Episode 671 - Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucksters what the fucking ears what the fuckadelics i am mark maron this is wtf welcome to the show oh my god
Marc:Good show today.
Marc:Well, you know, it's sort of like one of those rare bird shows.
Marc:And I never thought I'd talk to Charlie Kaufman.
Marc:I just never thought it would happen.
Marc:But today, Charlie Kaufman is going to be on this show.
Marc:Charlie Kaufman is the writer of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Marc:He directed Synecdoche, New York, and wrote it.
Marc:Duke, Duke Johnson is going to be with him.
Marc:He he worked on the show Moral Oral and Community.
Marc:They work together, co-directing Charlie's script Anomalisa, which is now in theaters.
Marc:And I tell you, there's I just haven't.
Marc:I don't, you know, the word genius gets used a lot.
Marc:It gets thrown around a lot.
Marc:I don't know if I'm a good judge of what a genius is necessarily, or I certainly have misused a word myself, but genius in its purest form.
Marc:I don't even know what that means, but I know I've been in the presence of maybe a couple, maybe a couple geniuses on this show.
Marc:I will explore this in a moment.
Marc:I do want to tell you that...
Marc:Again, I'm very excited that so many people are watching my series Marin on Netflix.
Marc:I do have to finish a script.
Marc:I'm writing the finale of the fourth season of Marin.
Marc:I got to get that in.
Marc:Got a lot of stuff to do.
Marc:I got interviews to do this week.
Marc:We got concept meetings for the show.
Marc:Got to get that script written so the other guys can sit down with it and me and put it together, make it right.
Marc:Don't love it.
Marc:I don't love writing scripts.
Marc:Writing in general is a bit of a chore.
Marc:Once I'm in it, it's great, but it becomes a puzzle.
Marc:When I write, I tend to eat a lot of brownies, Kit Kats I eat, cereal, whatever's in the fucking house.
Marc:I will clean the house.
Marc:I will do whatever it takes to avoid actually doing the writing.
Marc:I'll write a bit and then I got to eat.
Marc:I got to work on some stuff.
Marc:But that's just, that's my process.
Marc:It's a long process.
Marc:I don't have that kind of time this time.
Marc:Scripts coming along fine.
Marc:It's driving me crazy.
Marc:Point being, thank you again for watching Marin on Netflix or however you watch it.
Marc:It's nice to know that you do work and people appreciate it.
Marc:Now let's move on to what I was talking about, about genius.
Marc:Charlie Kaufman is a genius.
Marc:Not met many geniuses.
Marc:I've maybe had two geniuses in this room.
Marc:Oddly, they know each other.
Marc:And oddly, they're both involved in Anomalisa.
Marc:I think Dan Harmon is also a genius.
Marc:And it's not necessarily about output, though both of those guys creatively are completely original and an amazing sort of like fluidity to their imagination.
Yeah.
Marc:and imagination i think in the creative in the creative fields around genius is where you really you feel it you know you you know you watch something like community and and whether you like the show or not you're like holy where does this come from and with someone like charlie kaufman you watch all his movies the first time that you see being john malkovich
Marc:or adaptation you you're sitting there in the movie theater and you're like where does this come from because it's not it's not like sketch you know sketch can be weird and just be open-ended and and just you know sort of like you know well that was fucking well i don't well that was weird am i supposed to understand something no it's sketch you can just do weird shit without a button without a close without any point you
Marc:For complete absurdism, sometimes absurdism is a tremendous crutch.
Marc:It's a crutch that people with a good imagination can sometimes get away with not having a fluidity of imagination.
Marc:that that seeks meaning absurdism is is is an easy out sometimes but if you watch something like being john malkovich where there is like devices upon devices upon layers upon layers of visual and and uh lyrically um written content that that moves through a complete vision it's it's an astounding experience and that's the same with adaptation
Marc:On some level, Eternal Sunshine, The Spotless Mind, the way that was executed.
Marc:I mean, Synecdoche, New York, which is Kaufman's directorial debut and also his script that was very personal, is just mind-bending to the point where you walk out and you're like, I'm fucking exhausted.
Marc:I think I missed something.
Marc:I got to go do that again because you're in the hands of a fucking genius.
Marc:And this new movie, Anomalisa,
Marc:is genius for a lot of reasons.
Marc:With Duke Johnson, who oversaw and directed and brought the animated stop-action stuff to life with Charlie.
Marc:This was written as a radio play originally.
Marc:But they do something with stop-action animation that cannot be achieved with real actors.
Marc:There is a humanity to the movie that is sort of brain-bending
Marc:In its depth.
Marc:And there are moments in it that are so human because you watch some Kaufman movies and there's obviously a tremendous amount of humanity in them.
Marc:But sometimes the flights of imagination take you to places where, you know, the landscape is is is completely surreal.
Marc:But but with this, with the stop action of Anomalisa, there is a depth of humanity and pathos and and and and humility that that they I don't think it could have been achieved with with real people.
Marc:They were they were more real than real people.
Marc:It's just astounding.
Marc:But genius, you know, genius.
Marc:I got a story about a genius.
Marc:I got a story about a genius.
Marc:When I was a kid, I heard about this genius.
Marc:You know Einstein and everybody else, but there was a genius in my family.
Marc:My father's cousin, Brent, was supposedly a genius.
Marc:My father would talk about this kid, Brent.
Marc:He's a genius.
Marc:He's in Mensa.
Marc:He was a genius.
Marc:A lot of expectations on the genius.
Marc:Genius in families, it's a horrible position to be put in, to test well and have those expectations.
Marc:We have a genius in the room.
Marc:Well, what does the genius do?
Marc:Is he a dancing monkey?
Marc:Well, Brent was this guy I heard about.
Marc:And when I was a kid, it must have been about 1970, 1971.
Marc:So I was about eight or nine living in New Mexico.
Marc:And Brent, the genius, was traveling across country from Jersey, where my father grew up, and he was going to stop over for the night with his girlfriend.
Marc:And I just kept hearing about, like, you know, I just had this thing in my mind.
Marc:What does a genius do?
Marc:Am I going to know that he's a genius?
Marc:Is it going to be like seeing a wizard or an alien of some kind, the genius?
Marc:And I just remember that the backstory on Brent was like he was a genius, but he kind of dropped out.
Marc:I mean, this is, you know, the 70s, early 70s.
Marc:He was working as a grill cook or something.
Marc:And I guess he was not sharing his genius with the world.
Marc:But I was fascinated with this guy, a genius that would not use his powers, that refused to use his powers.
Marc:For good or bad, the genius checked out.
Marc:He's working in a kitchen.
Marc:And I remember he came over, and he was kind of quiet and a little hippie-ish, and his girlfriend was kind of hippie-ish.
Marc:And they stayed in my room down in the basement.
Marc:We had to sleep upstairs.
Marc:I think they smoked some weed.
Marc:And I just like, you know, I didn't really get to spend that much time with the genius.
Marc:I think I just kept looking at him and I was waiting for something, you know.
Marc:But that was the first time I, you know, I met a genius when Brent came over.
Marc:And I didn't, you know, it was mystifying in a way and a little disappointing.
Marc:But I do have to say...
Marc:that the morning he left, you know, he cooked everyone breakfast.
Marc:And I, you know, I got to tell you, to this day, probably the best eggs I ever had.
Marc:So genius manifests itself in different ways.
Marc:And they weren't even that complicated.
Marc:Just scrambled and it just, you know, genius eggs.
Marc:That's all I'm saying.
Marc:Genius.
Marc:But now I'm going to talk to to Charlotte Kaufman and I'm going to bring in Duke Johnson towards the end.
Marc:Spend a little time with both of them to talk about Anomalisa.
Marc:And it was a real pleasure.
Marc:So here's here are the three of us eventually.
Marc:Do you want to pull that mic into your face?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Can I turn this down?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:The first knob, I think, is you.
Marc:How's that?
Marc:Better?
Marc:Yeah?
Guest:That's better, yeah.
Marc:There was too much of me?
Marc:It was a little loud.
Marc:Yeah, I hear that complaint a lot.
Marc:I am excited.
Marc:To talk to you, Charlie Kaufman.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:And in later, Duke Johnson is going to chime in.
Marc:But I wanted to have a conversation about the earlier Charlie Kaufman.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Do you say Kaufman or Kaufman?
Guest:I used to say Kaufman, but then people didn't understand what I was saying, so I changed it to what they thought it was.
Guest:I'd spell it.
Guest:They'd say, what, what, what?
Guest:And then I'd spell it, and they'd go, oh, Kaufman.
Guest:So I'd just say Kaufman, yeah.
Marc:You actually changed to accommodate... Well, there's the story of my early life.
LAUGHTER
Marc:We got it.
Marc:We're done.
Marc:All right, Duke, you're in.
Marc:No, because the reason that I was excited to talk to you among being a big fan of your work is that you were always this almost mythological presence in comedy, in comedy writing.
Marc:You always heard about this guy, Charlie Kaufman, because I've been doing it for a while.
Marc:I have friends that you've worked with.
Marc:And then when I was out here, I guess maybe in the 80s, I remember there was this talk of this mysterious pilot script
Marc:Was it Depressed Roomies?
Marc:Was that what it was called?
Marc:Yeah, 90s.
Guest:I wasn't out here until 91.
Guest:So it was 91.
Marc:Well, it was 93, 94 maybe.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So in the mid-90s, okay, that I heard that there's this script.
Marc:It's the greatest script ever written for a comedy.
Marc:And it was called Depressed Roomies, right?
Marc:That's correct, yeah.
Marc:And what happened with that?
Marc:Nothing.
Nothing.
Marc:That's the other story of my life, yeah.
Guest:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And what was it about?
Guest:Because I remember there was- It's about depressed roommates.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They live together in a small apartment in New York and they, nothing.
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:That's what it's about.
Guest:Well, I mean, no, there's a story for the first episode.
Marc:Was there some weird stage direction?
Marc:Wasn't supposed to all be done with an echo or something peculiar about it?
Guest:I never got a copy of it.
Guest:There was somebody who moved upstairs who had a wooden leg, and they were trying to figure out how to get him carpeting.
Guest:And one of them had a cousin who was in the carpet business, and they thought if they could seduce this man, then they could get carpeting for free.
Guest:He wasn't gay, and neither of them are gay, but it actually worked.
Guest:And he moved in next door, and the guy had to go ahead and date him for a while.
Guest:we did a stage performance of it to sort of like try to sell it and had a good cast Jay Johnston played the right played the guy upstairs and Sarah Silverman played grocery clerk they were in love with and
Guest:Oh, you know who else was in it?
Guest:Jennifer Coolidge.
Guest:She played the wife of the carpet guy.
Guest:The carpet guy was played by a guy whose name I forgot now.
Guest:And was that a reading for studio people?
Guest:Yeah, I was trying to sort of interest people.
Guest:But did you have a deal or you didn't have a deal or it was just something you wrote?
Guest:At that point, it was something I owned.
Guest:I had written it as part of a development deal for Disney.
Guest:I had a development deal there early on, which nothing I did.
Guest:I wrote a bunch of shit for them and nothing got made.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:How does it start?
Marc:Where did it start?
Marc:Where'd you grow up?
Guest:I grew up in Massapequa, Long Island.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And then we moved to Connecticut when I was about 12.
Guest:So you're an East Coast guy.
Guest:I'm an East Coast guy.
Guest:And where'd you go to college?
Guest:I went to Boston University.
Guest:Me too.
Guest:I'm sorry, just had to-
Guest:It's okay.
Marc:It's your show.
Marc:I went to Boston University.
Guest:When did you graduate?
Guest:I didn't graduate.
Guest:I transferred to NYU.
Guest:I was an acting student at Boston University, and I transferred to the film school at NYU after my freshman year.
Marc:You were an SFA at BU?
Guest:Is that what it was called?
Guest:Yeah, I think the School of Fine Arts.
Marc:Yeah, what were you in?
Marc:I was a liberal arts guy.
Marc:What years?
Marc:I was there from, I transferred out of Curry.
Marc:So I guess I was there at 82 to 87 maybe?
Marc:Okay, I was there 76.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:So you're a little older than me, probably.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Guest:You look better than me.
Guest:Unless you just got left back a lot.
Marc:It was not bright.
Marc:I had motivation problems.
Marc:I just couldn't keep up.
Marc:So you wanted to be an actor initially?
Marc:Yeah, since third grade.
Marc:A childhood fantasy.
Guest:Well, it wasn't a fantasy.
Guest:I just discovered it in third grade.
Guest:And I was in love with my teacher who, you know, who did these plays.
Guest:And I got up there and I played a rooster in a play called The Cherkin Deuce, which was I basically ran the hen house.
Guest:And I was this blustery kind of asshole.
Guest:And which, you know, I got a lot of laughs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was a shy kid.
Guest:And it was like, holy crap, you know.
Guest:This is it.
Guest:This is what I want to do.
Guest:And that was just like my trajectory.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:to Boston University, and then I just dropped it.
Guest:So you acted through high school and everything else?
Guest:I acted through high school.
Guest:I did Summerstock.
Guest:You did Summerstock?
Guest:I did Summerstock at Green Mountain Guild in Vermont.
Guest:What big plays were there?
Guest:I was in the children's theater company, so we did children's plays.
Guest:There was this guy named David Marshall Grant who was in my company who went on to become an actor and did a bunch of stuff on Broadway.
Guest:But other than that, it was nobody really well known.
Guest:But apparently Meryl Streep was in this company, not when I was there, but years before.
Marc:So you really put the work in.
Marc:You did, you know... Yeah, it was my... I mean, I loved it.
Guest:I did a lot of community theater.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what... Did you write any plays at that time?
Guest:Yeah, I wrote plays and I did short movies.
Guest:I did... You know, I directed these Super 8 films and...
Marc:When is that film festival, the Charlie Kaufman?
Guest:I don't think they exist anymore.
Guest:Gone.
Guest:My parents had a lot of flooding in their house in Connecticut and everything got ruined.
Guest:Are you the only artist in the family?
Guest:My father is a painter.
Guest:He's an engineer by profession.
Guest:He's retired, but he paints a lot.
Guest:He has shows now.
Guest:He's in his 80s.
Guest:What's his style?
Guest:I'm trying to think how you characterize it or if there's somebody you could liken it to.
Guest:It's sort of political and it's sort of intense and angry and funny.
Guest:I would say he's very skilled, but his stuff is primitive.
Guest:He's interested.
Guest:He likes Basquiat.
Marc:Basquiat's his favorite.
Marc:Or like Dubuffet or like maybe.
Marc:Yeah, Dubuffet.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:So you grew up in an arty household in a way.
Guest:Yeah, my father was kind of eccentric.
Marc:And a little lefty.
Marc:Definitely, yeah.
Marc:There's a lot of, like, in Jewish, too, for the most part.
Marc:For the whole part.
Marc:Well, I mean, I'm just trying to characterize, because there was a type of...
Marc:kind of a jewish lefty that doesn't quite exist anymore that i think existed with the islands socialist summer camp thing yeah yeah i did i didn't go to social but i thought your parents because i had a great aunt who was a communist and there was a definitely this there was a very aggressive and very sort of uh uh ideologically pointed uh crew of uh jews at some time and i i don't know that my parents were liberal but they weren't that
Marc:They weren't all the way over.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My dad was an engineer.
Guest:And, you know, it was kind of like they were definitely left wing.
Guest:They definitely Democrats.
Guest:But but I would say more towards the center.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:And what did your mom do?
Marc:Is she an artist as well?
Guest:My mom was a social worker.
Guest:She gave that up to raise us.
Guest:And then she went and worked in after we grew up.
Guest:She worked in some offices and.
Marc:good-hearted people they were good brothers and sisters i have a sister who's older uh-huh and she's a she's an artist really she was a painter and she does all sorts of like creative stuff now i just like knowing that like a lot of people i talk to it's it's it's nice when you talk to people who are creative that grew up in supportive environments most people i have found that i talked to who have a job in creativity did have that you know there was very few people i've talked to they're like you're not gonna
Marc:They were always supportive.
Guest:They were supportive and they kept their mouth shut.
Guest:Apparently, my father has told me recently that he was terrified that I was going to go down the road of wanting to be an actor and not because it was bad, but because he thought it was going to be disastrous.
Marc:How are you going to make a living?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then, you know, and then with, you know, when I went to film school and I graduated and I didn't.
Guest:I didn't get a job working in anything in entertainment until I was 32.
Guest:So there were a lot of years, a lot of bad jobs, a lot of borrowing money, and they kept their mouth shut.
Guest:And I think then they were really thrilled and surprised that something happened, which was just kind of luck.
Guest:What was the first thing?
Guest:I worked on a show called Get a Life.
Guest:I came out to LA trying to get work, and I didn't get any work.
Guest:And then I was heading home.
Guest:I was living in Minnesota at the time, and I got a call to meet with this guy named David Merkin.
Guest:And I was packed.
Guest:And he said, don't leave.
Guest:I was going to go home to Minnesota.
Guest:I had been offered a job working on a show that Fred Willard was doing there, which was some sort of like cable access candid camera show.
Guest:And I thought, well, it's a writing job.
Guest:I've never had a writing job.
Guest:But I mean, had I done that, had I left, that would have been it.
Guest:I would have been in middle management in Minnesota now.
Marc:How'd you end up in Minnesota?
Guest:My girlfriend and I, who's now my wife, moved to Wisconsin.
Guest:I'd given up trying.
Guest:I was moving to study neurophysiology at UW, and that didn't happen.
Guest:And then we couldn't get work there.
Guest:So after a year, we moved to Minneapolis, where I just had a bunch of shit jobs for four and a half years.
Guest:And then I decided, well, I'll try to get in TV, which isn't really what I wanted to do.
Guest:But I kind of saw there was a path.
Guest:You write a spec script.
Guest:You don't really have to have any experience.
Mm-hmm.
Guest:I wrote a bunch of specs.
Guest:I got sort of an agent to, I guess what they call, hip pocket me.
Marc:I was hip pocketed most of my career.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he said, you have to move out.
Guest:So I moved out with like by 1945 Jetta, which was completely rusted out because it's from Minnesota.
Guest:And I was out here for like three months during hiring season.
Guest:And then as I was leaving, I got this offer.
Guest:So I worked on that show with Chris and with Adam Resnick.
Marc:Who I've had in here, both of them.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:I heard that Adam did your show.
Guest:I didn't know Chris did it.
Guest:And who else was on that?
Marc:Adam is intense, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was a great show.
Guest:People love that show.
Guest:I loved that show.
Guest:It was like I couldn't believe my luck that that was the show I was going to get.
Guest:And then it was all downhill after that.
Guest:I mean, that show got canceled.
Guest:I was in a bunch of shit shows for about seven and a half years.
Marc:You were staffed, though, for a few things, right?
Guest:Yeah, I worked in set for like seven years in TV.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:Well, let me just ask you real quick, because it's so, you know, after you went to NYU film school.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Graduated and then you kicked around New York for a few years.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And then, you know, at some point when you'd hit some sort of bottom, you decided neurophysiology was the path.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I thought, fuck this.
Guest:I'm going to do something that's sort of important and that's fascinating.
Guest:And they screwed me when I got there.
Guest:I was supposed to be sort of like a non-matriculating student.
Guest:And because of that, I was the last person to be able to register for courses.
Guest:I had to do a whole bunch of undergraduate stuff before I could get into a graduate program because I have a BFA, which I don't have any credits.
Guest:But I was closed out of every course I needed to take.
Guest:Because the matriculating students got there first.
Guest:And then I just like, so then I just gave up.
Guest:And then I worked in a Christian bakery.
Guest:Christian bakery?
Guest:That was the job I could get.
Guest:Yeah, I worked in it.
Guest:It was Livin' Bread, it was called.
Guest:What makes it Christian?
Guest:They played Christian music and it was called Livin' Bread.
Guest:And I guess the idea, I don't know.
Guest:But there was the cross.
Guest:They were Christians.
Guest:The cupcakes weren't Jesus cupcakes.
Guest:They were...
Guest:No, no, but they were like, I don't know, there was a sort of a sense that it was like, it wasn't like right wing Christian.
Guest:It was more like hippie Christian.
Guest:But they play Christian music.
Guest:And the weird thing is my wife, who is not Jewish, got a job at a Chabad house doing childcare.
Guest:She had a teaching certificate, so she was working with little kids.
Guest:And so we had those sort of weird jobs.
Guest:And then we left.
Marc:So the Get a Life, I imagine that that being your first job, there was a certain amount of creative freedom that after that closed down, I mean, I imagine entering writing for just shit television was kind of diminishing and horrible.
Guest:I was still making more money on these jobs than I had ever made before.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just entry level going on Get a Life.
Guest:I mean, I was making $5 an hour working at an art museum in Minnesota right before I got this job.
Marc:After the Christian Bakery.
Guest:Right.
Guest:While in Minnesota.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I actually left that job to come out here.
Guest:And, you know, I mean, it wasn't freedom on Get a Life because I was terrified.
Guest:I was I was I couldn't open my mouth for like the first six weeks there.
Guest:I could not say anything in the room.
Guest:And I just thought I was going to get fired every day.
Marc:But the tone of that, but you know, the way Chris Elliott's sense of humor works and the way Adam Resnick too, that they, they do push the boundary and they do.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And no, I love, I love the ideas on the show.
Guest:I loved writing the scripts, but I was terrified.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I was really shy.
Marc:And, and how long did it take you to, to move through that?
Marc:Were you able to move through it during that job or did that happen?
Guest:I mean, what happened was I got a script assignment and it came out.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And it was a relief.
Guest:And then I felt more confident.
Yeah.
Marc:And then like these other jobs, like The Edge and The Trouble with Larry, that these were job jobs, right?
Marc:On some level.
Guest:Well, some of them were just horrible shows.
Guest:I mean, The Trouble with Larry was Bronson Pinchot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And What's Her Face from Friends, Courtney Cox.
Guest:And yeah, it was just like, it was a terrible show.
Guest:And it didn't even, I don't, I think maybe it aired once.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that was it.
Guest:That was it.
Marc:It was sort of one of those reliefs yet.
Marc:Well, I'm not going to make money, but thank God that didn't go on for 10 years.
Guest:No, it wasn't.
Guest:Yeah, I guess so.
Guest:I guess so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know what the relief was.
Guest:I just like getting paid.
Guest:And, you know, and when the shows were canceled, I would write screenplays and hope that I could, you know, interest somebody in hiring me for assignment work.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, I'm just trying to track there's some moment where I'm assuming.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, because I knew, you know, I was friends with Louie when the Dana Carvey show happened.
Marc:Those guys that came out of Conan, that group of writers, I guess it was Smigel and Dino and Louie.
Marc:And who else was on that Dana Carvey show?
Guest:Robert Carlock, who works with Tina Fey, who did 30 Rock, Kimmy Schmidt and John Glazer.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right, John, yeah.
Guest:Of course, Carell and Colbert were both on the show.
Marc:It was a good group of people.
Marc:I just remember talking to Louis, and I remember Louis having that opportunity.
Marc:Was he the head writer or was Smeichel?
Marc:He was the head writer, and Robert Smeichel was the executive producer.
Marc:Because I just remembered there was a bit, and I don't know who was responsible for it, where Clinton came out with all the nipples.
Guest:It was either Smigel or Louis or Dino.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Nobody else got anything on that show.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, well, Colbert and Carell kind of did stuff that they'd done at Second City, bits that they did, like the great waiters who were nauseous, that kind of thing.
Guest:But in terms of writer-writers...
Guest:There was no group think on it either?
Guest:You couldn't get anything on.
Guest:I mean, it was disastrous for me.
Guest:It was a really frustrating experience because I moved to New York to do it.
Guest:They met with me and they really wanted me.
Guest:Based on what?
Guest:Based on my sketch packet from The Edge.
Guest:I wasn't anybody at the time.
Guest:I mean, I was really flattered that they wanted me.
Guest:I wasn't in that group.
Guest:I couldn't get on The Simpsons.
Guest:I couldn't get on Seinfeld.
Guest:I couldn't get on any show that I thought might be fun.
Guest:And you tried.
Guest:I tried, yeah.
Guest:I tried to get on Larry Sanders.
Guest:I couldn't get on that show, which Adam worked on.
Guest:Why do you think that was?
Guest:I assumed because I sucked.
Guest:Really?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Well, I don't know.
Guest:I mean, I don't know.
Guest:I just like...
Guest:I was really frustrated.
Guest:Maybe I wasn't, maybe I wasn't, well, for like Simpsons, I didn't even get a meeting.
Guest:So it wasn't like how I was in the room.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:Because I thought like, mistakenly, obviously, it was obviously the first time you worked with Dino, who you still have a relationship with.
Marc:I do, yeah.
Marc:And because of the,
Marc:The new film that that that would have been the moment where because when I look at being John Malkovich or adaptation or any of your movies, the imagination engaged in the possibilities you create with with writing and ultimately with with film.
Marc:I've never seen it before, and I don't think anyone has.
Marc:And I think that the respect and credit you get for being one of the most imaginative writers out there is obviously deserved.
Marc:So here I am in my mind, I'm like, well, it must have been some comedy event must have happened where your brain just broke open and gave you the freedom to do that kind of stuff.
Guest:No.
Guest:No, I just was writing and I was trying to write something that I thought was funny.
Guest:Being John Malkovich was the first spec script I wrote and I wasn't expecting anyone to make it, but I thought I'll write this and if it's funny, then maybe I'll get polish work or something.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, for a while, nobody, I mean, people liked it.
Guest:It got kind of a reputation like Depressed Roomies, but everyone said it would never get made.
Guest:Also, Odenkirk and Cross worked on Carvey for a while, too.
Guest:Oh, right, right, right.
Guest:I also knew them and didn't get on Mr. Show.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:No.
Guest:You know, now I like you more than I did before.
Guest:Well, good.
Guest:I've got a lot of sad sack stories.
Guest:So what was the story of being John Malkovich?
Guest:How did that get made?
Guest:Spike Jones read it.
Guest:And Spike at the time was, you know, famous.
Guest:And he wanted to make it.
Guest:And he had a relationship with Steve Golan at Propaganda.
Guest:And Steve supported it.
Guest:And it got made sort of under the radar for like $8 million maybe, which is what our movie cost.
Marc:And it's just like, and when you, like, I guess these are hard questions to answer.
Marc:Because I don't know, you know, when you follow the rules of sitcom, even when you're breaking them, there's a format there.
Marc:There's a three-act structure usually.
Marc:There's, you know, there's a way to write that shit, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it just seemed that with John Malkovich, obviously, you know, there's an act structure on some level.
Marc:But when you are...
Marc:you know creating this story of being inside John Malkovich and having these different environments and these I mean the way you visualized it how do you write that were you just sort of like fucking around in a way or did you see it as a full picture from the beginning I mean I figured it out as I went along right I didn't know where it was going and the third act or for whatever whatever that is was very different in the original script
Guest:um but spike didn't want to do that but do you work with a storyboard do you do no right i just write and and i find things as i go and more like a novelist i think yeah definitely right what i try to do with everything i i write and you know that's funny i like that that's funny and i don't care you know i'm gonna do this isn't for anybody it's not an assignment i'm gonna do what i think is funny and then you know see what happens and so and spike got it yeah spike got it yeah
Marc:And how close did you work with him during the very close?
Guest:Yeah, he was he was great and very collaborative and very respectful.
Guest:And I was fortunate because it's not the experience that most writers have.
Marc:Where did Human Nature come from?
Guest:Human Nature was the second script I wrote.
Guest:It was just another spec script I wrote.
Guest:And it had like this sort of weird history of people being interested in it.
Guest:Steven Soderbergh was going to do it.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Guest:And it was after he had left Hollywood and made Schizopolis.
Guest:And he came upon it and he wanted to make it.
Guest:And I started meeting with him and then out of sight got offered to him or something.
Guest:And he just out the door.
Guest:And then what happened was I went out and pitched this idea for Eternal Sunshine with Michel Gondry.
Guest:And...
Guest:I had to write something else first.
Guest:I don't remember what.
Marc:Was it Confessions?
Guest:Maybe.
Guest:I can't remember.
Guest:But I had to write something else.
Guest:And Michelle didn't want to wait.
Guest:He wanted to do a movie.
Guest:And he said, can I do Human Nature?
Guest:And I said, well, OK.
Guest:And so he did Human Nature.
Marc:What was your experience working with him?
Marc:Because I think he became a better director after that.
Guest:I think Michelle's really smart and really talented.
Guest:And, you know, I was a producer on that movie.
Guest:Spike was a producer on that as well.
Guest:And, you know, Spike introduced me to Michelle saying, Michelle is my favorite director.
Guest:And I can see that.
Guest:I really like Michelle.
Guest:I think he's great.
Guest:I think that, I don't know.
Guest:He we gave him freedom.
Guest:The idea was we let let Michelle make the movie he wants to make.
Guest:And I think there are really good things in that movie.
Guest:And, you know, I did.
Guest:It didn't do very well.
Guest:And it hurt everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Michelle.
Guest:It hurt.
Marc:I guess career wise or just personally your heart.
Guest:No, it didn't hurt my heart that much, actually.
Guest:But, you know, you know, it was after Malkovich.
Guest:So you're sort of kind of like expecting something.
Guest:Next big thing, you know.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So that happened.
Guest:And.
Marc:And then Adaptation happened, which is a fucking masterpiece.
Guest:Yeah, I was offered the job of writing an adaptation of The Orchid Thief by Jonathan Demme and Ed Saxon.
Guest:And I couldn't figure out how to do it.
Guest:And I think that's what I was writing at the time because I remember Spike was shooting Malkovich.
Guest:And I would just wake up every morning with this intense depression.
Guest:Like, I cannot fucking face this again.
Guest:I can't face it again.
Guest:I can't face it again.
Guest:adaptation adaptation because I didn't know how to do it I had the idea it's pretty close to what's in the movie I had the idea I'm just gonna write this movie about orchids with no story right you know and I I didn't know what that meant but I figured I'd figure it out and I didn't and then I thought oh well what if I what am I thinking about now let me write about the thing that I'm most fascinated with now and the thing that I was most fascinated now was with being stuck with my own problem so I thought well what if I write about me being stuck and
Guest:And I remember telling Spike, I remember going to the set where they were shooting the, what do you call it, the swamp scene.
Guest:I remember telling Spike about it and he said, yeah, you should definitely do that.
Guest:And I think that kind of gave me the courage to go ahead and do it.
Guest:Because I didn't tell them that I was doing it because I was terrified they'd say, no.
Guest:You can't do that.
Guest:And I had nothing else.
Guest:So I wrote it and then I turned it in without telling them.
Guest:I turned it in with my name and the name of my brother on the script and they were really pissed off because they thought I had sort of farmed out the script to this other person and it wasn't what they signed up for.
Guest:But then they liked it and then Jonathan decided not to direct it and Spike asked if he could and
Marc:Thank God.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, I like Jonathan Demme's movies a lot, but I can't imagine that movie not being directed by Spike.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And so was that as autobiographical as you've gotten in any form?
Guest:I mean, everything is autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent.
Guest:I mean, that one's sort of more literally autobiographical.
Guest:I mean, I really was stuck.
Guest:I really did have a meeting with that executive that went almost like that scene with Tilda Swinton and Nick Cage.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And what about the other executive?
Marc:Wasn't there another agent in there who played by that good-looking guy?
Marc:Oh, what's his name?
Guest:Oh, yeah, that was my agent.
Guest:That was Marty Bowen at UTA, yeah.
Guest:And who played him again?
Guest:Ron Livingston played him.
Guest:Yeah, he was great.
Guest:Yeah, he was great.
Guest:Yeah, Marty said stuff like that to me.
Guest:I love Marty.
Guest:Marty is like the polar opposite of me as a human being, but he really gets my stuff.
Guest:And he's been so supportive over the years.
Guest:And he's like always the person who laughs the most when at the first screenings.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I love him for that.
Guest:Right, yeah.
Marc:So the device of a twin brother, though, was that sort of the other voice in your head?
Guest:No, it was more like, okay, how interesting is it to have a writer sitting alone in a room typing?
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, what if there's somebody else he could talk to?
Guest:And then it kind of developed into what it developed.
Guest:I thought it was funny.
Guest:I thought it was funny that the brother had back problems and was always lying on the floor in the house.
Guest:LAUGHTER
Guest:It was great.
Guest:Nick Cage was great.
Guest:He was great.
Marc:And was Spike as collaborative on that one as the other one?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, Spike's great to work with.
Guest:And Michelle is as well.
Guest:Yeah, I like them both.
Marc:When you were sort of developing your sensibilities, I mean, who were you a fan of?
Marc:Who were your guys when you were growing up in terms of comedy?
Marc:Woody Allen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Monty Python.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:National Lampoon.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The magazine or the radio show?
Guest:The magazine and the radio show.
Guest:Early SNL.
Guest:I mean, just anything that felt sort of anarchic.
Guest:The Marx Brothers.
Guest:Ernie Kovacs?
Guest:I didn't really learn about Ernie Kovacs until I was older, but yeah, he's amazing.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Things weren't available.
Guest:Right.
Guest:As easily.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, were you hired to do that?
Guest:I was hired to adapt that.
Guest:I thought it was kind of, I mean, I was asked to adapt and it was interesting to me because I thought this guy is lying, but he's acting like he's not lying.
Guest:And I thought that was interesting as a character study.
Marc:Right.
Marc:I thought it was a good movie.
Marc:Did you like it?
Marc:No.
Guest:No, I didn't like it.
Guest:That was a movie in which I was not consulted.
Guest:I mean, George Clooney changed the script.
Guest:He didn't talk to me during production.
Guest:We kind of didn't get off.
Marc:Now, when that happens, are you angry?
Guest:i mean do you you know do you defend your work i try to yeah i mean he actually showed me um i was i was invited to see the movie after he was pretty much done yeah um and i i wrote a bunch of notes i took a bunch of notes and gave them to him and i guess it was offensive to him so he um shut you out well i was already the movie was already done but it's like well you're asking me my opinion and you know this is what i think and so did you did you have words
Guest:There were words.
Guest:There were a lot of words that were in the form of emails, which I kind of wished I saved because some of them were kind of amazing.
Guest:Some of your best writing?
Guest:No, some of his most interesting writing.
Marc:How could you not save them?
Guest:They've got to be out there.
Guest:I can't believe I didn't.
Guest:I can't believe it because...
Guest:It was an astounding experience for me.
Marc:They're not out there.
Marc:Hire some guy.
Marc:They got to be able to find them.
Marc:I don't even know.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:There's guys.
Marc:They can track them.
Marc:Whatever email account.
Marc:They're out there.
Marc:Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a beautiful movie.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Are you happy with the way that came out?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'm happy with that.
Guest:And Michelle and I worked very closely on that.
Guest:And that was a good experience.
Marc:Whose idea was it to have the landscapes actually dissolving?
Guest:The landscape's dissolving.
Marc:Well, I mean, as his memory was going, buildings were falling down.
Marc:Oh, you mean like in Montauk?
Guest:Yeah, in Montauk.
Guest:But when he was running and- We had a lot of conversations about-
Guest:I mean, that was in the script to a great extent.
Guest:How it was going to be done was sort of up for grabs, what it was going to look like.
Guest:It was sort of more fanciful.
Guest:At first, I was trying to push for it to be more realistic.
Guest:And then Michelle, who is brilliant at practical types of things, designed all of these sort of in-camera effects and on-set effects that are just gorgeous.
Yeah.
Marc:It did seem realistic, though.
Guest:Yeah, well, we were trying for that.
Guest:We were trying for it not to be like, you know, there are some movies that take place in the mind that sort of feel like you're, you know, it's sort of this magical sort of weirdness, and it doesn't really feel like anything to me.
Guest:So we were working against that.
Marc:Right, because there's no rules to it, so it just looks stupid.
Guest:And it isn't what it looks like in your brain.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know?
Guest:They don't have things floating around in your brain when you think of things, you know?
Yeah.
Marc:It is.
Marc:So you had to really kind of put some thought into that because what it looks like, what does it look like when you have a memory?
Marc:That's all I thought about.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It looks like a picture.
Guest:What does it look like when you have a memory?
Guest:What does it sound like when you think?
Guest:I've spent years trying to figure that out because it doesn't sound like anything, but you hear it.
Guest:And I still haven't quite done it.
Guest:With Synecdoche, I decided there would be no voiceover and everything that he thought would be projected onto the world outside of him.
Guest:So that's why it's got this sort of dreamlike quality to it because that's sort of what I was trying for.
Guest:Like in a real dream where things happen and they're metaphorical and they make perfect sense in the dream, but they don't really make rational sense.
Marc:Yeah, that movie was mind-blowing.
Marc:It was a little exhausting in a good way.
Marc:Yeah, that's what I go for.
Marc:When I went to see it, I was like, this is going to be... It was one of those movies, and I had this... Who did I talk to recently?
Marc:Todd Haynes, too.
Marc:Where I experienced it, I witnessed it, but I walked out feeling like I'm going to have to go back to that one.
Guest:There was no way for me to wrap my brain around it.
Guest:Well, that's what I wanted.
Guest:That was my plan.
Guest:That was my idea.
Guest:With anything I write, my idea is that you have to watch it a second time to get all of it.
Guest:But I think with Synecdoche, when people didn't like the movie, they weren't interested in watching it again.
Guest:Some people loved the movie and they were interested in watching it again, but...
Guest:The people who didn't is like, well, why am I going to go back and watch it again?
Marc:My experience with those kind of movies, especially in that one in particular, was like, you know, you're obviously in the hands of somebody who's got a creative vision that he put a lot of time into.
Marc:This is meticulous.
Marc:You know, there was in hearing you say what you said about trying to figure out how you express the sound of the mind or how the mind works that that I knew I, you know, I had to reckon with the movie.
Marc:And I had to, because you put a lot of work into it and you're not a slouch.
Marc:So I'm like, I'm going to go and I'm going to do it again and I'm going to get what I can get.
Marc:And no one's going to be able to go like, you know what?
Marc:I understand exactly what you were trying to do because there was so much in it.
Marc:But I felt satisfied with it as a piece of art.
Marc:Is that okay?
Guest:No, it's great.
Guest:And I appreciate it.
Guest:I think there are a lot of people who don't want to do that or they're mad at me or they're mad at.
Guest:What do you think they're mad at?
Guest:Oh, man, I don't know what people are mad at.
Guest:They're mad.
Guest:I mean, I could sort of, you know, do a laundry list.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think people are I don't know what people are mad at.
Guest:I think that people are like when people were mad at that movie, they were mad that it was bullshit and it was pretentious and it's self-indulgent.
Guest:Oh, that word.
Guest:Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and fuck you and fuck you.
Guest:And, you know, I.
Guest:They're not going to want to watch the movie again.
Guest:I don't know what they're so mad about.
Guest:So that was your first directing, right?
Guest:It was my first, other than stuff I did as a kid, yeah, or in film school.
Marc:And is that something when you went to NYU film school that you wanted to do?
Guest:Yeah, I was going to be a director.
Marc:And how was the experience for you?
Marc:At NYU?
Marc:No, I mean... Oh, directing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I love it.
Guest:I love it because it's like an antidote to writing.
Guest:First, also, I love actors and acting, so it's like a great thing for me, but it's like not sitting alone in a room for three years.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You've got all of this stuff going on, and you've got to solve things right away, and it's exciting, and it's this sort of social environment, which is not easy for me, but...
Guest:It's forced on me and I have to do it.
Guest:I have to get over things.
Guest:I had to think a lot about how I interacted with people.
Guest:I realized I couldn't be the sullen writer.
Marc:Yeah, because everyone's looking to you.
Marc:You're the captain.
Guest:There's no room for it.
Guest:You have to take care of people.
Guest:You have to figure out what people need and take care of it.
Guest:And that's a great discipline for me.
Guest:And I loved it.
Marc:And you had a clear vision.
Marc:For the most part.
Guest:I think I did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I think I did.
Marc:You knew what you were looking for, and you had these great actors.
Guest:And I had a great production designer, great cinematographer, and great actors.
Guest:Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was like, you know, worked with a lot of really good people.
Marc:Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Guest:And Philip Seymour Hoffman, of course, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, and that was, how was that experience for you?
Guest:He's amazing.
Guest:You know, he's amazing.
Guest:And he was in virtually every shot of that movie.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was just a marathon for him.
Guest:And it was, you know, we were shooting up in the top of warehouses.
Guest:It was a heat wave.
Guest:It was 105 degrees.
Guest:He was covered in prosthetics.
Guest:You know, the prosthetics were bubbling.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:Because it was filling with sweat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he had to come in with pins and puncture holes so it could drip out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But he was just very serious.
Guest:He was always there.
Guest:And then when you go into editing and you start piecing it together, I saw things that I never saw.
Guest:He understood who this character was in sequence that made it beautifully nuanced.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So in his mind, he- I don't know what he knew, but I saw he knew something.
Guest:It was like, this works.
Guest:It's not like, oh, fuck, there's tonal shifts and this doesn't work next to this.
Guest:It was all beautiful.
Marc:Emotional continuity.
Guest:Yes, throughout the movie.
Guest:And he held the movie together, obviously, because he's the thing in that movie.
Marc:That's fascinating.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because as a guy who's not really an actor but has had to do it, having that in your head on top of the scene, like, wait, this happened after, before, or this is right after I did that thing, and bringing that to the next thing.
Marc:So in a sense, emotionally, he probably anchored the movie in a way you didn't know was even possible.
Yeah.
Guest:I think so, yeah.
Guest:I'd say that definitely he anchored the movie and I was surprised by it, by the subtlety of it.
Marc:Yeah, it's sad he's gone.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So now you guys, let's bring Duke in here because now we're coming towards, let me make sure I got you on the mic.
Marc:How do you sound?
Guest:Check, check.
Marc:Check, check.
Marc:There he is.
Guest:That was great.
Guest:I really enjoyed that whole back and forth.
Marc:Now, this movie, Anomalisa, which I have some personal, my problems with it are because it was too close.
Marc:As a guy who spends time on the road and reckons, I'm using that word a lot, deals with...
Marc:The type of horrible loneliness that you can't even really explain of just a hotel room, of the freedom of it, and then not even knowing why.
Marc:Like when you're in a hotel in another city, especially if it's not near anything, there's this thing sort of like, I'm dead.
Marc:I'm lost.
Marc:I don't know who I am is really what it comes down to.
Marc:But before we get into the film itself, I didn't realize until I talked to you at the screening that you had worked on Moral Oral with Dino.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Not really.
Guest:I mean, it's not really true.
Guest:What happened was I had an idea that I thought might be good for Moral Oral, and I suggested it to Dino, and he liked it, and then he wrote it.
Marc:Are you and Dino friends?
Guest:Yeah, we're friends.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:And then he gave me credit.
Guest:I didn't ask for credit, but I saw it on my IMDB that I have story credit there.
Marc:But is that how you met Duke?
Marc:Because you do Moral Oral, right?
Marc:That's your thing, that you did the animation on it.
Guest:I did one episode of Moral Oral.
Guest:Just one?
Guest:Yeah, in the third season.
Guest:That's what I started doing.
Guest:I'd been friends with Dino for a long time since back when he lived in New York.
Marc:And you're still alive, and that's great.
Guest:I know.
Marc:You apparently don't try to keep up with Dino.
Guest:Nobody can keep up with Dino.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:But you started where?
Marc:Because you do a very specific type of animation.
Guest:Well, yeah, I kind of just fell into it, actually, because that's what Dino does.
Marc:There's something nostalgic and retro about stop-action animation, right?
Marc:Yeah, definitely.
Marc:I noticed with Moral Oral, if you're of a certain age, it triggers something very odd from your childhood.
Guest:Well, that's kind of a specific reference to Davy and Goliath.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:I don't know, Davy.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:But where did you learn how to do that?
Guest:Well, I went to undergraduate film school in New York at NYU.
Guest:And then I became friends with Dino in New York.
Guest:He left for when 9-11 hit.
Guest:And then I moved to LA to go to grad school at AFI.
Guest:And I invited Dino to my thesis film premiere, my AFI thesis film.
Guest:And he saw it and he was like, hey, do you want to direct an episode of my TV show Moral Oral?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was like, yeah, I'm just out of film school.
Guest:I want to direct anything I can, obviously.
Guest:And so he said, okay, it's in the second season.
Guest:If it gets a third season, you can direct an episode.
Guest:And so I went to the studio like every day in the afternoon and just hung out with Dino and kind of watched the process.
Guest:So you're not a hands-on animator necessarily.
Guest:Well, over the years, I sort of, I mean, I animated one shot in Anomalisa, for example.
Guest:I'm not an animator.
Guest:Um...
Guest:No.
Guest:You're a director.
Guest:I'm a director, yeah.
Marc:So who do you bring in to do... What do you call the specific type of animation that was used in Anomalisa?
Guest:It's stop motion animation.
Marc:And that's just what it's called.
Marc:So those dolls... Well, there's all different... Yeah.
Guest:I mean, there's like... People are very familiar with claymation.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Which is...
Guest:Claymation.
Guest:Which is made out of clay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they sculpt clay.
Guest:And then stop motion is, you know, any variation of an object that exists in real space.
Guest:It can be flat.
Guest:It can be paper cutouts.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It can be wire things.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And just, you know, moving them by hand one frame at a time is stop motion.
Guest:So this is, I mean, we use a type of animation called replacement animation where the faces are 3D printed and they're all swapped out.
Guest:Oh, really?
Yeah.
Marc:So they're like little green screens on the faces?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:Okay, so we had the maquettes and they were sculpted and they were scanned into the computer.
Guest:And then the facial expressions, it's split at the eyes and then there's brow pieces and a mouth section.
Guest:The mouths are sculpted for all the different possible phenomes and mouth shapes.
Guest:And then there's like 150 different ones.
Guest:And then the brows are sculpted as well for all the
Guest:you know expressions worried and angry and surprised and there's about 150 of those and then those are printed on a 3d printer so they're actual physical objects and um they are literally replaced every frame by the animator you know live so as a director you were like we we got to get a guy that does this this this this type of animation and you and how did you find that guy
Guest:Well, the anima... I mean, you find sort of like the fabricators that can do this sort of thing.
Guest:Like you find ZBrush sculptors that can change the faces in the computer.
Guest:And you find somebody who knows how to use a 3D printer.
Guest:But the animators, stop motion animators are stop motion animators.
Guest:They can do... Whatever ones you want.
Guest:They can make a ball.
Guest:roll across a table or they can sculpt something out of clay i mean certainly they have specialties and whatever but right i just use the same animators that we had used before and then you know we couldn't get enough animators because they were doing other stuff and then we had to scour the earth you know there's not many of these kind of animators in the world so we and you got a crew together though yeah now charlie how long did you have that script what was that script doing before you got uh you met uh duke
Guest:I had done it as a radio, a stage radio play in 2005.
Guest:Was that the intention?
Guest:Yes, it was written to be that, with the same actors at Royce Hall.
Guest:Who were those actors again?
Guest:David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan.
Guest:And we had a Foley artist on stage, and we had Carter Burwell conducting his music with maybe seven or eight musicians.
Guest:And that was the thing the actors were reading.
Guest:And the idea was that the imagery would be created in the minds of the audience.
Guest:That was the conceit.
Guest:That's what it was designed to do.
Guest:We did two performances of it, 2005, and it was over.
Guest:Um, I wasn't going to do anything with it.
Guest:It wasn't a movie.
Guest:It wasn't anything else.
Guest:And, uh,
Guest:But Dino happened to be in the audience and do that.
Guest:Well, he didn't happen to be.
Guest:He came to see it.
Guest:And Dan Harmon as well.
Guest:And Dino really liked it.
Guest:And I eventually gave him a copy of the script.
Guest:And then he had this animation studio called Starburns.
Guest:And they approached me in 2011 to do it.
Marc:And so...
Marc:They said, we want to do this as an animation.
Guest:Which is what they do.
Guest:They do animations.
Guest:I said, well, okay, if you can raise the money.
Guest:I wasn't expecting them to.
Marc:It's interesting to me because as a fan of your work and Dino's and everybody's involved, Dan's a genius, and you did a great job as well, first time meeting you.
Marc:is that somehow or another, it's the most human work that any of you guys have done in a way.
Marc:That the story, you know, when people ask me what it's about, I'm like, it's about a night out of town, a guy hooks up with a girl.
Marc:That's what it's about.
Marc:But somehow or another, the emotions conveyed with the animation and with a script that you didn't intend to be shot is really the most compact, compactly human experience script that I've seen you do in a way.
Marc:Is that possible?
Marc:Because it was so stripped down that it was very simple, but the emotions were profound and were allowed to sort of settle in a way that I've never experienced in movies, really.
Guest:Well, I mean, my initial challenge was to create this on stage with just voices.
Guest:So by necessity, it was stripped down because that's what I was doing, you know, as a radio play.
Guest:um and that's what we brought to this so it's different than a screen screenplay that i would write which would have a lot of scenes and a lot of characters and right and this was kind of a simplified thing um but it had to work as the radio play so i tried to make it work as that and i think we just that carried over to the work we did on on this visually well what was the inspiration charlie where did this where did even as a radio play so you decide you're going to write a radio play or you wrote the script first
Guest:I was doing radio plays.
Guest:I wrote one.
Guest:The Coens wrote one.
Guest:Carter did the music.
Guest:And we did them in New York and in England and London.
Guest:And then I wanted to go to Los Angeles and the Coens couldn't.
Guest:So I had to write a second play.
Guest:So I wrote Anomalisa.
Guest:I was trying to figure out a way to use three actors.
Guest:We had very little rehearsal time.
Guest:And I thought I'd like to use one actor to play many characters because I could do that because it's a radio play.
Guest:And I like the idea that people would see it's one actor doing all these voices, which was Tom Noonan.
Guest:So you were challenging yourself with the form.
Guest:I'm trying to use the form.
Guest:I'm always trying to use the form.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Always.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So that's what I was trying to do here.
Guest:And it was exciting for me.
Guest:And I'd read about something called the Fregoli delusion, which is a belief that every other person in the world is the same person.
Guest:So it's a kind of an organic brain damage syndrome.
Guest:And I thought that was fascinating as a sort of a metaphor.
Guest:For this character.
Guest:And because it's voices, I thought, I'll do it with voices.
Guest:Everyone sounds the same.
Guest:And it speaks to disconnection and inability to see people and loneliness.
Guest:And narcissism.
Guest:And perhaps narcissism, yeah.
Guest:I try very much not to judge the characters I write, at least not from the outside, unless they judge themselves.
Guest:When I'm writing Michael, I write as I think Michael would think of things.
Guest:In this case, it's Michael's perspective, the whole thing, except for the very end.
Guest:So I'm writing as Michael.
Guest:And if I'm sort of saying, you know, well, he's a narcissist and that's a bad thing to be, you know, unless he thinks that it shouldn't be there.
Marc:Why judge him?
Marc:Because it's only going to diminish your ability.
Guest:It's like it goes back to.
Guest:to when i wanted to be an actor right act i mean that's what actors have to do they have to find the character they have to think what the character thinks they have to understand the world that way yeah and everything i do is always subjective i hope because i don't think there's any other way to see the world so i try to write from the point of view of the characters that i'm writing from so perhaps he's a narcissist that's not for me to say i guess is what i'm saying right he's caused a lot of damage in this world you know and will continue to do so um
Marc:In a very specific and intimate way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's not Hitler.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I read someone the other day say that on Twitter that she'd been anomalised.
Guest:And I thought, oh, my God, that's like, you know, because everyone's been anomalised.
Guest:And everyone's anomalised.
Marc:Yeah, that's true.
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, but what a lot of us don't necessarily think in the same light as knowing that this character is completely self-involved to the point where he can't tell the difference between himself and others.
Marc:He just needs to get his needs met at that moment, whatever they may be.
Marc:Is that there is an assumption with that type of character that, you know, you've done.
Marc:I don't know about the conscience of Michael, but there is a sense that you've done something horribly wrong.
Marc:But that sort of undermines other people's ability to move through experiences and contextualize them.
Marc:Do you know what I mean?
Marc:That a lot of times you may think like, oh, what did I do to that person?
Marc:And that person could be like Anomalisa.
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:And that, you know, there is a sort of letting off the hook in that way as an audience.
Marc:And also there's a certain narcissism in assuming you are this powerful man.
Marc:Like Bella's experience, you know, did not, it was not all hinging on him.
Guest:But it's true.
Guest:And that is another thing that I think is important to consider is that people have different ways to approach people.
Guest:other people's dismissal or other people's hatred or other people's rejection and objectification and whatever you you know i i find that i go through periods where you know i'll read stuff that people have written about me and i cannot i cannot take it i'm so horrified and hurt and then other times it's like well it's kind of funny that's kind of funny right i don't care
Guest:And I like myself better the latter way.
Guest:If I can do that, that's healthy.
Guest:Emotional growth.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And it's not consistent.
Guest:I mean, it's an emotional peak that goes back into the valley immediately.
Guest:But I mean, those moments I go, well, that is what I'm allowing this person to do this to me.
Guest:I don't have to.
Marc:Well, I think the reason that happens from my observation is that there's a part of you that is very me.
Marc:That's, you know, always going to be hard on myself, that my wiring is to be self-judgmental and assume that I fucked up.
Marc:So if anybody, depending on the day, honors that narrative, I'm like, fuck.
Marc:You know, fuck that guy, you know.
Guest:But on another day.
Guest:Or they're right.
Guest:They're right.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:They're right.
Marc:That's always where it goes.
Marc:That's why you're so angry is if they hit that one button.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But somebody like Michael is, you know, it becomes, it's, again, I'm going to use the word relentless in whatever cycle he's in because he knows exactly what's happening.
Marc:And we had a brief conversation at the screening and both of you sort of chimed in on the decision that
Marc:Because when you look at what you write, there's only one departure from a very grounded and in human experience narrative.
Marc:And that's that dream sequence.
Marc:And we had discussed briefly the decision that you told me that sometimes in using this animation, they cover the face lines where the pieces where you can see where the piece that is the brow and the piece that is the mouth.
Marc:You can see where they're inserted.
Marc:that you told me that like a lot of times they take those lines out and you guys choose to leave them in, which I thought had a lot more meaning.
Marc:I don't know if when you made that decision that you realized that it did have some poetic meaning to it, that these parts could be taken off and then they're taken off during the dream sequence, but also like it has something to do with identity and who we are in my mind.
Marc:Obviously, I'm reading into it and if you agree with it, that's fine, but I don't know what your intention was.
Guest:Well, I mean, I think, you know, you can see the evidence of it in the fact that those seams and the style of replacement animation became integrated into the story.
Guest:I mean, we added those moments where, you know, he becomes partially self-aware or, you know, we show the audience that we're aware that this is happening.
Guest:And that came about...
Guest:As we sort of were designing the puppets and we wanted as emotional possibility to go as far in the emotional experience as we could with the range of expressions and we discovered the style of animation and then...
Guest:We liked the way that it looked and people do typically paint that stuff out with computers and we didn't want to have that sort of ambiguous, polished, what is this kind of thing?
Guest:The organic nature of what we were doing and of stop motion in general, we liked.
Guest:Being able to feel the impact of the animators interacting with these things and seeing that they were hand created and having flaws and having cracks, literal fractured elements to them.
Guest:And then, yeah, immediately that sort of paralleled some of the thematic kind of emotional things that were happening with the characters in the story.
Guest:And we just built off that.
Marc:It was astounding to me that by showing those cracks and those faults within the style of animation actually made the film, which was already pretty fucking human, even more human.
Marc:Like, there's an element of, I guess...
Marc:you know french new wave where where you know you you're made aware that you're watching a movie and that that's sort of almost a play on that because you're dealing with this animated movie that turns out to be more human than most regular movies or non-animated movies and you're showing the flaws of the animation characters in their animation which adds to the humanity of the movie i'm now i'm just tripping out
Guest:Well, I mean... That makes sense?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, when I first read the script, the first thing that I connected to, aside from relating to Michael's emotional experience, was that thinking of it in animation and reading that speech, that final speech, which didn't change.
Guest:He didn't rewrite it for animation.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It already existed like this.
Guest:And him saying, what is it to be human?
Guest:What is it to be alive?
Guest:Right.
Guest:What is it to ache?
Right.
Guest:To me, there was an immediate connection to the form.
Marc:Yeah, and what blew me away, and we could talk about it before, there's a couple other things I want to talk about, but the sex scene, because this movie's about a one-night stand.
Marc:On some level, on a basic pitch.
Marc:And the sex scene was profoundly disturbing, not because they were puppets, because it was the most human sex scene I've ever seen in a movie.
Marc:In some weird way.
Marc:And I don't know what the hell you've lived through, Charlie.
Marc:But in...
Marc:You know where we're going with this one?
Marc:No, no, just in the sense that for me, being a guy that, I've been single a long time and I've been a guy who's been out on the road and I'm a guy that has certain emotional needs and whatever, I'm a flawed character.
Marc:But the weird thing to me though, because you wrote this and from what I can gather from your life, this is not the life you live, but just the guy's choice to go down on her first
Marc:was very decisive and very fucking weird to me.
Marc:And not weird in a bad way, just sort of like that guy, you understood this character.
Marc:Because to do that, that's not a passive.
Marc:All this stuff was animated, so these are deliberate script points.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:Yeah, the puppets weren't improvised at that point.
Yeah.
Marc:But what did you struggle with in the sex scene as a writer?
Marc:When you wrote that, where this guy's going to go down on her first, on this woman, where did honoring that impulse come from?
Guest:I'm not sure.
Guest:Again, I wrote this in 2005.
Guest:And it was non-visualized.
Guest:So I wanted to, I think I wanted to have, it may be just a kind of not very interesting answer, but I think I wanted to have something that was clearly suggested that was happening in their conversation, but was alluded to, but that wasn't really ever specified.
Guest:And that seemed like a thing.
Marc:That could blossom in someone's mind.
Guest:Yes, that, you know, I'm a little shy about that, you know, that kind of thing.
Guest:And that's all it was in the play.
Guest:And then, you know, I think we all knew that's what it was.
Guest:So we animated that, you know, and that's how it started.
Guest:Right.
Marc:What was interesting to me is that for a guy that, you know, no matter what he wants to do for that other person, there's an almost pathological disrespect for personal boundaries.
Marc:You know, and to do that in a charming way would be to have him take that action and then, you know, sort of stand behind it.
Marc:No, no, no, no, we're going to do this.
Marc:But not in an aggressive way, because that's almost like it appears to be selfless.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yes.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So that was me getting passionate about something that I'm not quite understanding why I'm passionate about it.
Marc:But to begin that sex scene like that was something I'd never seen before.
Marc:And then to sort of follow through with the sex scene and all its awkwardness with their bodies and her bodies, what she's ashamed of, and her own personal flaws, was beautiful but painfully human.
Marc:And I don't want to give away too much because I think people should see the film because I've never seen a film like it.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:In terms of what you've done in your career, Charlie, where does this fit in?
Marc:How do you feel about this thing in terms of accomplishment and creative vision?
Guest:I mean, we had nobody watching over us making this thing.
Guest:I loved the experience.
Guest:It was really difficult.
Guest:You know, we had no money.
Guest:Many times we didn't think we were going to finish it.
Guest:But I think the fact that we finished it and we did it outside of any sort of studio system and now people are watching it is, I mean, I'm enormously proud of it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, I love the movie.
Guest:I watch this movie every once in a while with audiences and I still have reactions to it, which is not common for me when I've seen something a thousand times.
Guest:I mean, there are things that I still sort of see that I love, moments that I love, like human moments that I love and I marvel at.
Guest:And I think I marvel at them more maybe because I know that they're puppets and I know that they're inanimate.
Yeah.
Marc:There's a freedom to that.
Guest:Well, it's just, I mean, it's beautifully done.
Guest:And I don't take credit for the animation.
Guest:I mean, we were there to sort of direct it.
Guest:But these animators, they're extraordinarily talented and sensitive.
Marc:And Duke, what are your feelings about it as it enters the world and people are seeing it?
Marc:How do you feel about the experience of watching it with an audience and what you've done?
Marc:Do you see flaws in what you've done or are you like Charlie and are sort of surprised by the more you learn from watching it?
Guest:Yeah, I'm extraordinarily proud.
Guest:I did see flaws.
Guest:But I've always, everything that I've ever done or been a part of, I see the flaws.
Guest:And then over time, that sort of goes away.
Guest:And I think it started to go away earliest on this project than anything else that I've ever worked on because the experience of seeing it with audiences and...
Guest:You can feel that energy of watching something with the audience.
Guest:You can feel when they're engaged.
Guest:I mean, I've been moved to see that other people are having the emotional experience that we kind of hope for.
Marc:It stays with you.
Marc:That was what I couldn't get over because I think it profoundly disturbed my girlfriend.
Yeah.
Marc:to the point where she was like that was great but like you know i i don't feel good yeah you know and i of course like you know but i'm a guy like i watched you know altman shortcuts and i think it's a celebration of the human spirit uh you know like i i thought it was a very honest movie and i couldn't shake some of it and i in and when we're talking about it now i still can't shake the the depth of the type of emotions maybe because you know i relate to things that are uncomfortable
Marc:But but, you know, I've seen The Revenant and I've seen a lot of the movies that are out for Oscars now.
Marc:And they don't stick with me.
Marc:I mean, I can't get your fucking movie out of my head.
Marc:And I'm not saying that aggressively.
Marc:I think it's how are other people responding to what's the general sense that you're getting?
Guest:You know, the things that you've said, the realism of the sex scene and some of the authenticity of some of the interactions, I think... You know, one thing that I... One major... People ask me a lot, like, what did I learn from this experience?
Guest:Because it's my first feature film.
Marc:You want me to ask you that like an interviewer?
Marc:Hey, Duke, what did you learn from this experience as being your first experience directing a feature film?
Guest:Well, I think the thing for me that works best about the movie...
Guest:is something i learned from charlie is having kind of extraordinary bravery in some of these moments i think i think we didn't we didn't pull away from you know we held on some of these really intimate moments particularly like the sex scene for example uh
Guest:and we didn't hold on it for shock value or for a joke or something like that it's just because this is happening to these characters and it's happening right now and it's in the moment and we're gonna get in there and hold there and you have to experience this and you could because you didn't have you didn't have to go can we get a clear set we've got nudity right
Marc:Right.
Marc:You could hold it as long as you want.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because you didn't have to be codependent with actors who were sitting there naked.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:But it also goes for Michael alone in the hotel room, too.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Just the mundanity of that experience and the loneliness of that moment and staying there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's hard to make that clear because it's not everybody's life, but it's something very specific.
Marc:That's somebody who travels for a living.
Guest:We've had a lot of people come up to us and say they've been in that hotel room.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's a weird thing that I've never seen explored, which is that the desolation of a hotel room in a major city.
Marc:It's a bizarre phenomenon.
Marc:Yeah, it is.
Marc:Now, I know you were tweeting today about piracy.
Marc:What's going on?
Guest:Yeah, apparently this is a thing.
Guest:I guess it happens for every movie now.
Guest:I didn't know that because this is, again, my first movie.
Guest:But yeah, the movie got released somehow online through screeners or something.
Guest:We're not 100% sure.
Marc:I didn't get a screener.
Marc:Why didn't I get a screener?
Marc:Because somebody stole it and put it online.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:So you didn't send out award screeners.
Guest:Well, what guild are you in?
Guest:I'm in all of them.
Guest:Well, you should have.
Guest:they were sent out i mean dga uh sag uh and uh wga well we're neither dga wga or sag okay i mean i guess maybe the sag one you should have gotten for the sag yeah yeah yeah oh damn it yeah we're not up for any awards in those because we did it outside of you know those i don't know why i didn't get it that upsets me we'll get you one you will yeah of course okay good
Marc:Or you can just get it online.
Guest:It's available online.
Guest:But nobody should get it online because that's not a cool thing.
Marc:What you're saying to me before in the house is that when you make a movie like this, that the budget was tight, almost non-existent, and it was...
Marc:and you jumped through all the hoops and spent the money to make it, that a movie at this scale, if somebody is chipping away at the possibility for it to earn money, it damages the possibility of films at this level to be made and also damages the possibility for you guys to get what you worked for.
Marc:And it ain't right.
Guest:Well, yeah, I mean, it's exactly that.
Guest:I think it just reduces the likelihood that investors will put up money to make a movie like this in the future or that a studio will pick it up and distribute it.
Guest:Because if nobody makes money off of it, then nobody's going to do that.
Marc:And then we then we all just have to deal with what what William Friedman calls spandex movies.
Marc:Everything will be spandex movies.
Marc:And how did you fund this movie?
Guest:Well, we started with Kickstarter.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's how we got the initial funding.
Guest:Like Charlie said, we met with him and asked if we could do this.
Guest:And he said, if you can get the money, you can do it.
Guest:So we went off and tried to find ways to get the money.
Guest:And Kickstarter was kind of new.
Guest:And so we tried it out and we got 400 grand.
Yeah.
Guest:and uh somebody else reached out to us a man named keith calder snoot films and he said do you need some more money and we were like yeah and then it kind of started like that and then we got it came piecemeal yeah over the years how long did it take three years from start to finish two years of production every day
Marc:And how long did it take to shoot a minute of stop action?
Marc:A week.
Marc:A minute per week.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And people are just stealing that time.
Marc:Shame on them.
Marc:Well, you guys made a great movie.
Marc:It's a unique movie.
Marc:There's nothing that has ever existed like it.
Marc:And it was great talking to you.
Guest:Thank you so much.
Guest:It was great talking to you, too.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Go see Anomalisa.
Marc:It is a profoundly moving movie if you let it.
Marc:And I think if you let it, there is a little relief at the end.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Feel free to watch Marin.
Marc:All seasons available on Netflix.
Marc:Oh boy.
Marc:I'll play a little guitar.
Marc:Boomer lives!