‘Anomalisa’ Directors Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson Interview

Voices, Adaptation, Animation Production

Did you know if Tom Noonan was always the voice for “Everyone Else” in this production?

Kaufman: I wrote this as a play in 2005, so I cast it then. It’s the same actors. It was kind of a stage radio play. So, Tom and David and Jennifer were in it, and were reading scripts onstage, and we have some background with it. They’ve performed it before. For the voice recordings for this we brought it down, made it more intimate, because it’s not not a theatrical thing anymore.

Tom is, in my mind, so perfect for this, because he’s got such a specific voice, which was important to me, since he has to be understood as playing all these different people, but be the same person.

When you’re animating, you’re doing multiple sets at the same time, how do you schedule that? Do you know how long the scenes will take before you animate?

Johnson: You approximate it based on how long the shots are broken down, and you have the animatic. So that’s worked out, and it’s timed, so you know exactly how many frames the shot is. And then, you discuss with the animator and the animation supervisor. Let’s say it’s a shot of Michael, walking across the room from the bed to the desk. They figure out, from Michael’s standard stride, it’s approximately 12 to 18 frames per step, and they can measure out the distance and figure “It’s gonna take him exactly this long to get there,” and the length of the shot increases by 12 frames, and the animator has a quota of 48 frames a day, so it’s gonna take him seven days to complete the shot. It’s very specific and scheduled out that way, and so that’s how they figure out how many stages to build, and we had 7 hotel rooms, because we knew that’s how much time we’d spend in the hotel room, all the puppets to make. That’s how we figure all that out.

What was your favorite part of transferring something that was strictly auditory to a more cinematic visual?

Kaufman: It’s hard to say, there was so much and it was all new to me, this kind of thing. It was exciting when the first puppets were done. It was exciting when the sets started to get done, exciting when the footage started to come in, when scenes were done. There were long gaps of time in between all of this but, it kind of carried me all the way through. Any time a new scene would come in it was a moment that you really liked, or you were surprised by, then that was really exciting. So, I would say, there’s not just one thing. It was exciting when when finished. It was exciting when we showed it to Telluride. What about you? (to Duke Johnson)

Johnson: Yeah there’s landmarks kind of, you know? As you’re putting it together. Trying to think of some of the big things, like Lisa’s singing scene was one of the earlier things, once we saw that, it was moving to us. You’re trying to figure it out, you don’t know what these things are going to look like, you have to just discover all of that. You have to find all the characters, what they’re gonna move like, so once you start to see what it’s going to look like, then you get excited about that, and then you start to animate them and things aren’t working, and people are trying stuff, and something clicks. That’s like, “we’ve discovered that character.” As these landmarks come, they keep you going through all the disasters that are happening simultaneously.

Where did the inspiration come in to make such a dramatic format change, going from auditory play to a stop motion theatrical presentation?

Kaufman: From my point of view, it was completely happenstance. I had no plans to do anything with this. A friend of mine, Dino Stamatopoulos, was in the audience, we did the play in 2005 and he subsequently founded an animation studio. Duke was a director, and they came to me in 2011, said they would like to make it a stop motion film. So, it was just handed to me as that, and I didn’t think it was going to happen. I said, “if you can raise the money” expecting that they wouldn’t, because that had been my experience in trying to get stuff made in the last few years. So it just happened, it sort of fell into my lap I guess.