Char­lie Kauf­man & Duke John­son: ​‘We didn’t know if we were ever going to fin­ish this movie’

Char­lie Kauf­man writes elab­o­rate worlds to express his tor­ment­ed inner life. He sharp­ens despair into com­e­dy and finds hope in meta­phys­i­cal inven­tions. He’s giv­en us a por­tal into John Malkovich’s body (Being John Malkovich), a screen­writer who becomes obsessed with his sub­ject (Adap­ta­tion.) and a mem­o­ry-eras­ing ser­vice for the bro­ken-heart­ed (Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind).

Most ambi­tious in scope was his first bash at fea­ture direct­ing: 2008’s Synec­doche, New York explored the futil­i­ty of the art-can­ni­bal­is­ing-life cycle via a nev­er-end­ing play con­ceived by Caden Cotard (Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man). Anom­al­isa is as intri­cate­ly devel­oped, but its sto­ry – about a lovelorn and sex­u­al­ly frus­trat­ed cus­tomer ser­vice stooge – takes place with­in a micro, hand-built uni­verse. Kauf­man has teamed up with ani­ma­tion prodi­gy, Duke John­son, to direct a Kick­starter-fund­ed film about lone­ly stop-motion puppets.

LWLies: Was any of the world of Anom­al­isa live-action or was it all built?

Char­lie Kauf­man: Every­thing is built. Michael is the largest pup­pet and he’s exact­ly a foot tall. So the sets are built in pro­por­tion to him. You have lit­tle hotel room, lit­tle stair­cas­es, lit­tle hallways.

Duke John­son: Part of the rea­son we were able to do this for the bud­get that we did is because the gen­er­al scope of the world is rel­a­tive­ly small. Most of it takes place in a hotel room. We did have some expan­sive sets: the air­port ter­mi­nal, things like that.

CK: The office.

DJ: It was like 30 feet.

CK: Because we need­ed him to be real­ly small.

Where are they now – Michael and the hotel room and every­thing that you built?

DJ: Bur­bank, California.

CK: We had a mar­ket­ing meet­ing with Para­mount when they took the film. Duke brought in Michael and Lisa pup­pets – there’s a bunch of them – just because they hadn’t seen them yet. They just stood there on the table and it was real­ly sad, because you sud­den­ly realise that they’re not alive. After look­ing at them for so long mov­ing in the movie, they’re just these pup­pets. Beau­ti­ful pup­pets, but they’re puppets.

At some point, we’re all going to be like lit­tle life­less pup­pets anyway.

CK: That’s true. That’s sad. That’s kind of brought me down that you said that.

The eyes jump out from all of the pup­pets as if silent­ly scream­ing for help. How do you build an eye that looks so sen­si­tive and real?

CK: Explain how big they are.

DJ: Michael is 12 inch­es tall. His head is about an inch so you can imag­ine how big his eye is with­in there. We looked at glass eyes because there are some very intri­cate glass doll eyes but noth­ing that small. We end­ed up 3D print­ing the core of the eye and the iris – every iris – is indi­vid­u­al­ly hand-paint­ed by this guy with a mon­o­cle. Then it’s cast in this mould. The white of the eye is a type of sil­i­con that’s self-repair­ing. Then there’s a lay­er of resin that goes over the top. You get depth like a real eye from the clear resin into the iris. The way that the ani­ma­tor moves it is they have to stick a pin in the white of each eye and move it the thick­ness of a hair, and then they have to do the same thing with the oth­er eye, because they’re not con­nect­ed. They have to match them one frame at a time oth­er­wise they look cross-eyed.

How do you cre­ate the effect of them drink­ing their lit­tle cocktails?

DJ: It’s a series of mar­ti­ni glass­es, maybe 10 of them. There’s hard resin liq­uid in each one. They just swap it out for a dif­fer­ent one and it gets less and less and less.

Did you have a favourite part of mak­ing this film?

CK: You answer it first because I have to think. Unless you can’t and then we’ll both be qui­et for a minute.

DJ: One of the great­est parts of the expe­ri­ence was work­ing with one of my heroes. I learnt a lot from work­ing with Char­lie about the cre­ative process in gen­er­al. That was invalu­able to me.

Are there any spe­cif­ic exam­ples of what you learnt?

DJ: How to be brave when you’re being cre­ative. Focus­ing on how to find truth in the moment and how to focus on the character’s expe­ri­ence. You have to be able to com­mu­ni­cate your ideas to peo­ple. Charlie’s very good at that. He’s very artic­u­late. Okay, more com­ing to me. Being able to look at some­thing and find what’s inter­est­ing about it. God, I’m not being very artic­u­late but it seems res­o­nant to me.

This is the core of the cre­ative dri­ve: you have some­thing that you real­ly want to say but it’s so hard to find the way that doesn’t sound stupid.

DJ: So many times you feel like some­thing doesn’t feel right. Then Char­lie would be like, ​‘Well, maybe this’ or ​‘What about this?’ and I’d be like, ​‘Ahh, that’s fuck­ing bril­liant! That’s it.’

Is it ideas that Char­lie would have or is it just express­ing the ideas right?

DJ: Being able to artic­u­late. A lot of the time you can feel some­thing intu­itive­ly but being able to artic­u­late what that is or even start that con­ver­sa­tion is a skill. Also, being open to oth­er people’s ideas and being able to draw out of peo­ple what their con­tri­bu­tions are. As a film­mak­er there’s a sense of being an auteur and ​‘every­thing must be mine’ but that’s real­ly not the best way. Film­mak­ing is an extreme­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive process. Peo­ple come to you and they have their own ideas. Being able to stay true to a vision but also take the best of what oth­er peo­ple can con­tribute is a skill.

Did you think about what your favourite part of the process was?

CK: I can’t real­ly. I think my expe­ri­ence of this movie that I liked a lot was the sense of per­se­ver­ance that went into it. It was a real­ly tax­ing and stress­ful process because we didn’t know if we were ever going to fin­ish it. Along the way there were just these moments of morsels – a pup­pet design or a set design or a par­tic­u­lar shot or a frag­ment of a shot that came in that was like, ​‘Oh my god’. That keeps you going. And that we did this on our own with­out any safe­ty net and that it got done and it got done in a way that we were both pleased with, like, in ret­ro­spect, that expe­ri­ence is my favourite part of it, look­ing back and going, ​‘Oh wow. We did this’ and ​‘Good for us.’

Is it like a ver­sion of that Dorothy Park­er quote ​‘I hate writ­ing. I love hav­ing writ­ten’? Do you hate moviemak­ing but love hav­ing made movies?

CK: No. Like I was say­ing, there are moments where it’s like, ​‘Oh that’s so cool, that’s so cool.’ ​‘Oh we did that.’ ​‘Oh that works,’ but you still don’t know what the whole thing’s going to be. I feel more like Dorothy Park­er does in terms of writ­ing. Writ­ing is real­ly hard for me and I don’t enjoy it a lot. I don’t know if I love hav­ing writ­ten but if I’ve got some­thing done, it’s a relief. ​‘I hate writ­ing. Hav­ing writ­ten is a relief,’ maybe is my quote.

With each of these morsel moments, did they accu­mu­late in sig­nif­i­cance until at a cer­tain point you though, ​‘This is going to come togeth­er how I want it’?

CK: No, because the pieces are so small. They spend so much time on a few sec­onds of film. It’s a lot like mak­ing a movie before you make it. You have to say, ​‘This is how much we’re shoot­ing here.’ ​‘We’re not doing five takes of it’ because it might take a month to shoot one shot. I don’t think I was sure until we start­ed putting it togeth­er in post-pro­duc­tion. Some­times there’s a shot that you real­ly aren’t hap­py with and you’re focused on it. Then when you see it in con­text, what­ev­er the flaw in it that you saw doesn’t mat­ter any more, but you don’t know that at the time it’s like, ​‘Oh my god is that going to be awful’ and then it isn’t.

DJ: Not to get too new-agey but there’s almost a sense of des­tiny that a film has, or a life of its own that it takes, where there are flaws with­in it but that flaw some­how con­tributes to the over­all expe­ri­ence of the film in a unique, spe­cif­ic mean­ing­ful way. There are things like that that are weird, that feel mag­ic… The mag­ic of cinema!

So you just come to utter­ly believe in what you’re doing?

DJ: What’s the alter­na­tive? The train has left and you’ve com­mit­ted to years of your life in this extreme­ly dif­fi­cult process. You have your doubts and there are times when maybe you want to give up or some­thing just seems too hard but there’s no choice. You have to just keep going towards this objec­tive. That was my experience.

It sounds like it was more stress­ful for you, Char­lie. How do you man­age stress?

CK: Depres­sion. I don’t know if that’s man­ag­ing it.

How do you man­age depression?

CK: I have a dogged atti­tude, which isn’t great but it’s all I got so I just try to keep going.

DJ: Do you think that mak­ing art… I have a ques­tion now.

Go for it.

DJ: Do you think that mak­ing art, cre­at­ing, express­ing is a way
of treat­ing depression?

CK: Maybe. Prob­a­bly bet­ter than the alter­na­tive. I don’t know if it’s a ther­a­py thing for me but I haven’t tried not doing it so I don’t know the answer. But it’s what I do because, in addi­tion to every­thing else, it’s how I make my liv­ing so I can’t real­ly stop and I guess that’s good.

I pro­duced a pan­el called, ​‘Can Cre­ativ­i­ty Help Tame Men­tal Illness?’

CK: What was the conclusion?

The con­clud­ing thought was that express­ing a thing can help you man­age it, the way iden­ti­fy­ing a thing can help you man­age it, but it doesn’t take care of it forever.

CK: I do think that there’s a val­ue or a ther­a­peu­tic val­ue in putting some­thing in the world that is tru­ly you and hav­ing oth­er peo­ple feel that it’s true to them. That makes me feel less lone­ly. That’s not a strat­e­gy or any­thing but it’s a result that’s good for me.

Has it always been the way you man­aged or was there a time when you man­aged in a dif­fer­ent way?

CK: Man­aged depression?

Yeah.

CK: I’ve always been in the the­atre, or writ­ten, or made films since I was a kid.

Do you remem­ber how old you were when you first wrote some­thing that meant some­thing to you?

CK: No, I remem­ber how old I was when I dis­cov­ered the­atre. I was in third grade. That real­ly changed every­thing in the tra­jec­to­ry of my life. It became my pas­sion and my focus. It was weird because it was a school play and I had been forced to be in oth­er school plays and I hat­ed it. I was real­ly shy and I was real­ly ter­ri­fied. I remem­ber I was in a play in sec­ond grade where I had like two lines and I had to tie some­body up. I don’t remem­ber what the play was about but I remem­ber I fig­ured out that if I stood behind the per­son I was tying up when I said my line, no one would ever have to see me. That was my plan and that’s what I did. But for some rea­son in third grade I did a play and I played a char­ac­ter that was real­ly unlike me. I played a roost­er in a hen house who was very blus­tery and cocky. I got laughs and it was like some­thing changed. You know, the whole world changed and that’s all I want­ed to do.

Was it the fact of doing some­thing so out of char­ac­ter or was it get­ting a response?

CK: It was get­ting a response doing some­thing out of char­ac­ter. It was get­ting to be some­body that I wasn’t and get­ting laughs. God knows what it real­ly was because I was in third grade – were peo­ple real­ly laugh­ing or was it par­ents being nice? I don’t know. But to me, at the time, it was like, ​‘Holy cow. This is life-chang­ing’ and it became my focus for years. It was all I want­ed to do.

Is it now the same, so with Anom­al­isa, is the reward hear­ing peo­ple say that they under­stand it and there­fore under­stand some part of you?

CK: It’s not as clear to me any more. It’s not as imme­di­ate and direct as per­form­ing on stage. It’s removed but I cer­tain­ly do get some sort of some­thing out of peo­ple respond­ing. It feels more seri­ous now and not nec­es­sar­i­ly in a good way. When we did this as a play, it was like no mon­ey and we just put on a play, and it was for two nights and no one got paid and it felt like high-school to me in the best way. I loved it. This is hard­er and longer. It’s not the same. I can’t get it back.

What will be your new thing after this?

CK: What am I going to do pro­fes­sion­al­ly, is that what you mean?

I guess that’s what I mean. Are you going to explore these themes that you’re talk­ing about, of things get­ting worse?

CK: Things get­ting what?

Worse. Or feel­ing heav­ier. It sound­ed like you’re say­ing that things are get­ting heavier.

CK: Yeah. I don’t know. You’re mak­ing me rethink everything.

I’m sor­ry.

CK: No, it’s cool. It’s good.

What’s it like to hear your co-direc­tor talk­ing like this?

DJ: Sta­tus quo.

CK: I feel like we haven’t had this par­tic­u­lar dis­cus­sion yet, have we? Have I told you about the rooster?

DJ: Not specif­i­cal­ly about the roost­er but about you per­form­ing in plays as a kid and lov­ing that. This is what the expe­ri­ence has been like – con­ver­sa­tions about every­thing. We do some work and then it digress­es into long con­ver­sa­tions about art, his­to­ry or opin­ions on things. Then it gets back on track and you do some work and that’s all part of the process.

Are you two plan­ning to work togeth­er again?

DJ: We’ve talked about it.

CK: We’d like to do anoth­er ani­mat­ed movie at some point. We both have oth­er things we want to do indi­vid­u­al­ly as well. We’ll see. This was an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence for me. It whet my appetite to try oth­er things with it – try to explore it more as a form.