Charlie Kaufman, the brain behind the cerebral cult classic films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, once wrote a play, as he describes, to fill in for the Coen Brothers in 2005 with a limited cast consisting of David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh (The Hateful Eight) and Tom Noonan. In 2010, he was approached by colleague Dino Stamatopoulos about an animated adaptation of said play, entitled Anomalisa. With an $8 million budget that was crowd funded on Kickstarter and eventually picked up by Paramount, the film has been slowly building attention by critics and praised by audiences that have seen the film.
Anomalisa was co-directed by Duke Johnson, animator for Dan Harmon’s Starburns Industries, after making his start on the Community season two holiday episode, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.”
To date, Anomalisa has been a Golden Globe nominee for Best Animated Picture, and received a win for the Best Director award at Fantastic Fest, among other accolades in the 2016 awards season.
The following is a roundtable interview session with co-directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson after a screening of the film in Boston on January 8. You can also read a full review of Anomalisa, and view the film in theaters right now!
Voices, Adaptation, Animation Production
Did you know if Tom Noonan was always the voice for “Everyone Else” in this production?
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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.
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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.
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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.
Selling Animation for Adults, Avoiding the Uncanny Valley in Animation
Was there ever any concern about this not being an animated story for children?
Kaufman: We were excited about that! That’s what interested us, we wanted to do something that used this form, but used it in a different way. For adults. And not in a kind of – [makes a Disney kind of gesture] – but you know, this big, silly thing! Nuanced, movements, with emotional impact. I never, personally, shy away from that kind of thing. It’s more like “ok, well how do we do this?”
Johnson: People have worked in animation, my colleagues, peers, we’re all aware of the world of animation outside of America. Where there’s all kinds of animations used for all kinds of stories, of course animators like Jan Švankmajer, and all tons of stuff in Asia, even some Miyazaki stuff, it’s just used to tell all different kinds of stories, but in America it’s just delegated to, y’know, kids movies, which is-
Kaufman: — It’s for kids!
Johnson: It’s frustrating! Y’know, It’s for kids!!
Do you think it’s because they’re concerned about how to sell it?
Kaufman: Everything is about that.
Johnson: Exactly, that’s why there’s Marvel superhero movies.
Kaufman: Which by the way are not for kids, for some strange reason… but big kids.
Evan via TheYoungFolks: If I can ask about the style of the puppets, the process of the production, the puppets themselves, the lighting and the sets have this kind of look to it, some may find it to be in the uncanny valley. But, it’s photorealistic, and it’s clearly a deliberate decision… can you tell how that style came about?
Johnson: I would say we feel it doesn’t have an uncanny valley aesthetic. I think that we talked about uncanny valley a lot early on, which refers to a term that originated in, I believe, Japanese robotics, where, as something gets very close to looking human, it’s good until it reaches a point where it falls off a cliff and it feels very—
Kaufman: Creepy.
Johnson: Creepy, and people are sort of appalled by it. I think you see that a lot in computer generated things, motion capture, because, you know, there’s a soullessness in the eyes, and there’s a dead quality. I’ll tell you about how that affected our design, but also just jumping ahead to our experience in traveling the world, and seeing audiences responding to that, I don’t feel that is an accurate way to describe the design because many people have said that there are times in the movie that they forget they’re watching puppets…
Kaufman: Or that this moment is more “true” than anything they’ve seen with live actors, a lot specifically about the sex scene, but about other moments as well.
Johnson: We did things like trying to animate the breathing, like that, to make them feel alive, normally in the animation that I’ve done you try to cut out the breaths and clean up the audio, but we labored a lot of extra work to have them constantly breathing, but the big thing we did was mainly focus on the eyes as much as possible, to make them look wet, to make them look very manipulatable and constantly moving as human eyes do, and also having eye lights. We planted little “grains of wheat” which are little tiny light bulbs, in all the sets, so anywhere the puppets looked they would have eye lights, and would feel alive.
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.
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