Interview: "Our goal was to show emotional truth": Venice grand jury prize winners

U.S. Oscar-winning director Charlie Kaufman, who took home the grand jury prize award at the 72nd Venice Film Festival this week, spoke with Xinhua about his film after the closing ceremony of the event.

"I was just exploring the idea of a man who has difficulties seeing other people as distinct, and when I was writing I found it coherent that he would find a girl who was distinct," Kaufman said.

"We wanted these little puppets to seem like real average people with true emotions," directors Kaufman and Duke Johnson said during an interview with Xinhua about their animation movie, Anomalisa.

Johnson is famous for having directed the TV series Mary Shelley's Fankenhole, while Kaufman has been nominated for three academy awards: twice for best original screenplay for Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (winning for the latter) and best adapted screenplay for Adaptation.

Anomalisa tells the story of a lonely man, a famous author of books on the subject of customer service, who finds himself in a depressing, standard-issue hotel room when an unexpected meeting changes his grey life.

Questioned about the origin of the movie, Kaufman said he never thought about a movie until a company Johnson was affiliated with approached him in 2011. One of the guys of that company saw his play in 2005.

"My play was specifically non visual, it was a sound play and it involved some translation for us to figure out how to make it. We tried to make it organic to film and stop-motion," he added.

The protagonists of the animation movie are little animated puppets, Johnson explained about the complicated genesis process.

"We found real people to base them on and then we had a sculptor who interpreted the real person in a sculpture which was then 3D-scanned and reproduced on a 3D printer," said the director.

"The result had it's own texture and aesthetic because the printer prints in layers and creates striations in the face. The faces, when first printed, were extremely fragile and could break and disintegrate so we put them into a super glue mixture," added Johnson.

Johnson also spoke about the challenges in working with puppets in stop-motion: the puppets don't move on their own and are like static little sculptures. Somebody poses them, takes a still picture, moves them a little bit, and then takes another still picture so that over the course of thousands of these pictures, it creates the illusion of movement and of an emotional experience that was, in the movie, very authentic, nuanced and specific.

The project was very challenging also because the directors didn't have the resources to do multiple takes or to try many things out if it failed, so it was a very painstakingly meticulous process, he said.

The love scene was probably the most important.

"We were trying to create a real vulnerable moment between these two people who happened to be in real life, inanimate," Johnson said. "We wanted to show authentic movements. It is choreographed, but it's done in a way you don't feel it, we wanted to make it feel really natural."

Asked about the possibility of working again on such a project, Kaufman said: "We talked about it, it's a very time consuming way to work and therefore it's expensive so depending on how this movie does, there may not be a future for adult-themed stop-motion animation. Personally, I have no interest in making children's movies so it would have to be something that would be like anything else I would write."

Commenting about the future of animation movies, Kaufman said, "We are in different category, I don't think that the success of any other animation movie as anything to do with whether or not we are going to be successful because I think there are big budget movies for children but made with that sophistication that allows their parents to enjoy them too. This movie is not for children, it's an intentionally hand-made feeling thing, I can't predict the future of this film. For the moment, people here responded and were touched by the movie." Endit