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Sex, rape, cannibals: what Yorgos Lanthimos did after Poor Things
The maverick director and his trusted company of actors on making Kinds of Kindness, the ‘bonkers’ film causing a stir on the Croisette
Willem Dafoe, who stars alongside Stone and Alwyn in the gory shocker, agreed that it is “not always clear” what Lanthimos wants, but that a clarity develops on set through “call and response”, allowing the actors to “find the beauty in the strength of those things” they are asked to do. Dafoe, 68, plays three characters in the film’s anthology format, including a sociopathic businessman and a sex cult leader, and said he was glad to have been accepted into Lanthimos’s repertory company of regular actors after his performance last year alongside Stone in Poor Things. It may not rank at the top of the list of the festival’s most unpalatable fare – say, up with Lars von Trier’s Antichrist of 2009, which also starred Dafoe, or with Gaspar Noé’s notorious Irréversible(2002), but for determined strangeness and extreme content it vies with 2021’s Benedetta, co-written and directed by Paul Verhoeven, or with Michael Winterbottom’s Nine Songs(2004), which was criticised for using real sex scenes.
Or read this on The Guardian
