When Duke Johnson was making the Oscar-nominated animated feature “Anomalisa” with Charlie Kaufman, Kaufman suggested Johnson read “Memory,” a lost Donald Westlake novel that had recently been published. (Kaufman had heard about its resurrection on NPR.) The novel, about a man named Paul Cole, who finds himself stranded in a small town with a head injury after being attacked by the jealous husband of Paul’s lover, had been completed in 1963 and shopped around by Westlake, with no takers. An attempt was made in the 1970s to shop it around again but Westlake, one of the great American crime fiction writers, declined. After his death in 2008, it was finally published by Hard Case Crime two years later.
“[Kaufman] was telling me that he really liked it, because what was interesting about it is that it’s by this famous crime novelist and that it was in the guise of a noir thriller, where amnesia is typically used as a trope to propel a plot forward,” Johnson said. “And in this case it seemed like it might go that direction, but it ended up being used more as a meditation on the nature of identity and that was a really interesting subversion of expectations and use of that device. I was intrigued by that.”
Johnson came back to Kaufman and told him how much he had enjoyed the novel. “He was like, ‘Well, if you like it so much, you should option it and make a movie out of it.’” Johnson was doubtful that the option was going to be available – this was Donald Westlake, after all – but it was. He snapped up the option. “That’s how it came to me,” Johnson said.
As it turns out, that was the beginning of a very long journey.
In 2015, Johnson and his writing partner had completed a first draft of the script – “basically the book in script form,” Johnson said. The novel, according to Johnson, features a lot of protagonist Paul Cole’s “internal monologue stuff, and that’s always hard to translate into an audio/visual experience.” Johnson kept the option on the book but in 2019, they were going to run out of time again. Johnson then decided to do his own pass on the novel.
“That’s when I started imagining how I could sort of visualize this internal experience that Paul was going through and giving myself the freedom to change the book to a certain degree,” Johnson said. In the fall of 2019 that version of the script went out to actors. One of the actors that responded well to the material was Ryan Gosling.
“I met with him a couple of times, and then he came on board, and I started working with him in his boutique production entity that he has,” Johnson remembered. “We started developing it. And Ryan’s approach is very much let’s tear everything apart and put it back together and try a lot of different things.” This was during the pandemic, when “nobody was working.” Johnson and Gosling would talk on the phone all the time, constantly working on the script. They tried “a more thriller-driven iteration and a slightly more rom-com-geared iteration, learning what we could glean from these things.” Ultimately they developed the script to the point where it could be sold to Neon (who eventually released the film). It became clear, as they went along, that it was “maybe less suited for him as an actor.” “And once you try to get into scheduling, things get really complicated,” Johnson said. Neon suggested André Holland, who had appeared in “Moonlight” and starred, for Steven Soderbergh, in “High Flying Bird” and his brilliant, short-lived series “The Knick.” “I had met André previously, and I loved him,” Johnson said. “It was just like one of those moments where it was like, Oh yeah, this movie is meant to be a vehicle for André.” (Gosling remained an executive producer.)
Holland had known “The Actor” producer Abigail Spencer forever – her best friend from high school was his college roommate. “We used to all hang out down in Tallahassee, Florida, back in the day,” Holland said. He ran into Spencer at an Oscar party a few years ago. Johnson was there and they got to talking. “We said, ‘Why don’t we find something?’” Holland remembered. At the time, Holland said, Johnson told him, “I actually have a thing I want to come to you.” That thing was “The Actor.”
Part of Johnson’s pitch to Holland involved the idea of casting a “company of actors, primarily theater actors, and have them play multiple parts.” This appealed to Holland, who has a theater background. It also made him a little jealous. “I just thought, Man, what a cool idea. And as much as I wanted to play my part, I was also like, Dang, I wish I could play one of the other parts,” Holland said. The troupe ultimately included “Moon Knight” breakout May Calamawy, Simon McBurney and the legendary Tracey Ullman.
Of course, with Holland as the lead, “The Actor” took on a different shape. And had different parameters. “It’s a smaller movie than it was going maybe be, but it probably should not have been a big movie. It’s probably more suited to this scale, especially this experimental, art house nature that we were playing around with,” Johnson said. Johnson had concocted all of these visual motifs that he wanted to play around with and Holland “as always, my grounding, emotionally authentic centerpiece.”
Further complicating matters was that “The Actor” was Johnson’s first foray into live-action filmmaking. He said that since he was a teenager, he was making live-action films. It was only after graduating NYU and AFI that he had the opportunity to work in animation and “fell in love with it.” Johnson said that he approached animation “in a very live-action” way. In animation, the camera can do anything but Johnson appreciated having the camera “more grounded in a world of what’s possible in the natural world.” He was interested in more human stories. When approaching “The Actor,” he utilized everything that he had learned in animation and the process that he had developed. “I like to see behind the curtain. I like fabricated worlds. I love world-building because you have such an opportunity in storytelling to build a bespoke world that is infused with the ideas and the themes of the story that you’re telling,” Johnson said. Those ideas lent themselves perfectly to “The Actor.”
The “ticking clock” aspect of live-action was, Johnson said, “a freaking nightmare.” And everything is so expensive. They could not shoot the film affordably in America, so they traveled to Budapest, making the movie in a “drafty warehouse in the middle of winter.” They constructed a fictional Ohio town in the middle of Hungary. “It was definitely not comfortable, all the time it was freezing outside,” Holland said. “Even in the soundstage, sometimes it would be really, really cold.” Still, Holland said, “Duke had this warmth that made everybody excited to come to work. There were some difficult days and some challenges. But it was really like such a joy to get to do it.”
The artifice and fantasy of the movie is brought to life, brilliantly, in an extended tracking shot through a production that Holland’s character is in. “All the sets he’s walking through are actually the real sets of the movie,” Johnson said.
Even after production wrapped in April 2023, the movie entered a prolonged post-production period. Johnson said he was very ambitious in terms of what he wanted to achieve, although he had a budget that was “much less” than the reported $6 million of Neon’s breakthrough, Oscar-winning “Anora.” “I just didn’t have enough time to shoot everything, and I didn’t get as much coverage as I needed,” Johnson said. “I just didn’t get everything I needed.”
“I know Duke really is a perfectionist and wanted it to be the very best that it could be. I got to watch him along the way, as he made the movie better, continue to get better and better and better,” Holland remembered. “There were points at which I was like, Man, I think he’s ready. And he’s like, ‘Nah, it’s just one or two other things I want to do.’ And he was right. Those things made a big difference. I really admire that about him. And he’s not willing to settle.”
Johnson wanted to adjust the pacing and augment what had been shot. And since Johnson has a stop-motion animation studio in Los Angeles, Starburns Industries, complete with stages, he sprung into action. “I’m always like, Well, I can build a miniature. I can’t afford a drone shot of a bus driving through the snow, but I can build a little set and I can build a bus, and I can animate it myself. I can come in on a Saturday and animate that bus, which I did,” Johnson said. He asked animator friends to make matte paintings. He was able to “build out that world and add all of the bespoke craft elements that I wanted to shape the world that I didn’t have time or money to do in Budapest.” He didn’t have money in L.A. either, but if he took his time and asked friends for favors and did things himself, he could accomplish what he wanted. Johnson also built sets – or pieces of sets – and planned over a long enough period of time, he could recruit Holland for a day and “grab a bunch of things to fill the holes everywhere.”
After the success of “Anomalisa,” Johnson said he was able to pitch on bigger studio movies, including a sequel to Jim Henson’s David Bowie-led fantasy “Labyrinth” (it involved “Jennifer Connelly’s daughters”) and a live-action “Swan Lake” that Disney was preparing to funnel through their live-action pipeline. “I love ballet,” Johnson said. But he didn’t get anything. He said that the idea of using all of the tools of a big budget movie are still appealing (“I wouldn’t turn down a studio picture”), but that his next project is a hybrid of live-action and stop-motion animation.
“I’m really excited about it – it’s super top secret but it’s a hybrid situation,” Johnson said. “I’m basically returning to my stop-motion roots. Very excited.”
“The Actor” is in theaters now.
