The Idiot(s) premiered at Telluride on Friday night and heads to Toronto next, and if the film is even half as chaotic as its making sounds, that's saying something.

Johnny Flynn and Aimee Lou Wood play Fyodor Dostoevsky and his lover Anna in the film, directed by Polish filmmaking duo Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, set during the period the writer worked on his novel The Idiot. Flynn told The Hollywood Reporter the shoot involved a lot that wasn't even on the page. Improvisation, mostly. And a fair amount of surrender.

Here's the part that'll make you wince on his behalf. Flynn and Wood were attached to the project for a long time with the understanding that they'd play the couple with Slavic Russian accents, as written. Then, just before rehearsals, the directors called to say they'd changed their minds. They'd seen another film do the accent thing and thought it looked bad.

"I panicked. I freaked out because I was like, 'Oh, you've just taken away my whole performance,'" Flynn said, since in his head, Dostoevsky simply doesn't sound like him.

So what did he do with a week left before shooting? He considered, and this is not a joke, playing the great Russian novelist Welsh. "I don't know where I got that from, but it was a bloody stupid idea," Flynn admitted. The directors humoured him, politely, while clearly thinking he'd lost it.

What actually settled things was a tarot card. On the first day of filming, Wood pulled the high priestess for herself and had Flynn pull one too. He got the fool. "The fool is just pure surrender, go where the road takes you and play and be goofy along the way," he said. That became the whole approach.

Wood backed that up, describing days on set where she and Flynn could barely get through scenes without breaking into laughter, watching ordinary moments in the script turn into something stranger and more electric than anyone had planned for.

Flynn also mentioned being told, with zero warning, that a scene now called for him to be seen relieving himself on his landlady's doorstep. Not in the script. He did it anyway, trusting the directors completely by that point.

The film follows the couple on what's meant to be a romantic getaway in Germany that turns into something closer to a debt-trapped chaos spiral, which, going by these two, tracks with how the shoot itself apparently went.

Toronto audiences get their turn next. Whether distributors line up behind a film this odd, and whether Indian streamers ever pick up something this niche, is the open question now.