Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine … writer Charlie Kaufman had a brilliant run of oddball movies. So why did he suddenly drop out of sight? And what’s the story behind new film Anomalisa?

Given that it comes from the most perversely inventive mind in American movie fiction, Anomalisa might at first seem like no big deal. Charlie Kaufman’s plot premises have tended to be somewhat baroque: identical twin screenwriters, one named Charlie Kaufman, agonise over a script (Adaptation); a playwright mounts an autobiographical drama that threatens to engulf the world (Synecdoche, New York); most notoriously, an office building contains a secret portal into the mind of a movie actor (Being John Malkovich). By comparison, Anomalisa sounds altogether mundane: a depressed, middle-aged motivational speaker spends a night in a Cincinnati hotel where he has an affair with a gauche young woman. Nothing out of the ordinary – at least not until events take the inevitable nightmare turn. Yet Anomalisa comes across from the very start as deeply strange and unsettling – because its actors are all puppets.

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Initially funded through Kickstarter, Anomalisa premiered in Telluride before going on to Venice last week, where it won the grand jury prize. The film is written by Kaufman, and jointly directed by him and Duke Johnson, a specialist in stop-motion animation best known for the spoof series Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole on the Adult Swim channel. Anomalisa started life in 2005 as a stage play, part of composer Carter Burwell’s Theatre of the New Ear, a series of “sound plays”. The show was performed with Foley artists creating sound effects live on stage, and three actors – David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tom Noonan. That trio now comprises the film’s entire voice cast: Thewlis and Leigh playing the two leads, while Noonan does all the other characters in the same unnerving dead intonations. “I sort of have a monotonous voice,” Noonan tells me when I meet the film’s makers in Venice.

Kaufman, frowning intently behind heavy glasses and a thicket of beard, says that when he was approached to turn the play into an animation, he was resistant. In the live Anomalisa, he says, “there’s a disconnect between what’s being said on stage and what the audience is seeing – there’s Tom playing all these characters, there’s Jennifer and David having sex while they’re really just standing across the stage from each other and moaning. You’d lose that.”

Consequently, Anomalisa had to be reinvented, and while the script is virtually the same, the effect is utterly different. In the film, there’s something uncanny about seeing its puppet protagonist, with his silicone body and 3D-printed face, going through the tedious, drawn-out rituals of taking a cab, checking into a hotel, listening to the bellhop’s formulaic welcome spiel.

Johnson, boyish and brush-cut, says: “People told us, ‘You can’t make puppets that look too real, because it will be disturbing and off-putting.’ And we believed that’s not true. The unique thing about stop-motion is that it’s infused with organic life, because it’s not made by a computer, it’s not perfect – the hands reach in and they move something. No matter how perfectly you animate something, as you’re watching it, it’s undeniable – you feel it. There’s an organic life that’s present in these inorganic things. It feels creepy, and sometimes you’re like, ‘That’s a doll!’ That’s not the same thing.”

“The fact that they’re puppets being manipulated,” Kaufman adds, “becomes an existential issue as well. You know someone’s manipulating them – they don’t know it.” Although, Anomalisa being a very existential story, there comes a moment when its hero, Michael, has a sudden realisation that he’s something other than flesh and blood. Kaufman’s stories do tend to remind us that their characters are creatures inhabiting fictions. “Yeah,” Kaufman laughs. “I like that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deeply strange and unsettling … an image used for the initial Anomalisa Kickstarter campaign.

Audiences have tended to like Kaufman’s self-reflexive turn, too, as have the directors who began to film the former sitcom writer’s scripts, beginning in 1999 when Spike Jonze made the audaciously outre Being John Malkovich. Other films followed: Adaptation, again with Jonze; meta-biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, directed by George Clooney; and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a story of time, love and memory that was as close as American romcom gets to modernist maestro Alain Resnais. Kaufman’s originality and audacity caught on; the term “Kaufmanesque” was coined to evoke his singular style; other people’s quasi-Kaufmanesque projects got greenlit (eg Stranger Than Fiction, in which Will Ferrell discovers he’s a character in a novel); books on screenwriting craft were rewritten to accommodate the radical counterintuitiveness of his approach.

Then, in 2008, Kaufman directed his own first film, Synecdoche, New York – about a dramatist who attempts to stage his own experience as a vast, ever-expanding production. The movie was a sprawling, unashamedly depressive confrontation of Kafka, Arthur Miller, Borges and backstage drama. Some critics hailed it as a masterpiece for the ages, others threw up their hands in despair. Noonan, who appeared in Synecdoche along with Jennifer Jason Leigh, remembers the standing ovation it received in Cannes. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a monster hit.’ Which I think it was not completely.”

It was not. Costing a reported $20m, Synecdoche grossed only $3m in the US, and broke Kaufman’s magical run. After that, he seemed to go underground. So what did he do?

“I wrote a screenplay about internet anger,” he says. “A lot of that came from my reading stuff after Synecdoche. I was trying to make some use of it in my work. I don’t feel having an audience reaction like that is inherently bad. I kind of think it’s something to be proud of, because it means you’ve taken a position and you’ve put yourself out there. To me, it would have been better if it had been a commercial success, because it would have made my professional life afterward easier.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charlie Kaufman (right) with Philip Seymour Hoffman (left) and Michelle Williams during the making of Synecdoche, New York. Photograph: Everett/Rex

“I’ve been writing and struggling to get stuff made since then. It’s not like I’m just sitting here, but it’s been hard.” The industry too, he points out, has been less friendly to idiosyncratic work. “The economy changed in 2008 and big studio movies became the thing. I don’t write those and I wanted to direct.”

One thing that Kaufman has done since then is to create the pilot for a TV series called How and Why, with a cast including Noonan and Sally Hawkins; last year, the FX channel turned the show down, but we may see it yet. How and Why sounds appetising, as Noonan describes it. “It’s impossible to explain, but it’s amazing. It feels very pedestrian and sort of plodding, but it’s really crazy and great – and very scary and sad. Two families live in the same house at different points, and one starts to take over the other, even though they don’t meet – something like that?”

Kaufman has always had an image as eccentric, at least by Hollywood criteria – because he writes strange material, because he takes a highly philosophical angle on things, because he’s averse to talking about himself, because he’s known to read Kafka. The oddball reputation is all misconception, Noonan and Jason Leigh tell me.

Leigh: “He’s really easy to converse with – interested in people, not judgmental. He’s kind.”

Noonan: “He’s very down to earth, very nuts and bolts, not a lot of theory or bullshit.”

Leigh: “And very sweet.”

Noonan: “And not weird in the least.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Alienation is a big problem in this culture. I think it has a lot to do with social media’ … Anomalisa

Kaufman pinpoints one of his key concerns – although you’ll know this if you’ve seen even five minutes of his work – when he says, “Alienation is a big problem in this culture. I think it has a lot to do with computers and social media, and the inauthenticity of people’s interactions. But we’re going down that road, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

One version of that alienation emerges in Anomalisa through references to a delusional condition named Fregoli syndrome, which causes people to believe that different people are really the same person in disguise. Synecdoche, New York also alluded to something called Cotard syndrome. Is there, I wonder, a Kaufman syndrome that compels Charlie always to write complex, self-reflexive fictions that turn the rules of character and story inside out?

“I don’t think so. I hope it’s not that. I’m always trying to find things that interest and excite me. I’m not interested in doing anything weird for weird’s sake. I think about telling stories subjectively, because I think that’s the way life is lived.”