Charlie Kaufman cannot tell you what his mind-bending picture, Anomalisa, is about
Stop-motion animated film cuts to the heart of our longing for intimacy and unconditional love, and could be the filmmaker’s redemption after flop of his ambitious 2008 movie Synecdoche, New York
When Charlie Kaufman wrote the script for Being John Malkovich, the 1999 film directed by Spike Jonze that put them both on the map, it was about a puppeteer who finds a portal into the actor Malkovich’s brain. Now it’s Kaufman who is the puppeteer, pulling the strings on his new film, Anomalisa, a masterful stop-motion adult animation that’s more Jan Svankmajer than it is Nick Park.
The story of Michael Stone (voiced by British actor David Thewlis), a motivational speaker who has arrived in Cincinnati to promote his new book on customer service, How May I Help You Help Them?, the film traces his meltdown over one weekend. Set in probably the strangest establishment since John Turturro checked in to the Hotel Earle in Barton Fink, Anomalisa expertly dissects the heart of the human condition.
Not that the 57-year-old Kaufman would ever state something so directly. “To say what the film is about is something I’m not comfortable doing,” he says.
Fortunately, his cast are. “For me, it’s about the search and the longing for intimacy and for love – for a really unconditional love – and how transitory that is,” says Jennifer Jason Leigh, who voices Lisa, the telesales girl Michael falls for. “There’s a bittersweet quality in that. But there’s always the hope for it, and when it exists, it feels so, so good. It feels like it will last forever.”
Leigh and Thewlis originally starred in Anomalisa when it began life as a staged radio play in Los Angeles as part of composer Carter Burwell’s Theatre of the New Ear series. “It’s what we call a sound play,” explains Kaufman, “which means that the actors were on stage, there was a Foley artist [seen on-stage, providing sound effects] and there were musicians. The idea was there was nothing happening on stage except that and you’re creating this imagery hopefully in the audiences’ minds.”
Kaufman was approached by Dino Stamatopoulos, a friend and the founder of animation company Starburns Industries, to turn the play into a film. His only previous experience of directing was 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, a hugely ambitious meta-movie about an ailing theatre director, and he was hesitant. “Translating it into a visual thing was almost antithetical to what it should be,” Kaufman admits.
