Last night at the Landmark Theater, SSN Insider held a screening of Anomalisa, which Paramount is releasing December 30. The stop-motion animated feature has so far scored a staggering 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes out of 40 reviews. It’s no wonder as it came from the mind of Academy Award winner Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) who was the co-director, writer and producer of the film.
After the screening, Kaufman took the stage to answer questions from SSN moderator Zorianna Kit along with co-director and producer Duke Johnson and producer Rosa Tran, both of whom made their mark on Adult Swim series such as Moral Orel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole.
The film, which began its life as a play in 2005, features the voices of Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan and David Thewlis. Kaufman didn’t audition actors, rather, “I went to these three actors and they all said yes.”
The story centers on Michael Stone, husband, father and respected author of “How May I Help You Help Them?”, but a man crippled by the mundanity of his life. On a business trip to Cincinnati, he is amazed to discover a possible escape from his desperation in the form of an unassuming sales rep, Lisa, who may or may not be the love of his life.
The film, which is very much for adults, falls into an awards category with the happy-go-lucky Peanuts Movie but it couldn’t be more different. The darkly comedic and surreal stop-motion journey of a man’s long night of the soul, features realistic, often too-human scenes and doesn’t shy away from sex or showing other intimate moments of a life.
Kaufman took inspiration for the concept from a real-life condition. “I read about the Fregoli delusion, the paranoid belief that everyone else in the world is the same person. I felt, metaphorically, that was an interesting thing- the idea of people not seeing other people and not being able to connect.”
The choice to make the film in the medium of stop-motion was clear for Kaufman. “There’s some sort of focus you can give to what the characters are doing because they’re not real people. Everything you see on some level was done intentionally, there’s no accidents in the movie. So Michael alone in his hotel room doing very little becomes interesting by virtue of that.” He continues, “There’s an understanding they’re being manipulated by human hands which lends itself to the themes of the piece.”
We basically made this movie in a garage in Burbank for very little money.
-Duke Johnson
The characters were based off of real people, those that hit close to home for the filmmakers says Johnson. “Michael Stone is based off of my ex-brother in law. He was in the audience for a screening and there was the part where Emily says to Lisa, ‘He’s gorgeous’ and he shouted, ‘Yeah, he is!’” The other lead character, Lisa, was based off of an actress Rosa spotted while at Little Dom’s in Los Feliz. The rest of the characters of the film all together represent one character, what Michael Stone considers to be ‘The World’. As such, everyone else was “an amalgamation of all the people who were working at the studio at the time. We took pictures and combined all of our faces in Photoshop,” says Johnson.
The film centers on the mundanities of life, so the puppets needed to have a massive amount of articulation, explains Johnson. “There’s a line in the faces because there’s a 150 different brow pieces and a 150 different mouth pieces you can swap out in any number of combinations to get the emotional performances.”
The production had major challenges, but it didn’t stop the filmmakers, says Johnson. “With a typical stop-motion major feature film they’ll spend a year or more doing research and design. We didn’t have that kind of time because we didn’t have enough money to even make the money so we had the sense we should just get started. We had six week puppet build and then we started shooting and the puppets didn’t [initially] work.”
Kaufman described the production process. “The audio was recorded as a play but the animation was recorded based on what was ready. One of the first things that was animated was the breakfast scene because the puppets weren’t capable of walking at that point.”
With over 1,200 faces, 1,000 costumes and props and around 118,000 frames of film, the process at the start was overwhelming, remembers Tran. “Everything takes a lot longer than you think. There were panic attacks in the middle of the night, but we took it one day at a time and it was really touch and go. It was a duct tape production, we raised a portion of the money on Kickstarter and then found an investor.” A lack of traditional financing didn’t stop the filmmakers from bringing the vision to life with a Kickstarter that raised $406,237 dollars. “We basically made this movie in a garage in Burbank for very little money,” says Johnson.
The film took two years in production and one year combined in pre and post production. The audio was recorded over a period of just two days. But then the 32 animators had to get to work and three years is pretty fast in terms of stop motion where production alone usually takes upwards of five years. “But we didn’t have $175 million dollars,” muses Kaufman.
Unlike a traditional film were a director can call for 30 takes of one scene, because of the nature of stop-motion, everything has to be planned says Johnson. “There is no over and over. Everything has to be meticulously decided upon way in advance, to the frame. All your money goes toward trying to achieve animation seconds and we had a goal of two seconds of animation, per animator, per day and we rarely got that. On something really complicated, like the sex scene, we were lucky if we got six frames a day and it took six months to animate the first shot.”
The film has been heralded since its screening at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Future Film Festival Digital Award and has since earned multiple Annie and Independent Spirit Award nominations. Tran was completely shocked by the accolades, given its small scale. “It’s this tiny little movie that could. It was just us for three years in a warehouse. You don’t know if it’s going to be done and you have all these problems and then it’s done and now you get all these awards. I can’t even believe it’s happening- it’s a dream come true.”
-Paramount releases Anomalisa on December 30. Puppets and sets will be on display at The Landmark at the Westside Pavilion, The Arclight in Hollywood, and in New York at the Sunshine Cinema and the Museum of Moving Image.-
