With The Actor, St. Louis native Duke Johnson makes the jump from directing animation to live-action

The Actor. // Courtesy NEON

Before working as co-director with Charlie Kaufman on the 2015 film Anomalisa, Duke Johnson had mostly worked in television and stop-motion animation. Along with Dino Stamatopoulos and James A. Fino, he’s a co-founder of Starburns Industries, the animation studio behind Moral Orel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole and, recently, the Keanu Reeves-narrated orientation video in the season two premiere of Severance.

But with The Actor, out this weekend, Johnson’s got his live-action wings.

The surreal drama, based on Donald E. Westlake’s posthumously-published novel Memory, stars André Holland as Paul Cole, an actor who suffers from amnesia after a one night stand with a woman ends with the woman’s husband braining Cole with a chair. Unsure of who he is or what to do next, Cole tries to get back to his old life in New York, but finds he may be better suited to life with the charming Edna (Gemma Chan).

Johnson, a St. Louis native, spoke to us about what he’s been up to since Anomalisa, the long production trajectory of The Actor, and what draws him to dreamlike storytelling.

Abby Olcese, The Pitch: How long did it take this project to come together? What’s your trajectory been like post-Anomalisa?

Duke Johnson: It has been a long time, 10 years in the making. The wheels of bureaucracy happen very slowly. Charlie Kaufman recommended Memory, Donald Westlake’s book, to me when we were making Anomalisa, and I shared it with my producing partner, Abigail Spencer.

I did a draft of the screenplay in 2015 that was basically the book in screenplay format, and it wasn’t quite working. I’d never adapted source material as a writer. The book takes place in internal monologues, and that’s hard to translate into an audiovisual appearance. I kind of left it, went off and did other stuff. In 2019, our option on the book was running out, so I did another draft and sent it out in the fall of 2019 to actors.

During the pandemic, we could really only work on the script, so we developed it through the pandemic and shot it in 2022. I was very ambitious in what I wanted to accomplish. My mom would say my eyes were bigger than my stomach. I didn’t get everything I needed to make the film work while we were shooting in Budapest, so over the next few years I grabbed pieces I needed from my studio in Burbank.

Did working with Charlie Kaufman on Anomalisa influence your interests as a director at all? 

I’m blessed to have worked with one of my heroes, and continued to have a relationship with him as a mentor. He influenced me long before I was even a filmmaker, just through his work. As a human and a mentor he’s also influenced me a lot.

The thing I learned from him more than anything else was that he’s incredibly brave. He’s willing to take chances and risks with his art that may or may not land. That’s a hard thing to do when you’re making something that’s meant to be presented to the world for judgment. It can be very scary. When you get reactions from other people that are like “This is a little slow here,” the difficult thing is to trust your gut when you’re trying to do something weird or new.

The Actor. // Courtesy NEON

I noticed there’s a visual language that’s shared between that movie and The Actor. They both have a surreal dreamlike quality, both visually and baked into the plot. What makes you interested in that as an aesthetic?

I’ve always been drawn to the marriage of form and content. I fell in love with the craft of storytelling and filmmaking before I even knew there was such a thing. You’re watching The Wizard of Oz, you get into the worldbuilding because it’s something you’ve never seen before. You know it’s constructed on some level but it functions as a metaphor for the real world. Sometimes there’s a more direct route through artifice in some way.

I’ve always loved that, and I think when you read a book, and Memory in particular, you can hear someone’s thoughts. Typically film is an audiovisual experience. You want the visuals, at least I aspired to in this case, to create that world and an emotional experience of what the character is going through, and put the audience in that feeling as well. You’re disoriented or confused, but as long as you can connect to André (Holland) and the character of Paul in a sense that you’re rooting for him, you maintain that connection.

How does directing stop-motion and directing live-action compare? 

I love them both. I say that ultimately it’s the same thing because it’s storytelling, and the same principles of filmmaking or narrative apply. But they’re different in a lot of ways, obviously. In animation, you’re working with actors twice; you’ve got the voice actors, and then the animators themselves are also actors. Stop motion is all about the puppets because that’s what you’re looking at on screen. With actors, you already have a human with a soul in camera, which we automatically want to connect to. So there’s a leg up in that sense.

Do you think you have a preference for one over the other now?

Live action is really fast-paced. There’s a ticking clock that’s always hanging over you, and there’s never enough time to do anything. You only have this actor for three more hours, or this number of shots you have to get done by lunch. I thought stop motion was way more difficult than live action until I did live action, which is now I think, in the lead for difficulty.

The Actor. // Courtesy NEON