Yorgos Lanthimos wants Kinds of Kindness to make you feel more than discomfort: 'I hope it's not just that'

Yorgos Lanthimos isn’t intentionally trying to make you uncomfortable, but he certainly doesn't mind if you feel that way.

Kinds of Kindness, the latest film from the Greek director behind Poor Things and The Favourite, features a combination of grisly car crashes, severed toes, bizarre relationships, and deadpan dialogue bound to make most viewers shift in their seats. While the director insists he's not going out of his way to be provocative, he's not bothered by that reaction either — as long as it's not the only reaction.

“Great!" Lanthinos tells Entertainment Weekly when asked how he feels about making audiences uncomfortable. "But I don't think it's just that. I hope it's not just that ... We never think about, ‘Oh, if we do this, this is how people are going to react.’ I know very well that we can't control how people are going to react because people are so different. So different people are going to react in different ways. As an artist, you can only make decisions according to how you feel about certain things, and what intrigues you, and where are you going to go next.”

His latest outing (in theaters now) is a three-part anthology film wherein Lanthimos uses the same actors to play different characters in each segment. "We very instinctively put these stories together," explains the director. "Deciding what comes next, what a character does, how they behave, where the story goes — it's just a search, trying to come up with something that you feel curious about that might reveal something about human nature, human behavior."

The first section of the film sees Jesse Plemons play an aimless employee who has an unusually close relationship with his boss, portrayed by Willem Dafoe. The second section also features Plemons as its protagonist — this time, he’s reeling from the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a scientist played by Emma Stone. The two-time Oscar-winning actress, who also worked with Lanthimos on Poor Things and The Favourite, leads the final chapter, which revolves around a bizarre sex cult seeking a messiah with resurrection powers.

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While the third segment includes some of the strangest examples, kinky sex is a bit of a running theme throughout the film. But like other shocking moments in his movies, Lanthimos says it all serves a greater purpose. "It should serve as a specific narrative function," he says. "How that is defined is a much bigger conversation. Whatever we include in the film — sex, violence, humor, emotionality — it all serves a very specific purpose, whether that be you're trying to portray a certain kind of character, a certain kind of tone, or you're trying to muddy the waters about a certain kind of situation that might help other purposes in the film."

The director also says that no matter how dark the material gets, he seeks to maintain a lively spirit on set. "I don't believe so much in having to create a similar atmosphere to what the scene is in order to get it right," he says. "I think many times it's actually quite the opposite. I think you can create quite a fun, funny kind of environment in order to do something very violent or something very dark, and usually, it works better than everybody being depressed in a dark mood."

Lanthimos and longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou, who has written several movies with the director, including The Lobster, Dogtooth, and Killing of the Sacred Deer, originally had ideas for 10 segments. "I don't really remember what the other ideas were," Lanthimos says. "But the actual process was that we started writing that first story, then we had some time off. When we got together again to continue writing this script, both of us kind of felt the need to experiment with form a little bit. So we thought that it might be interesting to make a film that had more than one story. So then we just started exchanging ideas, and we made a list of 10 very basic concepts. Then we just instinctively decided which two would kind of fit the world of that first one that we were writing."

But fear not! Just because Lanthimos' memory is foggy doesn't mean those ideas are lost forever. "I don't really remember what they are, but it's the kind of stuff that we discuss every time we want to start writing a screenplay. So I'm sure some of those concepts will very soon come up, and we'll start developing those as well," he says.

In the meantime, the director already has another project lined up with Plemons and Stone, tentatively titled Bugonia. It’ll be his fifth collaboration with the La La Land actress, who has recently begun using her real name, Emily, in public. “It's great that we can call her Emily now,” Lanthimos says, relieved. "Everybody knows that her real name is Emily. Finally, I'm free."

The creative partnership between the actress and the filmmaker has become so familiar that they have a nearly non-verbal understanding of one another. "We just get each other really well," Lanthimos says. "We like spending time with each other. We're very good friends. We’ve known each other now for so many years that we can just go on about things without having to explain too much to each other. With one glance, we can tell each other what we need to do next without wasting any time. That takes you a long way."