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HBO: Where did the idea for the film come from?
John Canemaker: The idea went back a long ways. I was
looking through some old drawings and notes
for this autobiographical film about myself
and my father, going back to '97, and it
actually came to fruition in '99 when I got a
grant from the Rockefeller foundation, a
residency grant to go to Italy to live at the
Rockefeller villa for a month, and to create a
concept for a film. So I did, and the material I
brought over was about my family and my life
with them and my father, and this is the film
that resulted from it.
HBO: And how did you come to the project, Peggy?
Peggy Stern: John and I had worked together before on a
documentary series where I asked him to do
some animation, and he'd been telling me
about it, and I actually think it happened
through coffees and talking and John saying,
you know, I really think I should go for this
grant. I really just encouraged him to do what
seemed to me to be a very strong story and
something that he was passionate about. And
when he came back and showed me the
original storyboards, I was just blown away. I
thought they looked amazing, and at that
point, I sort of brought up maybe trying to use
some archival and home movies and stills as a
way to weave the personal part and bring that
even more into the forefront.
HBO: Tell us a little about the story.
John Canemaker: Well, it's basically the rather difficult
relationship that I had with my father, who
was actually an American citizen who was
taken back to Italy when he was one year old.
He had citizenship, but was raised in Italy. He
didn't speak English when he came back to
this country at eighteen; he got involved with
organized crime in Italy, and continued to get
in trouble with the law when he was here.
He had a great struggle; sort of the sour side
of the American dream. And went to jail for
arson at one point, and we talk about all of
that in the film.
Peggy actually came on very early in the
process, about a year after I had come back
from Italy. We had been talking about it in
great detail, and in fact I have notes from
Peggy from the year 2000 in which she's
saying, bring your mother more into this, and
make it warmer. [LAUGHS] You know, it's
such an angry film. [LAUGHS] She really
humanized the whole process for me, and
added a great deal in terms of fleshing out the
story and making it more than a rant.
Peggy Stern: I think we were very lucky because with a film
like this, it doesn't really fit into any category.
It's a short film, it's only twenty-eight
minutes, so you're not quite sure what's going
to happen with it and where it's going to be
shown. After the Rockefeller Grant I helped
John get some NYSCA money from the New
York State Council for the Arts, and that got
us to the next stage of having more of a rough
cut to show. Then we brought it to Sheila
Nevins at HBO, and lucky for us, she really
got it. She said, I think it's incredibly different
and strong, and what do you need? It was
just amazing, because without that we
probably would still be working on it. I mean,
it could have taken a much longer time.
John Canemaker: Sheila really saw it as a documentary. Even
though it's animated, it has that sort of
documentary feel to it, and it's dramatized in
many ways, but it's all based on an interview I
did with my father three years before he died.
I asked him all these questions about his
past. And I used the actual trial transcripts
from his trial. So there's a lot of realism in
the film even though it's animated.
HBO: The segment with the gloves, that was
very funny.
John Canemaker: Well, you know, you take anybody else and it
doesn't fit the evidence. But if you take my
father, it fits like a glove. So, I remember that
line when I was a kid, because I was at the
trial, and I decided to personify that, which is
what you can do with animation that's
different than live action. You can actually
personify thoughts and emotions in
animation, and that's what I did in that
section.
HBO: You said you did an interview with your dad.
Was that a taped interview?
John Canemaker: Yes, it was a little tape recorder; the sound
was terrible. I thought about actually using
his voice at one point, but that's why we
ended up taking the words, putting them into
script form, and then hiring Eli Wallach to do
it.
HBO: Were some of the lines in the film word for
word things your dad said?
John Canemaker: Yeah, absolutely, a lot of it is.
HBO: What was the process of working with such
personal material like?
John Canemaker: It was a painful process. But I thought it was
a necessary one, and I did it.
HBO: You also used home movies and other
materials in the film.
John Canemaker: Yeah, the home movies came from the fifties
when I was experimenting with an old Bolex.
I did my first animated films when I was a kid
back in high school, and happened to shoot
the family that particular day in 1958. There
were tons of photographs, we always took
pictures. We had one of the first Polaroid
cameras, so there was a lot of archival
material I could draw on.
Peggy championed the use of true archival
footage such as the scenes down on Mott
Street that were taken turn of the century.
And she was very interested in trying to find
good ways to transition between the
animation and the archival footage, so we
were always trying to figure that out. But she
pushed hard to find the right archival footage
besides our own home movies.
HBO: Let's talk about the vocal talents in the film,
because the two voices you chose were so
strong. Tell me about how they became part
of the film.
John Canemaker: Early on I wanted Eli Wallach to play the
father. I don't know quite why, but he was one
of the first people I thought of. Something
about his voice was very human, warm, and I
knew he could do an accent; he needed to do
an Italian accent, but I hadn't seen Godfather
III in which he does that, but somehow I knew
he could do it. So, I wrote him a letter and
sent him my reel, and he responded
immediately and said, I'd be interested in this,
and he wanted to see the script. So he came
over to my apartment, and before he even sat
down to read it, he was already becoming the
character. It was quite an amazing thing, and
he had this enormous energy, he loves what
he's doing, he loves acting. I remember going
to the first recording session, and being very
nervous, but he came in all smiles ready to go
to work, and I felt completely at ease.
I did the recording of the Son, originally, with
him, but then eventually we decided that it
wasn't hitting the emotional points that
needed to be hit. So Peggy fired me.
[LAUGHTER] Then we pursued John
Turturro. Actually Eli Wallach helped us get
John, because he called him up and said,
[USING ITALIAN ACCENT] "John, I want you
to be my son." So we got John Turturo, and
he was just wonderful, too.
Peggy Stern: Initially we went through John's agent, and
John was very busy; he was writing, acting
and directing a film at that time, and there
was a sense of, well, there will never be time
for this. So then Eli made this phone call,
which really did the trick. And John said, I'll
do it, but you're really going to have to fit this
into my schedule, because I'm on this huge
deadline. So he saw the rough cut and then
he came into a sound studio with his
Starbuck's coffee and just read it, and it was
done in an hour. That was it. It was
unbelievable. I mean, to work with
professionals on that level and see what they
bring to it. It was incredible.
HBO: What is your approach to animation?
John Canemaker: Most animation begins with the drawn image.
It can be drawn these days on an electronic
tablet, but more often than not people love to
draw by hand. And so the concept stage for
animated films, and even the storyboard
stage, much of it is still done by hand. And to
me, that's the most exciting part of the whole
process of animation is to come up with ideas.
My very first ideas were about how the
opening of the film might be done. It was
based on a dream, and had very crude
sketches of a spoon feeding a dying man, and
then him snapping on them and becoming a
snapping turtle, and then pulling out and
having the two brothers cry. That's where the
opening of the film came from.
And then of course it later developed into
more elaborate storyboards. This is stuff I did
in Italy. This is the way I worked over there,
you know, small sketches that were pasted to
larger paper ideas about color, staging. Then
this was brought back to the States and put
onto a larger board, which I then took around
to people. And Peggy would see that version as
well.
Eventually, this is put into animated drawings
which we did shoot traditionally, although at
the end we used computer scanning in the
drawings for three scenes, because of time
and money constraints, and that's probably
the way I'll do it from now on.
I had two mentors who were great Disney
animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.
Frank died about a year ago and Ollie is still
alive, he's in his mid nineties now. But they
were mentors of mine for about twenty-five,
thirty years. I would send them films that I
had done, they would tear them apart and
suggest other things. I actually worked on a
production with them once, years ago, and
their capacity for work and exploring the
possibilities so that you make the strongest
statement that you can make has stayed with
me forever.
I really feel privileged to have benefited from
their wisdom over the years. But basically it's
hard work. You have to keep exploring all
sorts of possibilities for looks, designs, styles,
you always have to keep in mind that it's
going to be animated, you know, what are
these characters going to look like? What are
their motivations? How does it work into the
story? It all has to fit together, and basically
what you're trying to do is communicate with
an audience and make the strongest
statement that you can possibly make, and
the only way to do that is to look at all the
possibilities.
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