For Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos Had a Totally Different Approach to World-Building

Photo: Yorgos Lanthimos / Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

For director Yorgos Lanthimos, figuring out the kaleidoscopic world of his Academy Award–winning film Poor Things was a careful process. In the end, the best way to bring the film’s out-there narrative to life was to erect elaborate sets in a studio. For his next film, Kinds of Kindness, the director was eager to return to filming on location, and New Orleans provided the ideal mix of highly unusual spots to bring the multifaceted project to life.

Kinds of Kindness is divided into three completely unrelated parts, each of which riff on the desire to control and be controlled. By virtue of its triptych setup, three times the number of distinct locations were needed compared to a single-narrative film of a comparable scale. For their first time collaborating, instead of extensively talking through what the three worlds of the film looked like at the outset, Lanthimos and Anthony Gasparro, the film’s production designer, embraced the discovery that comes with filmmaking outside of the studio.

“[The process] becomes more of a search instead of trying to find references and ideas and very specifically design something,” Lanthimos tells AD. “I very much welcome that it becomes like a game of chance as well—the kind of houses you’re going to find, the hospitals you’re going to find, how those fit in together. It’s a puzzle that you have to put together.” The process is a lot different from the meticulous early stages of planning sets in the studio, and that openness to discovery is exactly what Lanthimos was after this time around.

The film’s first part, “The Death of R.M.F.,” follows a man named Robert (Jesse Plemons) whose entire life—including his meal times, ability to have a child, and even his home’s security code—is controlled by his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). The two characters’ houses illustrate their dynamic: Robert’s ranch home is perfectly contemporary, the stylish ideal of a millennial family home, but it is absent of the personal idiosyncrasies that a man who cares to make his own choices might put in place. By contrast, from the exterior alone, Raymond’s 18th-century home makes it clear that he’s distinguished. Inside, it’s full of distinct touches selected by Gasparro and his team to make it clear that he’s a highly discerning man. The main living space, which Gasparro crafted as a space for Raymond “to hold court,” features a mix of antiques, including a massive Biedermeier sofa, some modern pieces, and artwork by Julian Schnabel.

“R.M.F. is Flying,” the film’s second part, follows Daniel (Plemons), a man whose wife, Liz (Emma Stone), doesn’t seem like herself when she returns home after being lost at sea. With wood paneling, a normal amount of clutter, and a humble stained glass panel in the window, the couple’s house provides a humdrum backdrop that foils the disturbing events that take place inside. Lanthimos hoped to work with natural light more in this film, compared to the studio-based Poor Things, and the primary bedroom, with two huge windows framing the bed, gave the director the ability to do so.

“I never imagined their home that way, I couldn’t really imagine it that well, so we just went on a search and saw different things,” Lanthimos explains. “As soon as I saw that house, I was very excited because it had an atmosphere kind of embedded into it. Of course, we did take a lot of stuff out and we made it appropriate for the characters, but the bones of that house were very present.” Although Gasparro was hesitant to settle on the location because of its extremely small footprint, he knew Lanthimos was right to insist on it as soon as the daily footage came in.

The most striking location Lanthimos and Gasparro used for the film appears in the third section, “R.M.F. Eats A Sandwich,” which follows two cult members on the hunt for a resurrector. Lanthimos and Gasparro knew from the start that the cult’s massive lake house would be the slipperiest piece of the puzzle to grasp. They suspected New Orleans would deliver them an amazing cult house, and they were proved right when they found a bizarre ’90s mansion on Lake Pontchartrain. The homeowners were happy to let the team drain their massive pool and build out the cult’s requisite cistern atop it. “I don’t really know any other homeowners anywhere that would let you get away with doing all this stuff,” Gasparro says. “It was such a joy to create this whole sort of commune at that one location.”

Regardless of which part of the film they were deciding on, whether it was a restaurant, a home, or a morgue, Gasparro’s key realization was that a fair dose of oddity is always welcome in Lanthimos’s world. “I don’t know if they have wizards in Greece, but I think of Yorgos as like a Greek wizard,” Gasparro tells AD. “He’s thinking about things on [such] a level that it takes you a little bit of time, when you first start to work with him, to kind of trust him implicitly, of course; but then [to see] the way that he sees locations…. Things that you think would not normally make sense actually make sense in his universe.”

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

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