“Lanthimos does not seek to fit into any category or label anything”

This Friday, June 28, it hits theaters ‘Kinds of Kindness’, the new film by Yorgos Lanthimos. After the success of ‘Poor creatures’,with which Emma Stone won the Oscar for best actress, the Greek filmmaker repeats with the American actress as the protagonist in a film whose cast also includes names such as Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley or Jesse Plemons. All of them, Pleemons recalls, had to face the “challenge” of interpreting three different characters for this film of crossed stories and also do it for a director as “singular” as Lanthimos.

“Yorgos is a teacher in a very concrete and unique way and at this time it is very stimulating and encouraging to meet someone who is not trying to fit into any category. and that, if one is presented to him, he is willing to break it,” says the actor in an interview for Europa Press in which he acknowledges that Lanthimos’ cinema can be “very elusive, ambiguous, difficult to understand”.

“But he’s also extremely warm and you know you can count on him. He cares a lot and He never tries to label anything or lock himself or any of us into one way of thinking.. It’s a very experimental way of working, and I love that,” summarizes the American actor who He admits that the first time he read the script for ‘Kinds of Kindness’ he thought he didn’t understand “much” and experienced “different emotions” although he jumped in and accepted the project to work with Lanthimos.

In any case, the ‘Civil War’ or ‘The Power of the Dog’ actor remembers that “the more I read it, the more rehearsals I did with their subsequent debates, the more it began to make sense.” “Yorgos is not one of those who gives you too many answers. It can be frustrating at first, but then you start to appreciate it.“I feel that I am getting closer to discovering for myself what is most striking about each story and what is most exciting. It is the most interesting way to access a project of this magnitude,” he says.

And as he progressed on this journey of discovery of the stories that make up Lanthimos’ film, which he defines as “gradual process“, he became convinced of something that the public will also experience in movie theaters, that in ‘Kinds of Kindness’ “nothing is one thing.”

THREE STORIES, THE SAME FACES

Lanthimos’ film, in which he once again featured Efthimis Filippou to sign the script after working together on ‘Lobster’, ‘Canine’ and ‘The Sacrifice of a Sacred Deer’ It is a fable in the form of a triptych that tells three different stories interpreted by the same characters. That of a trapped man who tries to take control of his own life, that of a policeman terrified because his wife, who had disappeared at sea, has returned and looks like a different person and, finally, the story of a woman determined to find someone with a special gift, destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.

“What I like is that it is never the same; Each time is a completely new experience and a totally new set of things to learn and discover. “I think that searching for a territory where I have not lived is also part of that process,” concludes Plemons, who won the award for best actor at the last edition of the Cannes International Film Festival thanks to this work.

Together with Stone and Plemons, they complete the cast of ‘Kinds of Kindness’ Williem Dafoe (‘The lighthouse’), Margaret Qualley (‘Poor creatures’), Hong Chau (‘Asteroid City’), Joe Alwyn (‘The favourite’), Mamoudou Athie (‘Jurassic World: Dominion’) y Hunter Schafer (‘The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’).