‘Anomalisa’ Directors Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson Interview

Building Atmosphere, Audience Reception

Would you say Anomalisa is about loneliness?

Johnson: I would say Michael feels like a lonely guy to me. We don’t really like to talk about what the film is about. I mean, I definitely think Michael seems lonely at times.

[To Kaufman] did you go into writing this with any specific message or anything in mind, and what is your interest in psychology and human nature?

Kaufman: I think if you’re a writer of fiction –which I guess I am– or a writer of anything, and you’re not interested in human psychology, you’re probably in the wrong business. I guess I could write about trucks. I write about people, and I try to write about people from their perspective. The individual perspective in this case is very clear. It’s from Michael’s perspective, so I’m writing a subjective movie. I think about human feelings, and psychology, I have a great interest in it professionally, and in person, because I also am a person. So, it’s something that affects my existence.

Did you have any intent in the naming of the hotel?

Kaufman: I had no intent in anything, no. That would be a weird fluke. Yeah, I’d read about the Fregoli delusion. It sort of inspired the idea when I did it as a play, thinking of it as a metaphor, but not literally that this character has it. So, it was originally called the Millenium Hotel in the play but we couldn’t get the rights to it, but it’s an actual hotel in Cincinnati. Fregoli was the pen name for it, so we took that and ran with it.

What was the part in the process of adaptation where the device of Michael’s awareness of the world around him came about?

Johnson: Yes, the puppet… awareness… element. Obviously the seams became apparent when we saw the puppet, that was the style of animation we were going with, that’s what these things look like. We liked the way that they looked, and how it sort of drew attention to the fact– we’re not trying to trick you into thinking these are actually humans — that this is what they are, and we’re showcasing that. We were doing an animation test, where all the faces come off, sort of an assembly line off of the 3D printer, and an animation assistant put them on a stick with wax and cycles through them because the color variations between the printouts are too subtle to hold up and tell, but if you photograph them and click through you can see the differences, so he put a bunch on there and played this cycling of the faces, and he wasn’t animating the eyes so they were spinning around, and we looked at it. It was kind of horrifying to us, so we decided to use it in the movie.

Have you had any unusual, unexpected responses to the film, that you thought were interesting?

Kaufman: We’ve had a lot of people come up to us and say, “This is what the movie is” to them, and it is often surprising. We encourage that. It happens, I think that if we quashed that, then we wouldn’t be hearing that stuff. But the movie is designed in order to have multiple experiences.

Evan via TheYoungFolks: The movie has this sense of normalcy of life in its first act, despite it being animation, it shows someone’s life from moment to moment, and judging from people’s questions, it seems that part has resonated with people. (i.e. The taxi ride scene where Michael is told to try the chili.) Have there been any specific instances of people saying “that’s happened to me before,” and about how human the movie feels?

Kaufman: You mean that people have told them to try the chili? Well, yes people who have been to Cincinnati say they’ve been in that cab, with that driver. It’s apparently a big thing in Cincinnati to tell people to try the chili and to go to the zoo. Who knew?

Is it Zoo sized?

Kaufman: [laughs] We want them to start using that as their slogan. If the movie does well, they could and if it does I can quit then.

Johnson: We do hear that all the time though, we hear about the hotel, “I’ve had that shower experience, I have had that key, I’ve stayed in that hotel, this is my life” and then the sex scene. That’s when you see people kind of turn white, or something. That’s the most authentic. They say that’s the most authentic sex scene.

Can you talk about the issues with getting the rights to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun?”

Kaufman: We had “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, that was the song in the play, we couldn’t get the rights to that, so we were looking for something else and we settled on “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and apparently they told us we had the rights to it, and we didn’t.

The joke was structured exactly the same [as with “My Heart Will Go On”]. But, I don’t think it was as emotional. The play was different in the way it was perceived. Because it’s people on stage and they’re not really doing these things, they’re actors and they’re just sitting there reading. So, the sex scene was just people moaning on stage. That played really funny. The whole thing did, because it suggests something sort of naive about Lisa, you know? Which this song doesn’t, this song was more emotional, and better for that reason.