Anomalisa
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“The Camera Lens Was Almost Touching the Puppet’s Face”: DP Joe Passarelli on Anomalisa
Joe Passarelli has spent the last decade serving as a cinematographer and electrician on more than 30 shorts, features and TV series. In 2015, he had his breakout film with Anomalisa, the long-awaited stop-motion feature written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman. Below, Passarelli speaks with Filmmaker about the film’s singular visual design, which seeks to capture the mood of its troubled protagonist Michael Stone. This interview was conducted in conjunction with “Behind the Scenes of Anomalisa,” a panel at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 28, 2016 -
Puppets and Pantyhose: DP Joe Passarelli on Anomalisa
Watching Anomalisa – the painfully human stop-motion animation film from co-directors Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman – the same thought flitted through my head as when I viewed The Revenant: “This is incredible, but it was probably a nightmare to work on.” Though free from the threat of hypothermia, the production of Anomalisa offered equally maddening difficulties. A tale of a depressed customer service guru (voiced by David Thewlis) and his fateful one-night stay in a Cincinnati hotel, Anomalisa took the greater part of two years to complete. Collecting mere seconds of usable footage per day, the film’s crew pieced […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 28, 2016 -
Anomalisa, Stop-Motion Animation and How 3D Printers are Changing Filmmaking
Remember stop-motion, that venerable technique of animated films ranging from old-time children’s classics by Rankin/Bass to sword-and-sandals epics by Ray Harryhausen? Given the success of Pixar’s movies, Minions and other computer-animated features, you might have thought that 2D, hand-drawn, and traditional stop-motion has been relegated to the dust bin of history. Well, if you are a fan of these styles, don’t lose hope just yet. Opening just before the New Year was Charlie Kaufman’s much-anticipated directorial follow up to 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa. Directed by Kaufman and Duke Johnson, it’s being touted for its unique amalgam of animation processes […]
by Christianne Hedtke on Jan 11, 2016 -
2015 in Ten Double Features
Every cinephile knows the curatorial bliss of a great double feature. A flexing of film nerd muscles while sitting on your ass for three to five hours, a double bill brings two films into dialogue with one another based on style, subject, theme, or whatever connective tissue you can find. Double features, like well-sequenced mixtapes, require the instincts of a programmer. Thanks to streaming, digital rentals, and the perennial ease of sneaking into a second film at your local AMC, the work of making a double bill happen has never been easier. Below, I rally through 10 great double features from […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 5, 2016 -
(Misleading) Trailer Watch: Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s Stop-Motion Feature
Here we have a first trailer for Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s keenly anticipated stop-motion animation romance/drama/something Anomalisa. By all accounts, this trailer is wildly misleading about the movie’s depressive tone: on Twitter, Brick/Looper director Rian Johnson observed that “It’s a little like that recut The Shining trailer awhile back, which I think is great.” The movie comes out in limited NY/LA release on December 30, with a platform expansion to follow.
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 2, 2015 -
Toronto, Camden and Venice
TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 28, 2015
