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Here's a great supercut of Charlie's work, and I just noticed it goes for about 7 1/2 minutes. Talk about appropriate! It was put together by Leigh Singer, and it's great.

Here's an interesting one. This interview between Charlie K. and Jason Solomons starts on a bit of a downer...

I venture, for a film as depressed as Anomalisa, nominated in the animation category, winning an award might have seemed, well, counter-intuitive.

"No, it would have suited us to win, believe me", he retorts about his remarkably realistic stop-motion animation, which follows a miserable motivational speaker in a soulless Cincinnati hotel. "There's nothing pleasant about losing, especially after we'd been through a long process of continued losing throughout the awards season. But it makes it worse when you've created something like Anomalisa and then Woody the Cowboy and Buzz Lightyear are on stage introducing your category at the Oscars."

... and then gets a little uncomfortable when Solomons tries hard to connect Charlie's work to his Jewishness, despite Charlie's obvious skepticism:

The mention of Woody Allen leads to my inevitable question of Jewishness in his work. "I don't know what you're talking about," is Kaufman's snap response and I can't tell if he's joking, at all. "I mean, you know, I am who I am," he continues, stuttering a bit, and playing with his beard. "I was raised sort of Jewish but secular, you know, I'm not from a religious family, but certainly Woody Allen was very important to me growing up, but then so was Monty Python, and I don't think any of them were Jewish?" (Source)

I can understand where Solomon's coming from--he's writing for the Jewish Chronicle, after all--but Charlie's irritation is just as understandable.

Here's a great interview on 52 Insights with Charlie and Duke, covering a lot of different topics. A few little snippets:

Has sleep deprivation ever helped you in your work?

KAUFMAN: No, it doesn’t help me. It makes me sour and angry. I’m not any of those things right now but it could turn on a dime so be careful.

Okay I’ll try to be nice.

KAUFMAN: The first day we came here we had to do a thing at the BBC. They have these glass security doors that swing shut and we were walking in a line and I was the last one, I wasn’t paying attention and I guess the guard didn’t notice that I wasn’t through. It’s glass so of course I don’t see it and it smashes me directly in the face. That was a bad day. And I was already in kind of a bad mood.

[...]

KAUFMAN: With the BAFTA speech, I knew I was going to be doing it and I really wanted to stop myself from doing it in a self-serving way. I spent months trying to get through that whole, “I’m going to be impressive to people” thing, which is the natural tendency when you go on stage anywhere. You want people to like you and think you’re smart or whatever. But I tried to not do that, and if it was affective it was because I was saying, “I’m not going to do this. I’m going to try to be useful.”

[...]

So moving forward would you say that you have a challenging relationship with Hollywood?

KAUFMAN: Challenging? It’s a hate-hate relationship I have with Hollywood. I don’t like the business aspect of it but I need the business aspect to get things made. I’m writing a novel at the moment because it doesn’t cost anything, so maybe that’s another way I can do what I want to do. I don’t know what my future is in Hollywood. (Source)

Thanks to Ari for the heads up!

Nope.

I have a backlog of links to post. I'll get on it.

Charlie and Duke will be appearing at the SoHo Apple store for a Q&A on March 7. You can log into Apple to reserve a spot, but something tells me those spots will disappear quickly.

Join directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson for a discussion and Q&A about their inventive masterpiece, “Anomalisa.” Love, laughter, and loneliness align in this stop-motion work of art, which was nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Animated Feature Film.” “Anomalisa" will be available on iTunes. (Source)

Details at the link!

Michael and Lisa have an awkward encounter in the hall:

Zadie Smith has a really great essay on the New York Review of Books site, where she talks about those two animated films (mostly Anomalisa) and that philosopher guy.

By aesthetic coincidence that evening I had a date to see Charlie Kaufman’s new movie Anomalisa, with my friend Tamsin, a professional philosopher, a Nietzsche scholar by trade, but not averse to the odd Schopenhauer reference, should a layman—or woman—try to force one upon her. [...]As we walked to the movie theater we considered the idea that all Kaufman’s movies have been somewhat Schopenhauerean, in the sense that they concern suffering in one way or another: the experience of suffering, the inevitability of it, and the possibility of momentary, illusory relief from it. This relief tends to arrive, for Kaufman, in the form of a woman (although these women are almost always the cause of much suffering, too). I thought of Catherine Keener, as Maxine, in the film Being John Malkovich all those years ago, ravishing in her white shirt and pencil skirt, offering a schlumpy depressive—a classic Kaufman protagonist—fifteen minutes’ relief from his suffering:

ERROLL: Can I be anyone I want?

MAXINE: You can be John Malkovich.

ERROLL: Well that’s perfect. My second choice. Ah, this is wonderful…. Malkovich! King of New York! Man about town! Most eligible bachelor! Bon Vivant! The Schopenhauer of the twentieth century!

Now, that last line was cut from the film, but I can take a hint. “It had puppets in it,” Tamsin noted, as we took our seats, “And this one’s all puppets?”

“All puppets.” (Source)

Thanks to Tram!

The 35th annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon went down last Monday afternoon, at the Beverly Hilton. Here's this year's class photo. Can you spot Charlie? 

Clicky to embiggen.

I've enlarged him, behind the cut. Also, visit Hollywood Reporter for the full rundown on who's who in the photo, and an even larger version of the pic.

Here's an interview with producer Rosa Tran via The Film Stage.

“We were working together at Starburns Industries and wondering, ‘what’s the next project?’” recalled Tran. “Duke got a hold of [Kaufman’s] script from Dino [Stamatopoulos] and immediately wanted to make it.” When they initially pitched the project at various studios they were either rejected or told to turn it into an episodic format that could be aired on television.

Huh! Didn't know that.

“I got involved in animation and it was like something clicked,” Tran said. “I call it the animation bug. You go onto a stage and it is beautiful.” She specifically tells the story of her days on the long-running stop-motion animated TV show Robot Chicken and how they had a Star Wars special. “You go onto the stage and there’s the scene where the AT-ATs are crossing over this icy terrain and I’m looking at the AT-ATs on this 20 by 20 set,” Tran noted. “I look at the computer monitor and I look back and forth and it’s like a magic trick. The snow is perfect. The AT-ATs are perfect. The little stormtroopers are perfect. When you look on the screen, it’s like the movie. The small details are so amazing.” (Source)

"Everything is intentional," says Charlie in this interview with The Verge's Tasha Robinson. "Especially in a movie that's animated. There are absolutely no accidents, because it's happening one frame at a time."

What gave you the most technical problems as you were designing the film together?

Duke Johnson: Well, a lot of different technical problems came out of a lack of money. But mostly, specifically, it came out of a desire to want to have the most articulate-able puppets and the broadest range of emotions for the character performances. Typically, with low-budget stop-motion, you can get away with a cartoony style. But we wanted to have this authentic human experience, that's what we were going for, so it lent itself more toward a realistic aesthetic. So the level of nuance and detail goes up, so we had to figure out how to make these puppets relatable in a way that made that possible. Typically, stop-motion puppets can cost upward of $80,000. We had $100,000 initially to design all the puppets in the movie. So we had to find creative ways to do that.

[...]

The production studio Laika prefers to have individual animators tackle entire scenes, to enhance the continuity and give the scenes individual character. When I interviewed the directors of The Boxtrolls, I found out they had one ballroom scene done by a single animator who worked solely on that for 18 months. Do you prefer that method? Does it matter to you?

Johnson: That's ideal. It's an ideal scenario to keep one animator on a scene, because animators are like designers and actors. They have their own skill sets, and their own styles. But we didn't really have the luxury to do that on this film. We had animators coming and going, because we couldn't really afford to pay Laika rates. So we could only afford to keep animators a short period of time before they had to move on and take higher-paying jobs. And we didn't have the luxury of time — some of the scenes in this movie are extraordinarily long. Like, the hotel-room scene took the entire two-year duration of production to shoot, and we did it on multiple stages. So we had to put a lot of time into establishing these characters, and how they move, and what their specific character traits are, so all the animators could create a sense of solidarity. (Source)