The studio bigwigs of Hollywood fear people like Charlie Kaufman, the wildly inventive mind behind films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. They fear risk-takers, deep thinkers, anyone who has the balls to make their audience use their goddam minds. Kaufman is all of the above. His films are routinely described as ‘perplexing’ and ‘oddball’. Which is why he’s been struggling since 2008 — when his last film Synecdoche, New York flopped abysmally — to get anything made. And it’s why he turned to Kickstarter to fund his latest film, a stop motion animation called Anomalisa that’s as thought-provoking as anything he’s ever dreamed up.
Anomalisa is about a self-help author who travels to Cincinnati to promote his latest book. The middle-aged man, Michael, is traveling alone. Kaufman magnifies the mundanity of his trip — the painful small talk with the cab driver and the bellboy, the sameness of everything in his hotel — and for a while you think, this is quite straightforward for a Charlie Kaufman movie. But then you notice something. You notice that everyone except Michael has the same voice and the same weird face. In this beige world, Michael can’t connect to anyone; he’s in the throes of an existential crisis. Then a woman called Lisa enters his life. Suffice to say, it’s not your average puppet movie.
I sat down with Kaufman, along with co-director Duke Johnson, to learn about the banality of hotels (they did their research), the alienation that modern culture breeds, and writing characters from the inside.
Your last film Synecdoche, New York came out eight years ago. I read that you were struggling to get things made for years before Anomalisa?Charlie Kaufman: I was struggling getting a lot of things made, but Anomalisa wasn’t one of the things. I had written it to be this stage play in 2005 and I was done with it. And then these guys approached me at the end of 2011 and asked if they could make it into a stop motion animation.
Being Charlie Kaufman, most people think it would be easy to get things made. Why isn’t it?
CK: Well, the business changed as of 2008 — which is when my movie Synecdoche, New York came out — because there was the financial crash and the studios began to make these big, safe tent-pole movies. And I think, had Synecdoche been a commercially successful movie, I would have had a better chance. But I think it was difficult for everybody who was doing this kind of independent, small, quirky thing. It might have been more difficult for me because of the circumstances surrounding my last movie. It’s all speculation.
Neither of you had done an adult animation before Anomalisa. Did you see it as a risk?
Duke Johnson: Yeah, but we didn’t give a shit about that. It was exciting. This is a great script; we’re artists and that’s the kind of story we want to tell.
The awkward sex scene looks and feels incredibly realistic. Did you want the audience to forget they were watching puppets?
CK: I don’t think we cared if people forgot but I think some people do forget. We were just trying to make it true and nuanced. We specifically kept the seams and indications that they’re puppets in place. We wanted it to look like stop motion, like what it was.
Tom Noonan is the voice of every character in the film except Lisa and Michael. How much of that idea came from the Fregoli delusion [a rare disorder in which a person holds a delusional belief that different people are in fact a single person]?
CK: I was looking for a device in which to have one actor play many parts. I had read about the Fregoli delusion and that informed the idea for the play. The character of Michael doesn’t suffer from the Fregoli delusion; it’s just a metaphor for a guy who can’t connect to people. Because I was working with voices, I thought it was a cool way to do it.
The world of hotels, with their identical rooms and endless hallways, also speaks to Michael’s alienation. How do you feel about that world?
CK: What the hotel looked like specifically became a big topic of discussion. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out that world and to perfectly represent it. We looked at stuff online and Duke went to a hotel in LA — this is for some reason an anecdote now.
What do you find alienating about modern culture generally?
CK: I think it’s great [laughs]. No, I mean… everything? I don’t know. It’s not real; it’s sort of professional politeness and everything is sort of franchised. You go everywhere and everything is the same everywhere. Obviously that’s not true but more and more you’ll see Starbucks everywhere you go or Banana Republic. We were in Paris recently and every store I recognized from my hometown in Pasadena. So it’s like, why do you want to come to Paris?
Do you avoid social media and things like that?
CK: I don’t do that, no. I mean I look at Twitter but I don’t have an account or a Facebook or anything.
I feel like your films and characters get called ‘oddball’ a lot. How do you feel about that? Is it reductive?
CK: Oddball and unlikeable. I don’t care anymore. I’m trying to explore things and be honest, and people can have their reactions and that’s fine. I don’t want to control how they think. Sometimes I’m surprised when people say things are oddball that aren’t particularly oddball. But my goal is not to write oddball characters. Ever.