How practical lighting reacts in a real environment can be very complex sometime and I wanted some of those locations within the hotel to have that complexity. I felt in order to create a realistic world there needed to be extreme detail to all the lighting. It is a dark and dramatic story and I wanted the look to enhance that. Passarelli: My artistic goals for Anomalisa was to help create a realistic world for the characters to live in, but also try to capture the mood that the main character Michael was going through. Charlie liked that I mainly worked in live action, but also had some stop motion experience.įilmmaker: What were your artistic goals on this film, and how did you realize them? How did you want your cinematography to enhance the film’s storytelling and treatment of its characters?

Duke and I shot the Kickstarter pitch together and once some money was raised, we started pre-production conversations. After that, Duke told me about the potential to do a Charlie Kaufman script in stop motion – if we could raise money.

Once he’d made a couple television shows in stop motion, he invited me to shoot season 2 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole, the first TV series Starburns Industries ( Anomalisa’s production company) produced. We made our thesis film together at the American Film Institute (AFI). Passarelli: The film’s co-director Duke Johnson and I are long-time collaborators. This interview was conducted in conjunction with “Behind the Scenes of Anomalisa,” a panel at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.įilmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Below, Passarelli speaks with Filmmaker about the film’s singular visual design, which seeks to capture the mood of its troubled protagonist Michael Stone.

In 2015, he had his breakout film with Anomalisa, the long-awaited stop-motion feature written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman.

Joe Passarelli has spent the last decade serving as a cinematographer and electrician on more than 30 shorts, features and TV series. In Cinematographers, Cinematography, Filmmaking, InterviewsĪnomalisa, Charlie Kaufman, Joe Passarelli, Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival 2016

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