Yorgos Lanthimos on screenwriting, directing actors

In director Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” as enthusiasts of the director might be expecting, there are events that defy rational explanations. For example, in “The Death of RMF”, the first story of the “Kindness” triptych, the viewer does not understand how and why an apparently benevolent boss (Willem Dafoe) has Robert (Jesse Plemons) But there is so much power, that he happily acquiesces to his employer’s extraordinary requests to make love to his wife (Hong Chau) from time to time, secretly poisoning her drink so that she will never get pregnant. Ho (she is led to believe that she is infertile), and forcefully agrees to drive her car into another car at the prospect of catastrophic trauma. There’s a touch of the surreal, or even a pinch of the supernatural, in two of the stories to watch, though more than the rest, Lanthimos is able to push the audience into the center of those darkly comic events in one of these ways. They are taken at face value.

On the Future of the Toolkit podcast, Lanthimos was once asked how he and co-screenwriter Efthymis Filippou were able to do this without the traditional first employment setup and the exposure of feature films the collaborators wrote together in the past. (“The Lobster,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” “Dogtooth”), and so the audience isn’t looking for backstory to provide an explanation for the over-the-top control/presentation dynamics in every other movie. 3 Snip Tales.

Lanthimos said, “It requires more attention (in terms of screenwriting), but most of all it requires that you leave it.” “If you let things go and accept them as they come, I think it becomes easier to get into it, then you start to connect with your kind of ideas about what it’s like. is, and where it goes, and I find that very gratifying.”

The viewer brings his own instinctive reactions to fill in the blanks, something the director also asks of his actors. Lanthimos joins first-time actor Jesse Plemons in “Kindness,” joining the store’s avid gamers Emma Stone and Dafoe. The director isn’t one to turn to actors for personality inspiration and then to story.

“It’s difficult because I don’t have a lot to give (actors) if that’s their primary need,” Lanthimos said. “The inspiration and the background, and all that kind of stuff, I mean, I didn’t even think about it when I was writing the script. I think the information I can give them is already in the script.

This goes against the grain of Hollywood principles of great screenwriting, in which gurus instruct writers to do the leg work of laying out the foundation of your story’s world (no matter how fictional) and the events relevant to your story. , so that even without offering exposition the stage and characters actually come across to the target audience. Although Lanthimos and Filippou rarely remain idle, they worked on the script for five years, with the project evolving significantly through its few iterations until finding the right director they felt was capable of making the film. They abandon this aspect because their goals and efforts lie elsewhere.

At all levels of the filmmaking process, including screenwriting, Lanthimos is going to great lengths to seal the world of his story with a special genuine international park, the history, the length – everything else that allows audiences to connect with human behavior. Refers to the camera is looking. Take, for example, the film’s Fresh Orleans setting. The cinematography is naturalistic, the locations are real, and but in the hands of Lanthimos and his longtime staff of collaborators certain cities on the planet are stripped of their distinctive tradition and vibe, turning into a stand-in for a typical American. The town/city with a beautiful and relaxing climate, pond and optional miscellaneous highlights was what Lanthimos wanted for this story.

“We wouldn’t necessarily try to hold it in that particular (city),” Lanthimos said. “I don’t mind if people recognize it, it’s just that it was never our intention to make it obvious where it was.”

By sealing off the world of his story, preventing the audience from drawing connections to the outside world, we are left to see both the horror and bleak comedy of human behavior in the film and to express our own instinctive reactions to what we are seeing. goes. This may be what Lanthimos wants from his talented actors, and over the years he has developed a theater camp-like practice session process to achieve the physical, spontaneous and ambitious performances that can be so distinctive and important for his films. .

Rehearsals are workout routines, regular “silly theater games”, which are not actually rehearsals of scenes. For example, at Lanthimos the actors can learn their tracks by playing the musical chairs game throughout the day. Or he would make a special offer to an actor, for example, “Come up and get a cup of water while you speak.” Talking about the exercise routines, Lanthimos described his purpose behind them.

“The actor focuses more on the action, as well, on trying to learn and remember their lines, so they don’t sit in them in a very rational way, thinking, ‘Oh, how would I say that? What does it mean? Should I put another layer?’ That’s basically how we talk in life, we don’t really think about it that much,” Lanthimos said. “When the text enters them that way, they’re free to try things and be present and react to the other actor on the day, rather than thinking too much about their character.”

The lightness and laughter that comes from the workout routine is also impressive for Lanthimos. As with anything, his personal response to horror is to find the humor first, and he wants the cast to get a good handle on it too, but more importantly, he wants the camaraderie that comes from practice. .

“It allows them to be kinder to each other, to trust each other more, to know that they can do anything and the other person won’t be judgmental because you’ve been through all that and you’ve Every stupid thing you did was another person’s,” Lanthimos said. “I think it’s very important that they feel this way, it unlocks their creativity and makes them more adventurous about their choices.”

It’s this milieu that allows something like Stone to indulge in her unapologetic dance at the end of the film, and it’s shown in the “Kindness” trailer. Lanthimos said his curriculum is more inspiring when he sees the bold choices he makes. These include, “But it’s very comfortable. I’m not saying, ‘Oh, that’s not right because this character, 10 years ago, I thought they did this.’ It’s just about tone and how it relates to the rest of the story, or the characters, or the general perception and taste about things.

“Kinds of Kindness” opened extremely well in five theaters in New York and Los Angeles on June 21, and will expand to more cities in the near future, before hitting nearly 1,000 screens in July.