ANOMALISA GLASGOW
FIlm festival
HUMAN NATURE
Charlie Kaufman has had a tough time getting a fi lm made over the past decade. James Mottram talks to the director and his team about a radical animated
affair which fi nally ended that unlucky streak
W hen a 60-day pitch for Charlie Kaufman’s new movie Anomalisa went up on Kickstarter in 2012, most fans didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Looking to raise $200,000, the attached production company, Starburns Industries, saw more than double this hoped-for amount come in from those willing to see the next work from the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Yet it says something about the short-sightedness of Hollywood that the man who penned the exceptional Spike Jonze movies Being John Malkovich and Adaptation has had to resort to the crowd-founding website for seed money. ‘I’ve been trying,’ explains Kaufman, who has been absent from our screens since his 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. ‘But the business has gotten really hard.’ To quote from the Anomalisa Kickstarter pitch: ‘The entertainment industry is i lled with incredible scripts, written by incredible talent, that have not or will never get made.’ Since Synecdoche bombed in cinemas, Kaufman has written three screenplays and three television pilots, directing one. None have been greenlit. This includes Frank or Francis, a musical set around the i lm industry, despite an attached A-list cast including Nicolas Cage, Kate Winslet and Jack Black.
In a world of remakes, reboots and re-imaginings, it almost dei es belief that Kaufman’s original mind has been largely ignored these last few years. ‘I think people have very mixed feelings about genius,’ says Tom Noonan, one of the stars of Synecdoche and Anomalisa. ‘They love it and they really fucking hate it. To have somebody doing what you wish you could do and be celebrated for it brings up a lot of resentment.’ Whatever the case (‘you never really hear the truth from anyone’, sighs Kaufman), it’s a huge relief that Anomalisa got going. Resolving to turn it into a full-length feature in the wake of the Kickstarter success, Kaufman joined forces with animator Duke Johnson, who oversaw the Emmy-winning stop-motion episode of TV series Community, to co- direct this story about a motivational speaker, Michael Stone, who is spiralling into a personal depression.
Set over one weekend, as Michael arrives in a Cincinnati hotel to give a keynote speech, the i lm’s very contained nature points to its origins, a 2005 stage production. Performed live as part of composer Carter Burwell’s Theatre of the New Ear (a series of sound plays with Foley artists creating sound effects live on stage), it was like watching a radio drama unfold. As Kaufman says: ‘You’re creating this imagery, hopefully, in the audience’s mind’.
When Kaufman’s friend, Dino Stamatopoulos – the founder of animation company Starburns Industries – approached him to turn the play into a i lm, he was initially resistant. ‘Translating it into a visual thing was almost antithetical to what it should be,’ Kaufman admits. ‘But once we started working on it, it felt like it was becoming something beautiful; and that seemed beautiful to me. It was its own thing. The play existed and this existed.’ In the i lm’s case, the animation is so detailed that it appears computer-generated. In fact, there wasn’t a pixel in sight. The puppets are all tangible with faces created using a 3D printer. ‘I want people to
know how hard it was to do this stuff,’ says Johnson. ‘There was no computer animation in the entire movie. People say: “What’s outside the windows? Is that computer animated?” We built that city and those buildings. We lit them with individual lights. The clouds are made of cotton!’
There were overlaps with the original play, of course, not least with the cast returning to voice the characters, including David Thewlis as Michael and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, the shy telesales agent our anti-hero meets and falls for during his long dark weekend of the soul. As Leigh says: ‘For me, it’s about the search and the longing for intimacy – for a really unconditional love – and how transitory that is.’ The third actor in Anomalisa is the aforementioned Tom Noonan, voicing literally everybody else. ‘When we did the movie, Charlie wanted it to all sound very similar,’ says the actor, touching on the i lm’s thematic interest in the Fregoli Syndrome. This real-life delusional condition causes the sufferer to believe everyone else is the same person (nodding to that, Kaufman wrote the play under the pseudonym Francis Fregoli while the i lm’s hotel is also called ‘Fregoli’). Perhaps amid Anomalisa’s many layers is the idea that Hollywood is prone to such a syndrome, where everyone sounds the same. Thankfully, after the wilderness years, Kaufman’s unique voice is i nally being heard. Winning the Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, Anomalisa has since been nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Animated Feature, a category usually dominated by younger fare. As Kaufman notes, one thing about Anomalisa is for sure: ‘It’s not for children’.
Anomalisa, Glasgow Film Theatre, Sun 28 Feb. General release from Fri 11 Mar. See review, page 60.
4 Feb–7 Apr 2016 THE LIST 23