Everyone wanted to know about the nudity and bawdy sex scenes in Searchlight’s Kinds of Kindness at the pic’s riotous Cannes press conference, but politely referred to it as “physicality”.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest, an anthology of three short films, covers plenty of off-kilter people with absurd attractions to each other, amid various perversions including stalking, finger chopping, and orgies. Oh, there’s also a twin motif going on.
Fielding questions about the bawdy scenes in his movie, Lanthimos said, “Physicality is very important and body language” in his movies.
“I very often start form that…our rehearsal process always starts with physicality instead of intellectualizing things,” the 5x Oscar nominated filmmaker responded.
“It’s just observing life,” said the filmmaker about the spicyness in his canon, “a lot of it is dark and ridiculous and awkwardness, we try to inform all of that.”
Emma Stone, who just won a Best Actress Oscar for Lanthimos’ Poor Things, echoed, “we really don’t’ discuss intellectually what is happening because their physically oriented and he wants to dance.”
“The things we discuss at length (during Poor Things) is how she walked in the movie; what was happening under the surface, that’s my part of it,” said Stone. In sum, the process in a Lanthimos movie is about “physicalizing a feeling in her body.”
Stone expounded later, “I am a feminist whether there’s activism or not…When it comes to these stories, these are just stories that feel interesting to me as an actor” before underscoring, “I’m a feminist and like working with Yorgos Lanthimos.”
Hammered with more questions about feminism and starring in Lanthimos’ adult-oriented pics, Stone reached out to the actresses on the dais, Hunter Schafer and Margaret Qualley, and tried to pull them into the conversation: “What about the other girls up here?”
Qualley, who was donning an enormous sun hat, beamed in response to the press, “Do you like my hat?” which got a great roar from the room.
Lanthimos latest in Cannes received a six-minute standing ovation at its Grand Theatre Lumiere premiere. The pic is the Greek filmmaker’s fourth at the festival following 2009’s Dogtooth, 2015’s The Lobster and 2017’s The Killing of the Sacred Deer.
Dogtooth wound up winning the Jury Prize, Un Certain Regard Award and the Youth Award and went on to launch the filmmaker to global audiences, becoming Greece’s Oscar entry and International Film nominee. The Lobster here at Cannes would win the Jury Prize and Queer Palm with Killing of a Sacred Deer nothing a Best Screenplay win at the fest.
The movie opens June 21 via Disney’s Searchlight stateside.