Yorgos Lanthimos and Jesse Plemmons Love Their Filmmaking Cult

“Sicko Yorgos is back,” declared our film critic Bilge Ebiri after seeing Lanthimos’s latest, Kinds of Kindness, which premiered this week in competition at Cannes. This film feels definitively closer to the director’s pitch-black, degradation-filled Dogtooth and The Killing of a Sacred Deer than it does to his more recent Poor Things and The Favourite, both of which offer up a semblance of hopefulness about the state of humanity. There’s no such assurance in Kinds of Kindness, which is an anthology of abject debasement that comprises three parts, all starring the same actors in a variety of roles: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie, plus cameos from Hunter Schafer, among others.

Plemons is the only actor who plays a lead role in all three sections, each of which explores themes of control, obedience, free will, cult-like idolatry, and the strange societal mores that most of us follow without questioning in a desperate attempt to belong to something, to be loved. His characters here are tormented and lost, one compelled by a godlike father figure to run over an innocent stranger, another convinced their wives are imposters, and, in two of the three segments, sexually and emotionally obsessed with Dafoe. The day after the film’s premiere, I sat down with Lanthimos and Plemons in a hotel room set up with some very intense microphones and cameras to talk about Kinds of Kindness.

Yorgos Lanthimos: It should feel like we’re being interrogated.

It does. It’s very intense in here. Yorgos, we actually spoke a couple of months ago about Poor Things with Emma.
Jesse Plemons: It’s crazy that’s just a couple of months ago.

I’m like, “How did he just put out another movie?”
Y.L.: Well, I’ll tell you.

I know at the press conference you mentioned Caligula as inspiration for this. I’m interested in the seed of the idea for you, and at what point you started thinking about it.
Y.L.: First of all, whenever we finish something with co-writer Efthimis Filippou, because we’re working together for such a long time and we’re very good friends, we just start writing something new or we start searching for an idea. That started many years ago, right after we finished The Killing of a Sacred Deer together. We started writing this and the spark was me reading Caligula and going to Efthimis and saying, “What if we made that on a very personal level?” Like, one man having such control over another man’s life.

Then I think soon after we just had a need to experiment with form a little bit. We started thinking of a triptych. We made a list of ideas that he had and I had, and we combined them and then chose a couple that felt that they belonged in the same world, and started writing. Then the idea of the same actors playing a different part in each story came about, so that changed it. That happened over many years. We actually made Poor Things, and it allowed us to also revisit what we’re writing with Efthimis after some time and see it in a different light.

Eventually when we were in post-production on Poor Things and we reached the final stage of the VFX, we already had this script that was very mature. We said, “Instead of just me sitting around waiting for VFX shots, why don’t we go and shoot this so we have it in the can, and then we can get back to it after we finish everything Poor Things-related?” That’s how it came so soon after, but at the same time, it was a very long process to get it made.

Jesse, can you tell me about receiving the script and your initial reactions to it? There are a lot of very strange, sort of depraved things that you’re asked to do. What did you think when you first read it?
J.P.: I’ve been an enormous fan of Yorgos’ work since I saw Dogtooth years ago. I think, like Willem has said, I wasn’t even really humoring the idea of potentially one day working with him. It came along and I was like, “Sure, I’ll read the script, but I don’t see a scenario where I don’t do this.” I read the script and was amazed at how much it made me feel and how many sort of very intense, visceral emotions it brought up. Then at the end I was like, Why? What has happened to me? Now this is in me, and I don’t know where to put any of this, and I feel very strange. I remember having that sort of conversation with my wife, just like, “I am feeling all these things, and I don’t know how to make sense of it.” We spoke after I read it, and then not too long after I flew to New Orleans to rehearse.

You guys hadn’t worked together before, but Jesse, you’re really the only person who has a consistent lead role across all three. Yorgos, how did you know, or what about him made you think, Okay, he’s going to be the main guy?
Y.L.: I’d just seen his work over the years and it was always in my mind. Even for Poor Things I think we checked and he wasn’t available.

J.P.: [Shakes his head]. That’s crazy.

Y.L.: He was always in my mind and I always wanted to work with him, and I had no question in my mind that, as an actor, at least, he’d be great. But for us, it’s also that this kind of troupe is being created. It’s also working with good people, and that you understand each other, and get along — there’s that aspect of it that is very important. Now that we’ve been working with Emma for so long, and Willem, and Margaret, and now Jesse — all these people that you add to a kind of family of people where you understand each other, and can work comfortably, and have the same goal and not have different things in mind that are beyond what we’re actually creating.

Just like the cult in the third section.
Y.L.: [Laughs.] Yeah, like the cult in the third one. Exactly like that! We’re a cult now.

I read an interview with Willem where he was saying how, when he read the script, he wasn’t exactly sure what it was about. Jesse, did you come away feeling like, Oh, I understand exactly what is going on here?
J.P.: The first time I read it? No, no. Boy, I would love to talk to someone that felt that way. No, but then that is exciting, for it to evoke such strong feelings and then, on an intellectual level, to have very little clue — that’s extremely exciting.

Over time, do you feel like you came to an understanding of it?
J.P.: Yes, but it’s hard to articulate at the same time. It’s like, fleeting, and then it changes, but it’s a constant discovery, and evolution, and constant stepping off the ledge and getting more comfortable with that. Like he said, this sort of troupe that he’s built, not just with the actors but with the crew, creates an atmosphere that is palpable and you can feel when there’s this — going back to the cult analogy — this group mind, you know?

Y.L.: This is a group mind. Only one goal.

The film is tonally similar across all of the three anthology sections, but you’re playing someone just a little bit different. How did you tweak your performance slightly in each, but without really tweaking the tone at all?
Y.L.: That was one of the few things I’d actually talked about with you.

J.P.: Basically, “Don’t go crazy.”

Y.L.: “Don’t go crazy with the different characters.” For me, that was a thing I knew when I made the decision that it is going to be the same actors playing different parts in the different stories. It was very clear to me from the beginning — although many things weren’t — but it was clear that they shouldn’t try and disguise themselves and do something totally different, because that kind of defeats the purpose of selecting the same actors. Because what I think is interesting in doing that is that, although the characters themselves don’t really have any connection, the fact that you do follow one actor from one story to the next, it kind of brings a continuity that you can’t explain literally. You can’t understand it, but subconsciously it happens. So I think it enriches story after story, the fact that it’s the same actor. But then if they were trying to do something totally different, it would become more about the performance and how different they can be as actors rather than serving that kind of idea that there is a connection. We don’t know what it is, but we feel this connection between the stories just because it’s the same people in different parts. It’s almost like it’s a different life of the same character.

J.P.: A reincarnation, almost.

Y.L.: Yeah, like it’s a reincarnation.

J.P.: I mean, I’ve never thought that and don’t want to put a title on it, but it kind of felt like that.

Y.L.: No, I think that whenever I see the film. Especially with Jesse, because the next one starts with him. As soon as I see him with his police uniform when he goes to pick up his wife’s dog tag, I go, “That’s a different life of his.” It does have that feeling. We’re not saying it and we don’t expect everyone to think that specifically, but there is a connection. So I think that was important and I shared it with all the actors. I mean, there’s going to be all these tweaks in appearance or whatever so it’s separate enough, but to not go overboard and try and make it about how different we can be in the different stories.

Jesse, was that stressful for you or more difficult? To play someone who was just subtly tweaked across the three stories. Yorgos, from talking to you previously I know you don’t like to talk a ton about characterization and motivation, and Jesse’s characters here are all struggling with wanting to feel controlled and wanting to feel like someone’s telling them what to do, as well. So I thought that was an interesting parallel.
J.P.: Well then you’ve got Andrew (of the cult section), who kind of feels slightly different, but is still looking to be Omi’s (the cult leader, played by Dafoe) number one, which is never going to happen. It was an exciting sort of balance to try and find. It doesn’t feel like you’re just playing dress up, I guess, but then also doesn’t feel like you’re making a show of it. That, in the beginning, was maybe something I was a little stressed about, but you just start and hope for the best.

There’s a real darkness to this film that is different from Poor Things, and I think much more akin to your earlier work. The critical consensus is that this is sort of a return to form for you in that way. Some people have been saying that this is sort of like a “fuck you” to the idea that you’ve “gone Hollywood,” Yorgos. Does that resonate for you at all?

YL: No, but I love the fact that people call —

J.P.: He’s so Hollywood.

Y.L.: — people now call Poor Things “Hollywood,” which was a film that we’re striving to make for 12 years and everybody was going like, “You’re fucking crazy. We’re never making that film.” And now it’s “Hollywood”? Of course we didn’t compromise on anything in that film, either. In the beginning, I was irritated. I was like, “Oh, now Poor Things is the norm?” But then I went, “You know what? That’s not a bad thing, actually,” that people think that Poor Things is kind of an everyday, normal Hollywood film.

Anyway. I don’t feel that because I don’t feel I’ve changed so much over this course. Now, again, we have another script with Efthimis. If it happens to be right after Kinds of Kindness because of the circumstances, or if I make this very different film — actually, I am going to make a very different film. We’re going to make it together. [Editor’s note: The film is Begonia, starring Plemons and Stone.]

Everybody knows now. If I make something, it’s just a little bit random and circumstantial. I keep working on the stuff that I like and whatever feels ripe, we just go out and make it. The Favourite and Poor Things were things that I wrote with a different writer but also were — one was based on a real story, the other one is based on a novel. Of course they feel different. But, I mean, they were still things I was very interested in making, and I had no compromise in making, and people were thinking I was crazy for wanting to make them. For me it’s just been a continuous kind of journey, and I’ll just keep going wherever it feels right.