven wins, Golden Globe nominations, and a record 10 British Independent Film Awards.
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