It hasn’t been 3 months since Emma Stone won her second Oscar for her role in Yórgos Lánthimos’ Poor Things, and the inseparable duo is already back, this time at the Cannes Film Festival, to introduce their new movie, Kinds 0f Kindness. This three-part anthology movie features an all-star cast including Jesse Plemons, who just won Best Actor at Cannes for Kinds of Kindness, but also Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Hunter Schafer and Mamoudou Athie.

Kinds of Kindness will certainly divide opinions. People who discovered Lánthimos’ work with Poor Things might certainly be taken aback by this one. However, most of his earlier fans were pleasantly surprised to discover a story in the same vein as The Killing of a Sacred Deer or The Lobster.

There is not one single answer or correct interpretation to try and define what Kinds of Kindness is trying to do. The different stories all study our relationship to kindness and its definition. The movie test the limits of every character, in every way possible. Lánthimos pushes the situations to the extreme and in these extreme cases, suggests that kindness and our pathological -but ultimately human- need to be loved could be the end of us. How far can one go for love, respect and acceptance?

I asked Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons if after reading the script, they decided to share their own take with everyone else, in order to see the movie under a new light.

Stone said, “The only person I talked to about these ideas was Jesse, and only a little bit. We talked about what we thought it was saying, and even as we shot it, I think a lot of these ideas changed within me. So I think we feel like you do, in a way.” She added: “It is fun and interesting because the interpretations are so open and as an actor, I love this sort of, whatever I want to make it, I can make it. There is no right or wrong here, there is no rules to it.”

To tell these stories in music, Lánthimos asked Jerskin Fendrix to compose the score, which marks their second collaboration after Poor Things. The score acts like another character, accompanying the stories of all these protagonists as if it was their fate, glooming over each and every one of them.

So I asked the cast if the soundtrack added to the way they understood the story and the characters they played. Emma Stone, who under her blazer, was wearing a t-shirt with Jerskin Fendrix written on it, proudly took the occasion to show it off.

She said, “That’s a great question. The interesting way that Jerskin works with Yórgos is that he doesn’t read it, he does not know what the film is about. He does it in advance, so that it could be edited to his music. So Yórgos gives him some keywords, and Jerskin’s like ‘That’s all I need to know’ and goes away. For Poor Things, I heard the entire score before we stared filming, so it’s very interesting because it does feel like you’re living in that score while you’re even making it. He’s a genius, he just turned 28.”

Plemons also praised Fendrix. He said, “I was very lucky because there’s a sequence in the beginning that we probably shot, maybe the second week or so, in the bar restaurant that Robert frequents. Jerskin is playing that beautiful, heart-wrenching song, that I was hearing live for the first time. Getting that was such a gift, and I secretly recorded it on my iPhone.”

He then answered to Emma Stone who called Fendrix a genius. He said, “That was my first introduction to him, that’s the takeaway, I was like, ‘Where does this person come from? ’”

Mamoudou Athie revealed one aspect of the score that really impacted his view on the film. He said, “What I thought was interesting when I first saw it, is that it opens on Sweet Dreams, that meant something to me. The whole movie felt like a fever dream.”

The opening sequence in question resonated a lot with the audience at Cannes as well, so much that during the first press screening of Kinds of Kindness, everyone started clapping as soon as they heard the famous Eurythmics song. I asked Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie what it meant for them, as storytellers, to be able to bring one long, big movie to the big screen, even though it was cut into three short stories. Were they trying to find the common threads between the stories, or were they acting like they were completely different movies?

Margaret Qualley said, “I relied on the fact that, I’m not that good of an actor, I will be the common thread. I better treat it like three different movies, four different people, because at the end of the day it will still be me and that all tied together.”

Kinds of Kindness will be released in theaters on June 21.