Margaret Qualley. “The most difficult thing for me is to portray a character who dives into the pool naked and drunk”

Sensitive souls or those prone to chronic attention deficits refrain. Types of kindnessYorgos Lanthimos’ new film (Favorite, Poor creatures), presented at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is a challenge to understanding, nerves, even morality. There we find the director’s favorite actors playing different characters over the course of three apparently unrelated mid-length films. In the first, Jesse Plemons (winner of the Best Actor Award at Cannes) plays a man whose life, down to the most intimate, is controlled by another (Wilhelm Dafoe). The second sees him play a husband who refuses to believe that his wife (Emma Stone), who miraculously survived a shipwreck, is really the one he married. And who pushes him to extremes (“Cook me out of your hand for dinner”) to prove it? Finally, the last segment features a woman master of acrobatic braking and a sect that consists of drinking the tears of their gurus in search of a being that can raise the dead.

You didn’t understand anything? You’re not the only one, the most hermetic part of the Lanthimos film community, who has sometimes struggled to grasp the film’s problems. Types of kindness Either way, the filmmaker is allowed to continue exploring his obsessions (control, desire, brutality) in the elegant settings he likes and with actors who now form a veritable troupe around him. Meeting Margaret Quall in Cannes (see Poor creatures) and the Mauritanian-American actor Mamoudou Atti, for whom this is the first foray into the director’s world.

Madame Figaro : What was the biggest challenge for you to overcome in this film?
Mamoudu Atie. Let me be completely inside. I was terrified before I started. I’m a big fan of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films, I absolutely wanted to work with him. But at the same time it scared me a lot. If I wanted to accept the challenge, I had to overcome it and be among them all. Margaret Qualley: For me, and this is the case with every film, the challenge lies in what’s outside the set. Being away from home, going to bed early when you have to be on set at 5am the next day, playing a character who dives into a swimming pool naked and drunk… That’s the hardest thing in my opinion.

Now that the movie exists, what do you remember about this experience?
IM.- It was great. I feel a bit like I’ve graduated, like I’ve grown as an actor. In this sense, I am proud of myself. I allowed myself to take a risk on a shoot that made me very uncomfortable at first, even though I thought I would never do it.

What do you think connects these three stories? Types of kindness ?
IM.- Ever since I read the script, and even more so when I saw the movie, I’ve been fascinated by how it deals with control. How it affects people in different ways, whether it’s from an organization or an individual.
MQ.- I agree. I also had the impression that they were three dreams of the same person. We see different parts of his subconscious emerging, but it all comes from the same place.

What was the atmosphere like on the set? Different from the movie, we imagine…
MQ.- Yes, but at the same time, something in the film is felt from the shooting. Yorgos works a lot with the same actors, his collaboration with Emma (Stone) and Jesse (Plemmons) and Wilhelm (Dafoe) is wonderful. They are all very used to this way of doing things and it is fun to watch them develop. There was also a very intimate aspect: we were a very small team. Robbie, the operator, is a very gentle man, very fast, so everything was moving very quickly.
IM.-Yes, everything seemed very peaceful. And now, here we are in Cannes.