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From the Archive: Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

Nothing Concrete text
27 Oct 2021
25 min listen

Ben Eshmade opens the door and crawls through the imagination of Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, who co-directed the 2015 Oscar-nominated stop motion film Anomalisa in this archive interview.

Anomalisa is the story of one soul searching evening in the life of self-help author Michael Stone played by David Thewlis. Michael has a blinkered view of the world, perceiving everyone as having the same face and voice, with all the characters he encounters played by the same actor, Tom Noonan. It's Michael's encounter with an original face and voice that makes a huge impression in his life, that of Lisa, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. 

The film was produced and co-directed by Duke Johnson and co-director and written by Charlie Kaufman. Kauffman was responsible for the writing of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and writing and directing Synecdoche, New York. We caught up with the directors in a not-so-ordinary hotel in central London to discuss the film.

‘You know I’m just glad it exists, I mean I was struggling for a long time to get anything made and I wasn’t really expecting this thing to happen, so I was just basically just throwing thing at the wall and this happened to be one of them’Charlie Kaufman
 


From the Archive sees us dig into our extensive contemporary and classical music and cinema podcast archive as we rediscover interviews and discussions with artists, with our long-standing producer and presenter, Ben Eshmade. 

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