Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are hungry and wolfing down sandwiches at the start of our “Kinds of Kindness” interview (June 21, Searchlight). They are in Cannes to promote the unique three-part anthology film, which has been well received. They laugh a lot. She’s a Yorgos Lanthimos veteran and just won her second Oscar playing the free-spirited Bella Baxter in “Poor Things.” After that, it seems, nothing will anger her and she will do everything for the director of her soul mate. Announced at Cannes: their next film to be shot this summer, “Bugonia” (Focus Features), a remake of a Korean thriller, starring Plemons.
The 36-year-old former child actor is the new kid in town, joining such familiar faces as Stone, Margaret Qualley and Willem Dafoe in the Lanthimos ensemble. When the “Fargo” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” star got the call from his agent, before he had even read the script for “Kinds of Kindness,” he said, “I’m doing it. I read it and “Whoa.” This is going to be a roller coaster.
The cast prepared for the film via Lanthimos’ usual rehearsals, which eschew intellectual discussions in favor of physicality and play time. “It’s like, oh, my God, what do I do?” Stone said. But they also immersed themselves in his old films, those co-written with Efthymis Filippou, “The Lobster”, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “Dogtooth”.
Lanthimos and Filippou wrote the script on and off between other projects for five years. Lanthimos took advantage of the lengthy VFX process on “Poor Things” to move “Kinds of Kindness” forward.
“It made sense to him after we made ‘Poor Things,’ five years after we made ‘The Favorite,'” Stone said. film in the meantime. So it was nine months after the filming of “Poor Things”. Coming back to this world with Efthymis and to a world of his own, it was a feeling of joy for him and therefore for all of us. There are some heavy themes and situations going on so it’s definitely not fun. Except for the dancing part, which I thought was just fun.
Stone came up with the idea of dancing next to a car. “Then we just improvised and spent a while choosing the song and that was really it.” They chose “Brand New Bitch” by Cobrah, which Searchlight used for an early trailer.
The film began with the first story, then expanded into three self-contained shorts that share a world (an anonymous-looking New Orleans) and themes of domination and submission.
“It wasn’t a throwback, but it was like stepping into the worlds that they create,” said Stone, who left behind the period flavors of Tony McNamara’s scripts. “‘The Favorite’ and ‘The Poor Things’ are both technically period films. They were also filmed in Europe. And this was modern America, it was just different in every way. After so many projects together, I enjoyed doing something that Yorgos and Efthymis had written.
“It felt like a return to the form of his previous films,” Plemons said. “But in a way it also felt like a step in a new direction. With such simple themes, yet explored in such a wild way.
After hosting a “Yorgos Film Festival for myself,” Stone said, “Willem and I were talking about this recurring theme of control that’s present in all of them, including ‘Poor Things.’ There is an element of control in all of this. (Yorgos is) clearly attracted to it, to the nature of how we submit to it, or how we try to master it or why we need it and what it means and the freedom to choice. And I saw so much of that in these three stories.
In every episode, you see characters desperate to fit in, belong, and find comfort. It’s heartbreaking to watch, because they have no free will. They cannot function alone.
“These things that we need in the world, or that we need to feel comfortable, are the choices that we make to put ourselves in these positions,” said Stone, who carries the third episode. “There are so many things that she doesn’t have control over, and has tried to control, and she wants to find the Messiah. Out of context, it seems crazy! But you’re fooling yourself into thinking that someone else will fix the problem for you, or that you need a number to tell you what to do.
“They choose to live this way,” said Plemons, who believes the public should be able to interpret these strange stories for themselves. We wonder if his character in the second episode is crazy. I didn’t doubt it. “Do you think so? Did you see the end?” said Pierre.
Lanthimos wants us to question authority, Plemons said: “All these things that we’re taught as humans to just accept, there’s no reflection, not a lot of questioning that goes into these institutions and constructs that we build as people to make us feel. safe and secure. And Yorgos seems to take these simple things that we’ve been conditioned to put all our faith in and not question them, he looks at all of these things in a way that no one else seems to do like he does.
Although making a film with Lanthimos is “never fun,” Stone said, this quieter film put less pressure on her than carrying “Poor Things” herself. “Jesse is definitely the real protagonist of this movie,” Stone said. “But this whole film is also incredible. All the actors who are here (in Cannes), we are all together again, seven or eight. And the movie revolves around these changing characters and we get to be together all the time.
Plemons felt the pressure. “It was really exciting and a little scary,” he said. It didn’t help when its director screened a rough cut of “Poor Things” three or four days before filming began. “OMG, this movie is awesome.”
“He was sitting in the back of the theater group and was absolutely sweating,” Stone said with a laugh.
One of the reasons why the universe is offbeat is the sexual mores followed by the characters. And following the theme of control, “in terms of dynamics, there’s a subdom thing,” Plemons said. Dafoe is often the dominant player.
For Stone, “Poor Things” obviously sparked a lot of discussion about sex. “The most important question was about the sexuality of the film,” she said. “What does this mean for Bella, what else is she learning, all these things she is enthusiastically experiencing in life. I of course understand the sexual component, because it’s a theme that is generally taboo and a bit forbidden and that’s Yorgos’ bread and butter. But I would say that violence is a bigger theme than sex. There is a lot of violence, whether inflicted on people or on ourselves, in the commentary on violence, as well as other types of kindness.