In Conversation: Charlie Kaufman

The singular director and Oscar-winning writer of Being John Malkovich and Anomalisa opens up about puppet sex, the TV shows he can’t get made, and the future of humans as a species. 

- Adam Sternbergh

As a screenwriter and director, Charlie Kaufman is responsible for some of the most critically acclaimed and remarkable movies of our time, including Being John Malkovich (1999), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Synecdoche, New York (2008). He returns on December 30 with Anomalisa, a film he wrote and co-directed, which follows an unlikely tryst between a melancholic customer-service guru and one of his acolytes, and which was filmed entirely using lifelike stop-motion puppets. Anomalisa is at times mordantly funny and at times outlandishly heartbreaking: in other words, Kaufmanesque. The following conversation is an edited and condensed version of an interview that took place in two parts, on November 23 and December 4.

Is it weird for me to say that Anomalisa contains the most realistic sex scene I’ve ever seen in a movie? Given that it’s happening between puppets?

It’s not weird. Almost everybody we speak to feels that way. We worked really hard on that scene. It took six months to shoot. We were very aware of people coming into it thinking it was going to be like Team America, that it was going to be a joke, and we didn’t want it to be. We knew there would probably be some laughing at first, because it’s puppet sex. We weren’t opposed to that, but what we found is that there is the occasional laugh at that point out of nervousness, but then people get really quiet.

It seemed very, very realistic.

I find myself emotional about it, which is weird because I was involved in the movie and I still feel like Michael and Lisa exist somehow.