Interview with Duke Johnson
Thursday / October 1, 2026
About Duke Johnson
Director from St. Louis who spent years in stop-motion animation, co-directed Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman, and wrote and directed the live action feature The Actor.
Source: IndieWire on YouTube
These answers are taken from Creating a Mystery of the Mind in THE ACTOR w/Director Duke Johnson | Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast on IndieWire's YouTube channel. You! Backstage did not conduct this interview.
How did your filmmaking career unfold?
I pursued live action purely. I went to film school at NYU and I studied live action, but I took an animation course while I was there. And I studied abroad at FAMU in Prague, which is a school that's very well known for animation, particularly stop-motion. I remember seeing those sets and falling in love with that idea a little bit, but putting it in the back of my mind.
Then I went to AFI and I made a live action short. I invited a friend of mine who had an Adult Swim stop-motion show called Moral Orel, and he saw the short and he was like, I see you can direct, do you want to direct an episode of my TV show? It was in its second season, and if it got a third season, I could direct an episode. So it was about a year and a half, and I hung around the studio and learned the craft a little bit, and I soon discovered, oh, this is something I've always loved.
So I spent 15 years or so working in animation. Then I had the opportunity to do the Charlie Kaufman film, Anomalisa, which is very much a standard live action cinematic approach to filmmaking, but done with puppets. And now this is live action.
What advice do you have for new filmmakers?
When you make an independent film and you're limited with resources, sometimes you have these challenges, and the challenges bring forth great creative ideas.
Charlie Kaufman told me early on: don't let anybody tell you that you have to direct in a certain way. You should have the freedom to direct a movie any way you want to. It sounds like a romantic idea, but it's more difficult than you think, because there are systems and structures in place that you have to work within.
And I come from a pretentious film school background where coverage is for losers, not for artists. I would just say get some coverage. You need stuff, especially to control pacing; you need stuff to cut to in the editing room. Nowadays, especially if you shoot digitally, it's so easy to throw in another camera. If you can get two cameras on something, you're covering one take, so you don't have to think about continuity, and you have something to cut to if you want to adjust the pacing. Even if you know the shot you want is this one shot, cover it with something if you can.
Has your filmmaking career progressed the way you expected?
It's so funny how life works. A lot of it is luck and fate. I was into foreign cinema and European cinema throughout high school and college, so it just seemed like that was the path. But then ultimately the marriage of the two worlds, live action and animation, became the thing that I wanted to do. It just kind of happened organically. It feels like it was always meant to be, but I just kind of lucked into it in a way.
After making Anomalisa and the success that I had with that film, I really wanted to think a lot about what I wanted to do next. I was getting offers and opportunities to do a lot of mainstream animated films and things like that. I really wasn't sure what kind of story or movie I wanted to make next.
I said I'm not going to do another stop-motion movie, because they're too hard. And then I did a live action movie, and they're so hard because you have no time. It's this ticking clock.
How do you keep your cast and crew communicating well on set?
Having the troupe of actors created almost a theater mentality. I had a very small group of actors, and we were all in it together. All the supporting actors had one or two primary roles, and then one or two almost background or very minor roles, so they were always present. It created an atmosphere almost like a film camp, a summer camp, like when I was in high school and in the summer I'd take film courses, and you just make stuff together with your friends.
The way that Andre [Holland] and I worked together was very spontaneous and in the moment. A lot of changes happened while we were shooting. We would organically be like, this maybe doesn't feel right, maybe it should have this kind of tonal quality.
With my production designer and my cinematographer, I made a lookbook that was very detailed. It had music, reference images, animation in it. It was a tonal reference of the emotional targets and the visual targets I was aiming for. Then I did some animatic work, drawn from my animation experience, which allows me to illustrate exactly what the shots I'm planning are, and from that I can draw diagrams of exactly what I need the sets to be.
Describe your filmmaking style.
I'm in love with the pageantry and the theatrical qualities of filmmaking. I've always loved seeing behind the curtain a little bit, and the films that I'm drawn to are not the gritty realism.
I have some cinematic techniques that I've developed with my cinematographer, Joe Passarelli, who's shot 90% of my stop-motion and animation work over the years, and he shot my AFI thesis film. We've worked together for 20-some-odd years now, and we've developed certain techniques in the miniature world and the stop-motion world that I brought to the live action world. It's my style, or our style.
I really like the idea of things doubling as other things. His hotel room is the same as the doctor's office. The sets are reused quite a bit intentionally.
The 1950s and '60s are my favorite era of cinema, and the music is very bold. Nowadays a lot of score is subtle and withholding from really going into the emotion. I wanted to just go big and go there.
Tell me about a production that was hard to pull off. What was it and why was it challenging?
It was super challenging, because I was naively incredibly ambitious. I wanted to build this imaginary town, and I wanted everything to be sets, and sets to be redressed and reused for other sets, in the same way that actors are reused for other characters. I had these very big ambitions, and it was a very low-budget film, and that's why we shot in Budapest. We didn't even shoot in a sound stage. We shot in a leaky industrial warehouse that made me sick for the entire time. I had this horrible sinus infection, coughing and ruining takes.
There was a ticking clock, and I would show up with 15 setups planned, and by the time we got sets dressed and actors on set, sometimes it'd be like, how can you get this scene done in an hour? I'd have to figure out how to get it all done in one shot, which affected pacing and everything else.
When we started putting the edit together, it felt like there were holes. So I reached out to a friend of mine who's an incredible painter, and he did some matte paintings for me, and I had some friends build some miniature sets, and I animated some stuff on my own. It's the old adage: you make the film three times.
Tell me something I may not know from reading your filmography.
I was making Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman, who is a big hero of mine, and he's a prolific reader. I asked him to recommend a couple books, because I wanted to expand my literature knowledge, and he had just read this book called Memory by Donald Westlake. It had recently been published posthumously. It was something Westlake couldn't get published in his lifetime. He pitched it to me as in the guise of a noir crime novel, but really it used amnesia, rather than as a plot device, as a way to investigate the nature of identity. I read the book and I loved it, and it was actually him who said, if you like it that much, you should try to option it. And I'm like, it's a Donald Westlake book, what are the chances that option is going to be available? And lo and behold, it was available, and we optioned it.
I went home to St. Louis, where I'm from, and started going through old boxes of my stuff from high school and film school, and I found a letter from a friend I was at NYU with, Stephen Cooney. I contacted him, and he had just taken a writing program in LA, and I was like, oh, we should write a screenplay together.
Duke Johnson's Full Biography
Duke Johnson was born on 20 March 1979 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He is a director and producer, known for Anomalisa (2015), Community (2009) and The Actor (2025).