The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote a play that ended up being turned into the stop-motion animated film, "Anomalisa"; filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky relied heavily on footage shot by Ukrainian protestors for the documentary, "Winter on Fire"
Charlie Kaufman never intended 'Anomalisa' to be a movie
“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.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
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.
Netflix doc 'Winter on Fire' is the 'Les Mis' of the Ukrainian Revolution
Filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky was in Los Angeles in late 2013 when he got a call from a friend in Ukraine. His friend told him to come quickly — history was happening.
What started as peaceful protests in Kiev's Independence Square soon turned violent, culminating in February, 2014 as the Euromaidan Revolution. Protestors demanded the immediate impeachment of President Viktor Yanukovych after he had backed out on a popular agreement with the European Union, which would have included political reforms, and instead signed a treaty for a multibillion-dollar loan from Russia.
The chaos eventually led, among other developments, to an interim government in Ukraine and to the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula, still unrecognized by most U.N. members.
At least 130 people were killed during the early months of 2014, including 18 police officers, and hundreds more were injured. But what Afineevsky found most fascinating was the scale of unity among the protesters. He and his crew of filmmakers — some professional, some not — canvassed the city, intent on capturing the human stories of the revolution.
Afineevsky sat down with The Frame's John Horn to discuss his vision for the film, the process of making a documentary that unfolded so spontaneously, and the difficulty of parsing through some of the footage.
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
I was actually in L.A. and one of my friends called me one of the first days and said, You need to come down because the history is happening. And it was history. It was different from all the previous events that happened in the same square, like nine years before it was the Orange Revolution. And here, it was completely different. I came on my own. We hired two filmmakers, two cameramen, and we started to film.
First it was peaceful. It was a gathering of the people. And then, all of a sudden, events started to unfold spontaneously. Nobody expected that people — kids, young people — would be beaten at 4 o’clock in the morning. People would be kidnapped, literally killed. So we realized, we are in the middle of something. History was happening there.
And that means — and this is what’s extraordinary about the film — you end up using 28 different cinematographers. Or I guess they’re protestors? Camera operators? I don’t know how you’d classify them. Are they just going out and shooting what they’re seeing? Are you assigning them to different places? What are you asking them to do, and were they ultimately put in harm’s way in trying to serve you and the film?
I met all these people. They all were on [Independence Square], some of them professional and some not. And as you know, [these] days you don’t need to be a professional cinematographer or have any professional equipment. These days, everything is digital. So you can do it with your cell phone, you can do it with your tablet. So, some of them were professionals, and we discussed some shots. Some of them were not professionals and they just wanted to share the stories that they’d seen and that they captured. So this is how my team was growing.
There were some moments when I was able to assign what I needed to shoot. There were some moments when I was able to angle the cameras and create more cinematography because I love the visuals that have been on the square. But at the same time, because it was so spontaneous, it was important to have enough coverage from all places across the square. Some of the events happened in the next streets outside of the square. So it was important to have eyes everywhere to create this fascinating picture, to document the aspect in every story that happened there.
Some of the critics of the film have said that you do not explain in a larger context the intricacies of what’s going on politically in the Ukraine. Was that part of your intention, to not make a movie about geopolitical issues, and focus on the individuals fighting the revolution?
It was my choice because it’s not about the political situation in the Ukraine or politicians. This movie is not about politicians at all. It’s a movie about human beings, about this young generation who can be a perfect role model. So for me it was intentionally people’s stories — human stories — from young to old, different social groups. At the same time I was looking for the stories that can be reliable to all other people. In the reviews sometimes people are writing to me, It’s like watching the musical "Les Mis.”
Did you feel that you and your camera operators were in some way part of the revolution?
I’m sure that my operators and my team were a part of the revolution. All of them were a part of this movement, but at the same time, their weapon was the camera because they wanted to tell this story about amazing unity, about human spirit. About all these fascinating people who’d been there not for PR, but for beliefs. And they give their own lives. The cameras were their weapon.
And for me, I was somebody who came from the outside, who was trying to document this history and to bring it to the entire world. Because for me, the stories are fascinating. It’s a unity that I’d never seen in my life — unity, like I said, of different social classes, different groups, nationalities. I’d never seen the church be on the side of the people, because usually the church is something used by the government to control people.
As a documentary filmmaker, you’re always looking for the most compelling footage. And a lot of the most compelling footage in this instance is people getting beaten, shot, killed. So, as a filmmaker who is looking at the footage coming in, is part of you — and I use this word very cautiously — excited by what you see on the one hand, but you also recognize that people are dying and losing their lives on the other? Are you able to separate the two in terms of your reaction as a filmmaker and as a person?
All this footage was emotionally difficult for me. I do have footage of people killed in front of my eyes. For me it’s hard to absorb this. Maybe for somebody it can be fascinating as material, but for me it was human beings being shot. I will tell you something else: I gave some of my footage to the investigators in Ukraine in order to bring justice to the people who killed some of the [protestors]. So I am lucky and feel really good that I've been able to serve, at some point, justice for all these families that lost their beloved ones.
"Winter on Fire" is currently available to stream on Netflix. The documentary is also up for consideration for an Oscar nomination.