Charlie Kaufman probably does look and sound like the sort of man who might make Charlie Kaufman films. Small and furrowed with tight, curly hair and a modest beard, he answers questions in a taut voice that never seems too far from a sigh.
There's a terrible sadness to Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich and Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – both of which Kaufman wrote – but the films for which he takes a director's credit are more sombre still.
Synecdoche, New York charted the unravelling of a hitherto successful life. Kaufman's brilliant new picture, Anomalisa, a stop-motion animation co-directed with Duke Johnson, is scarcely more cheery. A motivational speaker travels to Cincinnati and has a brief, adulterous liaison with a fan. Like so much of his work, the piece seems to be about the impossibility of emotional connection.
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“The subjective is a theme in my work,” he says cautiously. “It attempts a route in to subjective experience. Skewed perception and self-consciousness are always present. But I never set out to express something like that. I always try to explore some sort of subjective experience. But obviously it all comes from my subjective experience. As I am this person, this is what you get.”
Keep that in mind when you approach Anomalisa. David Thewlis voices the permanently clouded Michael Stone. During his stay in Ohio, he fails to persuade an old flame to join him in his room, dallies in a sinister sex shop and ultimately meets up with a fan called Lisa. Crucially, Tom Noonan voices all the other characters, male and female, whereas Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa. Her voice and character stands out from the heterogeneous mulch of daily life. It feels like a metaphor for love.
“I have this aversion to saying what things are about,” he says without smiling. “I feel the metaphor works in other ways for me. It works for that too. So you’re not wrong. But it’s also about rejection and invisibility. The waiter who brings your coffee in the morning is ‘the waiter’. That’s what he is to you. But of course he is not that. He just takes on that role for a moment.”
The human adjective
Kaufman is adored by his fans. Now 57, raised in New York and Connecticut, he spent the first decade and a half of his career making do with occasional writing gigs on TV series. You will see him credited on such shows as
Ned and Stacey
and
The Dana Carvey Show
. His successful collaboration with Jonze on
Being John Malkovich
in 1999 not only made his name, but set that name on the way to becoming an adjective. People who know his work know what we mean by Kaufmanesque: self-conscious, playful, nihilistic, idiosyncratic. For all that adulation, he had a real fight getting
Anomalisa
made. What’s changed since
Being John Malkovich
?
"For the last five years I couldn't get anything made. That was my experience," he says. "It's changed a lot. In 2008 everything changed. It went to hell with the economy. I had made a film that year, Synecdoche, New York, and it didn't perform commercially. I got all these scripts together. But there are no mid-budget movies anymore. Being John Malkovich was a different era. Spike Jonze had the power to get a movie made because he was a successful video director. Everything has changed, personally and culturally."
Anomalisa (a nominee at last week's Oscars) was eventually funded with the help of Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform that invites small donations for big schemes.
Friends with riches
“We realised that the only way we could do this and keep Charlie’s vision intact was to get independent financing,” Duke Johnson, a young animator from Missouri, explains. “So who do we know that is rich? People explained there was this new thing called Kickstarter. So, let’s see if we can get some money. We went for $250,000. It didn’t occur to us that the media would notice. It not only got us started but it got us attention.”
Kaufman will need to tease out the origins of the script for us. It was originally staged as a “sound play” starring Thewlis and Jason Leigh. What does that mean?
“The cast was reading it out on stage,” he explains. “It was like a radio play. There were Foley artists there and musicians on stage. The translation was how to make it visual. We had to decide on certain things that were left ambiguous. We had to work out what stop-motion did to the story.”
It was not Kaufman’s idea to turn the script into a feature animation, but, when Johnson and his team approached him with the idea, he began to savour the possibilities. There are few accidents in animation. The camera is never likely to encounter an unexpected tree or a fortuitous sunset. So, were they able to build exactly what was in Kaufman’s mind when he wrote the sound play?
“It certainly wasn’t in opposition to what might have been in my head in 2005. Maybe I had David Thewlis in my head and presumed Michael would look like that. He ended up looking like Duke’s ex-brother-in-law. That obviously wasn’t in my head because I didn’t know Duke’s brother-in-law in 2005. The fact that it’s naturalistic appealed to me.”
The details are brilliant. In particular, Michael’s hotel room comes across as the bland ideal of all hotel rooms. They all have that grey throw at the bottom of the bed. They all have the hairdryer bolted to the wall.
“We all had the experience of staying in these places,” Johnson says. “So I spent a night in one in downtown LA and took photos of everything. That card on the pillow. They always have magazines on the desk. We wanted to get that experience just right.”
Carnal toon
The film has already become famous, maybe notorious, for a moderately explicit sex scene. Johnson admits that, with the shadow of
Team America: World Police
looming, they were constantly concerned about ensuring that it didn’t become a comic interlude. They have succeeded. Indeed, by removing the actors’ mediating presence, the sequence seems to gain intimacy.
“The expectation is that it’s going to be funny. It’s puppets having sex,” Kaufman muses. “They will start to laugh and then stop. That makes it more effective.”
The camera even manages to show some respect for their privacy by pulling away from the action. “I think that works because, as you pull away, you make them smaller and that makes them more human. The largeness of the sex act is made smaller by being incorporated into this larger world. There’s a world out there.”
“That sex scene is one of the most complicated I’ve ever done,” Johnson adds. “It took a very long time. It took six months to do that alone.”
All this extraordinary effort is to a philosophical end. We return again and again to the difficulty of connecting with another human being. Kaufman seems like a nice fellow. He can’t find that quite so hard as his characters suggest. We’re back where we started.
“I can’t say that sort of connection is impossible,” he says slightly wearily. “But I am exploring a societal problem and that’s how it came out in this story. I don’t have any solutions. I struggle and I think other people struggle to connect.”
He pauses. He loses his way a little.
“It’s a struggle. It’s a struggle.”
