‘Stopmotion’ Director Robert Morgan Explains Why Meat Doesn’t Make Good Puppets [Fantastic Fest 2023]
Robert Morgan is first and foremost a stop-motion animators cutting his teeth non unsettling works like The Cat with Hands and Bobby Yeah. Now, for his debut feature Stopmotion, Morgan melds reality with unnerving animation to craft a disturbing tale about an artist on the ledge of sanity.
Read the full synopsis below:
Ella Blake (Aisling Franciosi) is a talented stop-motion animator living in the shadow of her ailing and overbearing mother, herself an influential animator. Doing her bidding, day after day, there’s little space for Ella to work on her own stuff or to have a life of her own. She is her mother’s hands, moving her creations one fifteenth of an inch at a time. She befriends a little girl, finds a boyfriend, but these short tastes of independence don’t last. When her mother dies, however, Ella is not released from servitude. Instead, she increasingly struggles to keep a grasp on what is real, and what is part of the film she’s creating.
Dread Central spoke with Morgan at Fantastic Fest about how to make these puppets look as gnarly as possible, directing Aisling Franciosi, and the horrors of being a creative.
Dread Central: Let’s talk about Stopmotion. So you’re a stop motion animator by trade and this is your first feature.
Robert Morgan: Yes. I have made live-action shorts as well, but this is the first one that really synthesizes live-action and stop-motion in the way that I really wanted to do. It’s been an aim of mine for a long time to make a film that synthesizes those two things. I think it’s an under-explored area, actually.
DC: I didn’t realize how terrifying it truly was until things started happening and I realized I need more movies like this because this is the uncanny valley that makes me want to tear off my skin in a good way.
RM: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s a really unexplored area. So that was definitely the intention to mine, that uncannyness.
DC: In Stopmotion, there is obviously her stop-motion film. Was that a film that you had characters for, or did you up, did you design her film that’s in this film for this film? Does that make sense?
RM: It was designed for Stopmotion, it came out of the narrative, the story, but for me, the Ash Man is kind of like a death figure and it’s a reaction to what’s happened to her mother. I mean, it’s very buried in the film. It’s not explicit at all, but that was the driving force. It’s a girl who’s suddenly lost because she’s lost this dominating thing. So there’s a girl that’s lost and death is around. That was sort of metaphorically what the film that she’s making is about. She’s seen what’s happened to her mother and it’s freaked her out.
DC: So the meat wrapped around the armatures for the stop motion film. What am I trying to ask here? Is that a method that you ever tried before?
RM: I have used it before. But it doesn’t work that well, actually.
DC: Is it the smelliest?
RM: The problem with it is meat dries out. And so under the lights, it doesn’t really doesn’t work. You have to shoot very quickly. So it is actually better to find a material that looks like meat. I used that instead, which is actually what we did in the film.
DC: I remember the little girl mentioned the meat dried out, we need something better. And I was like, “Oh, no.” I can only imagine how bad that room smelled. Just the way that you create a sensory experience without us being in the room is wild. I wanted to hear more about incorporating that in every frame of Stopmotion.
RM: I’m glad you noticed. That is for me, that’s how she experiences the world as an animator. She goes and visits her mother and she animates her mother’s body. There’s sounds like she’s manipulating her boyfriend’s body when they’re having sex. He’s squeaking like an armature and that’s how she experiences sex. It’s like he’s an object that she can move around. So that’s her. And for me, cinema is a sensual experience, so it’s really important. All that stuff, sound design, the tactile quality. And it’s about the fact that the way that she touches and interfaces with the world, it’s as much a part of the film as the story is really.
DC: Well, and the sound design is incredible. The way that you use the speaking of the armature and the way that you have the sounds of flesh when the dolls are walking, there’s a meaty quality to them. So what was it like working with the sound designer?
RM: Ben, he’s an amazing sound designer. He’s absolutely amazing. They turned that around very quickly as well on schedule. But he had a team who just went wild with the Foley work. It’s incredible in Stopmotion. It’s wild. Really, really pleased with that. But I’ve always done that in my shorts before. It brings the thing to life, especially when you’re dealing with animated characters. When you shoot live-action characters, you can record the sound and they make footsteps in their clothes move or whatnot. But when you’re making animation with characters, there is no sound today. You have to invent everything. That stuff grounds the character in something that’s physically there and it makes it more persuasive. So it’s a really important aspect for me.
DC: And something else I really loved about Stopmotion is you have Aisling’s character Ella seeing this little girl. And I love how, from the get-go, you’re not trying to fool us with some things. I feel like you’re subverting a lot of expectations regarding movies about mad creators in a really interesting way. So I just want to hear more about shaping not just Ella, and her relationship with the Little Girl.
RM: Yeah. I mean, it is deliberately mysterious. We didn’t want to have a big reveal.
DC: But I love that though. I feel like you did such a good job of being like, yeah, there’s something weird about this girl, don’t worry. You’re right. She’s weird. But that’s not what you should worry about.
RM: It’s one of those things where I have to maybe not be too explicit about what it all is because it’s nice for it to be ambiguous. But the most important thing for me was because Aisling is in every scene of Stopmotion, the entire film is just what she experiences. You don’t experience anything she doesn’t experience. So when she meets that girl, that girl is there and talking to her, and gradually as the film goes on, it’s like, well, hang on. Is she there? Or what is she? And it raises questions. Maybe she sometimes is aware of what this thing really is, or sometimes she thinks, no, it’s just a kid.
Robin and I, who I wrote Stopmotion with, said from the outset, that we are not having this big reveal of like, “Oh my God, the girl was never there in the first place.” It’s irrelevant, all of that. It’s just you’ll pick it up as you go along. You get a feeling of what she is, I hope anyway.
DC: Oh, yes, very much. Well, and Stopmotion is a movie that I think really gets to the anxieties of being an artist in such a good way. Especially, I mean, Ella has so many moments where she’s like, “Someone has to be in charge of me. I can’t make creative stories by myself.” And as an artist myself, you hit me right in the heart of all the insecurities. And I love the way you tackle that, assuming that you’re drawing from your own experience as a creative.
RM: Yeah, I have. And I still have that experience. It’s an overwhelming urge, a hunger, and a desire to be creative. I want to be an artist. I want to be creative. You sit down to write and it’s like, I don’t know. I’ve got nothing to say or what am I saying? Or this is shit, and I’m useless and I’m crap. I can’t do it. I need someone to help me.
All those anxieties are what Ella is experiencing in the film, but she’s doing it without necessarily even knowing she’s doing it. She is creating something, but she’s not necessarily fully conscious of exactly how it’s happening. It’s a mysterious process for her. And for me, that’s one of the things about the film is that it’s a film about creativity. It’s a film where I’ve tried to tackle the enigma of what creativity is and how it works because it fascinates me.
Where do these ideas come from? And that weird experience that sometimes when you get an idea and miraculously another idea, crops up that connects to it, and then another one and another one. It’s like, how does that work? What is going on? And it’s like the thing has its own consciousness almost. Are you channeling something or is it coming from you? Where’s it coming from? Those questions I wanted to raise in the film.
DC: So cool. What was it like directing Aisling? She’s so incredible.
RM: Yeah, she’s incredible. I was so lucky to get her. When we were casting Stopmotion, Wild Bunch was sending me lots of actors, and there were a lot of people, people with big followings and people who were bigger stars. But they weren’t as interesting. They don’t have her presence though. I’d seen her previous work. I know she’s different in everything, she has a chameleon aspect. So I knew she was one of those actors who would crawl into the role of Ella. And yeah, I spoke to her and she was already talking about it. We hadn’t even formally agreed to do it. She was like, “Yeah, I really like this. I want to do it. And yeah, this scene’s going to be very tricky.” She’s so great. And then when we talked about it beforehand, but when we were shooting, I mean, I didn’t direct her that much, actually.
Little adjustments here and there. Very practical things. A bit more of a pause there, a bit more anger there. Tiny little adjustments. And then she makes the adjustment. It’s like surgical precision. She’s got the presence, she’s got the physicality, the precision is there, and she’s got the heart as well. It’s like you feel for her, even when she’s the darkness. So I think she should be a megastar.
DC: She really should be a megastar. I mean, in The Nightingale, are you kidding me? But with the puppets, did you design them?
RM: They were made in Dan Martin’s studio. So he sculpted ’em. I went there a lot. I was kind of sculpting some of them, but they were based on my designs. They needed to look like how Ella has made them. She’s wrapped meat around armatures and then smeared [things on them]. It couldn’t be too designed. It had to be messy and dirty.
DC: And then what was it like translating the Ash Man puppet into a bigger version of the Ash Man who was worse than the puppet? Somehow?
RM: Very difficult. There’s the first iteration of the puppet, and then there’s another one that’s made out of fox meat that’s a bit more nasty. And then there’s the real one. I wanted them all to be a bit different, but you can tell it’s the same thing. So there’s different iterations of it. The thing that connects them all is the eyes, actually. It’s always got these eyes. But yeah, that was a challenge actually. And then we shot a lot more of him walking around. But at a certain point, it’s that classic thing in Alien where at the end of the day, you can tell it’s a man in a suit. So we ended up cutting back and having a bit less of him in the film. So he’s present, but you’re not getting really big full-on shots of him all the way through Stopmotion to make it a bit more psychological.
Categorized:Interviews
