“Kinds of Kindness:” Yorgos Lanthimos Made the Feel-Bad Movie of the Year

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.

“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.”

READ MORE: Yorgos Lanthimos Says He’s Not Trying to Make Audiences Uncomfortable with ‘Kinds of Kindness’ (IndieWire)

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.

“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.”

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.

READ MORE: Review: ‘Kinds of Kindness’ Shines a Floodlamp on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Worst Tendencies (Slant)

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.”

READ MORE: Yorgos Lanthimos: ‘Are rules beneficial? Or is it beneficial to also break them?’ (The Independent)

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