Charlie
Kaufman is “a genius”, enthuses actor Tom Noonan. He has “an
imagination unlike anyone,” gushes actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.
We're talking at the Venice Film Festival, where Kaufman's second
directorial outing, Anomalisa, has just screened, and
their comments are irrefutable.
Co-directing
with Duke Johnson, Anomalisa takes Kaufman into the world of
stop-motion animation, with stunning results. However, the Being
John Malkovitch writer hasn't suddenly gone
child-friendly. Anomalisa's story of Michael, a depressed
inspirational speaker who has a brief encounter with Lisa, a shy
telesales agent, touches on grown-up themes, is peppered with salty
dialogue, and features full-on puppet sex.
Anomalisa began
as a stage play read live by Noonan, Jason Leigh and David Thewlis.
When Johnson received the script, he was thrilled. “I could see how
it could be stop-motion in the sense that it wasn’t specific to
anything," he says. "And I thought it would be really
exciting because it wasn't like anything I had seen before in that
medium.”
Taking
“the pulse” of a couple of studios, Johnson realised they'd have
to fund the project independently. Studios are conservative by
nature, agrees Kaufman. “As an executive you get fired for making
an eccentric decision that doesn't work . . . If you make a superhero
movie and it doesn't work, you were right to try.”
He
started talking to Johnson about how to translate the play following
the launch of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign to raise seed
money. Left alone, they were able to follow their own vision. Using
3D printed facial components, expressive lead characters were
created. When naked, Lisa (Jason Leigh) and Michael (Thewlis) look
like animated Ron Mueck sculptures. They had to be “fleshy”, says
Kaufman. “Not idealised. Just real human.”
In
a typically Kaufmanesque touch, Michael is experiencing a
psychological condition based on Fregoli Syndrome (the protagonist of
his directorial debut, Synechdoche, New York, had
Cotard's Syndrome), which causes him to see everyone (except for
Lisa) as the same person. He is bored by life, which Kaufman regards
as depression.
“It's
like a removal from life, which I experience quite often. I feel like
there's a numbness that Michael has that I certainly recognise.”
Explaining
his approach to writing characters, Kaufman says: “I think everyone
has a mental disorder. I think everyone has got a subjective
psychology and just trying to get inside that and create somebody
struggling, it seems like the only way to present a human being.”
A
talking point of the film is likely to be Lisa and Michael's
realistic sex scene. Tender and awkward, it has an erotic charge that
the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey could only dream
of. Kaufman believes its power comes from us seeing “the
entire experience, from the flirtation until the end of the
experience. That is unusual in a movie, and I think that is what
gives it some of its tenderness and it’s vulnerability.”
This
takes the movie deep into adult territory, and reminds us that
animation wasn't always for children. When I mention the success of
Ralph Bakshi's saucy Fritz the Cat, Kaufman says that
while it was released in 1972, “that was a hundred years ago, in
terms of what's happened to the culture since then.”
Could Anomalisa make a difference?
“If
it’s successful there’ll be a hundred Anomalisas,”
he says drily. “Until they stop making money.”
Ultimately,
Kaufman has never followed a formula, he hates labels (like
Kaufmanesque), and has never followed fashion. And he is not about to
start now.
“I
just keep stumbling. I try to do something new, I don’t exactly
know how to do it, and I get frustrated. I get depressed. And I have
to keep stumbling because somebody’s paid me money. I can’t stop
stumbling. I just keep doing it and eventually have something to turn
in, and see what happens.”
One
of his strengths is that no matter how strange or surreal his films
become, the feelings, anxieties, emotions, and fears that characters
like Lisa and Michael experience are always recognisably part of our
shared human experience.
“It
doesn’t feel foreign,” says Jason Leigh. “He somehow taps into
something that is so universal, and yet so out there, that it blows
your mind.”
