A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
“Anomalisa” is a stop-motion animated film about an author who lives a mundane life but then experiences something out of the ordinary.
Charlie Kaufman originally wrote the story as a play simply to be read without staging, but the principals behind the production company Starburns Industry — Duke Johnson and Dino Stamatopoulos — were interested in turning it into a stop-motion animated feature film.
Kaufman is mainly known as the screenwriter of films such as “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Then he tried his hand at directing with the 2008 film “Synecdoche, New York,” starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.
“Anomalisa” is Kaufman’s first film since then, and he co-directed it with Duke Johnson. The Frame’s John Horn spoke with the duo at this year’s Telluride Film Festival about why they wanted to make this an animated film, the challenges of stop-motion animation, and why it took so long for Kaufman to come out with another film.
What inspired you to make your play into a film?
KAUFMAN: I did not want to do it at first. I thought it wasn't going to be possible to do it as a film of any sort because it was designed to be non-visual. You're supposed to be seeing the actors onstage not doing anything and creating in your mind this thing. So a lot of it was ambiguous. There are things that you hear about in the play and you have to imagine what they are, and we had to make those things real.
The reason it became a stop-motion thing was because Dino [Stamatopoulos] had a stop-motion company and he wanted to do it. So that was the initial reason and then Duke [Johnson] and I had to try to figure out how to translate this into something visual and not destroy it, and it became its own thing. Ultimately it was serendipitous, I think, to make it into a stop-motion.
It's hard to talk about without giving away plot points, but there are things that would have been hard to do in a live action movie that were very simple to do in a stop-motion thing.
The characters in the film have a slightly otherworldly look in how their faces are assembled. I suspect part of that is to animate their faces?
KAUFMAN: Yeah, that's exactly what that is. They have two face plates. They have a forehead and they have a lower face. They're 3-D printed faces. There's hundreds of variations of mouths and foreheads. Normally when you see a stop motion animation, they'll be painted out when that technique is used and we didn't want to do that.
Once you do that and once you polish it to a point, there's no point in making it a stop-motion. It just looks like computer generated animation and we wanted to show that this was a piece that was handmade. Then they became story points. We used the faces as metaphors for other things that happen in the movie.
Duke, were there any physical items, facial expressions or even body parts that were challenging to animate?
JOHNSON: It was all exceptionally challenging mostly because we came about a style organically that's not like anything that I was familiar with or had seen done before. We were going for something that was very subtle and nuanced and emotional. That's challenging because you're shooting these still frames of still objects that you pose and take a picture of and then you change the pose and you take another picture. Over the course of thousands of frames, you create the illusion of movement and we're trying to use that illusion to portray an emotional experience. That was very challenging.
Charlie, how conscious are you about what people say critically about your work? Does it mean anything to you and do you remember what the reviews were like on your last movie? Were they hurtful?
KAUFMAN: Well, some of them were hurtful and some of them were very nice. "Synecdoche, New York" was a polarizing movie and I think I'm over it now. I think I have a little bit of perspective through that experience.
That was your last film, in 2008. How frustrated were you as a filmmaker in not being able to get something going for so long?
KAUFMAN: Oh, I was enormously frustrated. It's been very difficult. I've written a bunch of screenplays and TV pilots and I couldn't get anything going.
Earlier in your career you were working constantly and for the last couple of years you haven't. The nature and quality of your writing probably hasn't changed. So I assume that the nature and quality of what Hollywood is interested in has changed.
KAUFMAN: I think if you ask anyone, 2008 was the year that everything changed. It became difficult for everybody to make things that were unusual.
Because of the financial crisis?
KAUFMAN: Yes. The studios became very conservative. So that, coupled with the fact that "Synecdoche, New York" didn't make a lot of money and I wanted to keep directing ... I think it might have been easier for me to get these movies made if I signed on with a director. My choice was that I wanted to make these movies. They're becoming more personal to me and I wanted to be in control of them.
Was there a constant type of criticism for the people saying no for things that you wanted to do?
KAUFMAN: My feeling is that you never really know the truth. They're never gonna tell you the truth about why they don't want to make something because everyone's very nice to me. But I would say that my sense of the concern is: Will this be commercial enough? You're putting money into something that you want to make back. I don't know how that resonates. I can't think in [those] terms. I just try to do something that interests me and hopefully interests other people.
“Anomalisa” opens in select theaters in Los Angeles and New York on December 29.