Hello from the Cannes Film Festival. Have you ever worried about being single, finding love and settling down? In the Greek film, The Lobster, if you haven't found your match within a certain amount of days, you're turned into an animal and sent off into the woods.
British actor Ben Whishaw stars alongside French actress, Ariane Labed in this weird film. Let's go meet them.
JOURNO: Ariane and Ben, hello.
BOTH: Hello.
JOURNO: Congratulations on the film. Would you be able to describe it for us?
BEN: You try.
ARIANE: Oh my god. Yeah, it's a film about… relationships and love and human behaviour. How funny our roles can be or the way we deal with them makes us make crazy and stupid stuff. I think it's something about, yeah, how weird we are as an animal, actually, human.
JOURNO: What did you think when you read the script? Because it's quite… It's a unique idea, isn't it?
BEN: It is a weird idea, but at the same time, you understand completely what's being discussed. I was very excited by the originality of the voice, you know, it didn't feel like anything else I'd ever read before. That's very liberating when you read something like that, very exciting.
JOURNO: This idea that people are turned into an animal if they don't succeed in finding a match, mean, do think in the real world there's too much pressure on us to be in a couple?
BEN: I think being in a couple is just what it means to conform to certain expectations of society or perceived expectations of society. There are lots of others as well, aren't there? But It's part of what it means to sort of be a normal, balanced part of society. I do think it's difficult to opt out of that. People automatically think there's something wrong with you, or you're not dealing with something, you're… know what mean?
BEN: I think I've always felt a need to find a partner or to be in love. Something has always been a need for me,
JOURNO: There's lots of pressure on the couples in the film. mean, when you're in the public eye, there's lots of pressure on you as well, especially when you're in relationships. I mean, how do you kind of protect your couple when you're in the public eye? Can you?
BEN: Mm, yeah, you just don't…talk about it, you don't engage in certain things and keep the other person out of it, particularly if they're not involved in that world. I mean, it's a very strange world to be thrown into if you're not a part of it.
JOURNO: And the characters are kind of in this hotel. It's kind like a singles camp or something like that. Do you think there's an ideal way to find a partner in real life?
BEN: It would solve a lot of… heartache, wouldn't it? I mean, it just isn't. It's always going to be complicated and flawed and difficult.
JOURNO: And what do you both think about modern ways to find partners, like internet dating, Tinder, this sort of way that we just look at people and go through and look at them? Do you think that's good for relationships, for meeting people?
BEN: Lots of relationships seem to be flourishing. I know lots of people.
ARIANE: Yeah, my mum is with the man that she met through a website like that and she's with him for eight years or something like that. So I don't really judge it, I just find it weird for my… ..the way I live, the way I meet people. just think it's weird, but I don't judge it.
JOURNO: In the film, your character pretends to be something that he's not. Do think we all do that as humans? Sort of… We can't ever really be who we really are with a person and who we end up with, or is that just in the film?
ARIANE: I hope that's a question that the movie is…
BEN: I think it's an impulse. I think it's an impulse that exists in people to want to… I think it's human, very human. You try and disguise other parts of yourself you don't like. But I don't know whether it's key to a long lasting relationship. Probably not.
JOURNO: What do think the pros are then, or the pros and cons of being single and being in a relationship?
BEN: Well I think it's a mistake to think about it in those terms because it doesn't need to be such a binary thing.
JOURNO: Yorgios Lanthimos is known for having quite a distinctive, weird voice in cinema, in Greek cinema. What was it like working with him?
ARIANE: I really like the fact that he's not talking much and he's very intuitive and very… That's his world, he built it, so we just have to follow him and trust him and go with him. It's great.
JOURNO: What do you think he's trying to say with the movie?
BEN: I don't think he's trying to say anything.
ARIANE: I think what he had to say, he said it in the movie, actually.
BEN: Yeah. And I think it's just raising certain questions. and it's looking at conflicts in people. I think that's what's fascinating about human beings. We have these warring impulses. We want to be in a relationship, but we want independence. How do you live with that?
JOURNO: If you two could be any animal then, if you had to choose, what would it be?
ARIANE: I would love to be a cat, because I just like the way they move.
BEN: Me too, I want to be a cat. Maybe a big cat.
ARIANE: Maybe a lion or something like that, actually, a big strong cat.
