Releasing this weekend, Stopmotion is award-winning director Robert Morgan’s live-action feature debut. The horror movie traces the path of a stop-motion animator who begins a new, rather startling puppet project, where the characters in her film take on a real-world life of their own.
To celebrate the film’s release, FANGORIA sat down with Morgan and stop-motion legend Phil Tippett to discuss the film, as well as the two auteurs’ shared filmmaking philosophies, inspirations, and challenges.
Phil Tippett: Well, to start things off, I love the movie.
Robert Morgan: Oh, thank you so much. I mean, it’s such a pleasure to meet you, because I’m such a huge fan. I’ve grown up watching your work throughout the years. It’s a real honor to speak to you, especially in this context, when I can actually talk about my own movie.
PT: Are you primarily a live-action director or did you come from stop motion? Who are you?
RM: I’m a stop-motion animator. I’ve been making independent stop-motion short films for twenty-five years, more or less. This is my first feature film. I’ve done live-action before, but this is sort of my first real entry into live-action filmmaking, but with animation as well, of course.
PT: It was a great cast. It was a really accomplished, well-crafted movie.
RM: Thank you very much. I’ve always been conscious of the fact that stop-motion animation, for me, has always been an uncanny art form. It’s always been something that lent itself to the dark side of storytelling and characterization. I just wanted to make a film that formally put that out there as a subject, and really explored that dark side.
PT: And there certainly is a dark side.
RM: Yeah, for sure. I watched your film (Mad God, 2022) again last night and was transfixed all over again. It is an extremely dark film but it still resonates a lot with me.
PT: One of the things that you touched on was the fact that, like many artists, you get to the point where you hate your work. It has certainly happened to me. I obsessively pursued this thing with Mad God, and ended up in the psych ward.
I’m bipolar, and that’s my superpower. Once I launch into stuff, I am just totally obsessed. I can’t stop and work eight to twelve hours a day. Then it gets crazy. I had to go to the psych ward and be in recovery, and it took me a few months to just recenter myself.
I was so traumatized by it, that I stopped making anything with my hands. It’s only been within the last two months that I’ve started making another stop-motion movie. So I mean, I totally related to the repulsion aspect of your movie.
RM: This movie, Stopmotion, was based on my own experience making a short film. It was a 23-minute short film about ten years ago that seemed to take on a life of its own. And I got quite ill as a result of it.
Itt seemed to have its own agenda. It was almost as if the film itself had its own consciousness, like it came alive.
PT: For me, it was Mad God telling me what to do. I didn’t know how long it was going to be. I thought it might be ten minutes, then it grew into twenty minutes. And then it was like, well, maybe I’ll just keep working on this movie until I get hit by a bus.
RM: Is that how you want to continue working? Or do you want to go back to a more sort of traditional way where you write a script and then execute it in a more traditional production?
PT: That’s not how I operate. I wanted to see something that I had not seen before. I really made the movie for myself, not for an audience, which can be somewhat problematic and limits the demographic that you can tap into. For Mad God, it was an age range of mid-20s to mid-30s – a very small demographic of people. I call it my “get rich, slow” scheme.
RM: It ends up being a really beautiful thing when you’ve got talented artists, and they bring things to you that can still surprise you. If you make sure you’ve selected the correct people, and then give them a lot of freedom, it can be magic. I was just constantly excited to see what they were bringing me.
PT: My edict is to leave the cooking to the chefs. When you watch the twenty minutes that you’ve just shot, and then you go in to screen it with sound and music, it’s like somebody else made the movie. I’ve never seen this movie before.
I met Mad God’s composer, Dan Wool, through Alex Cox (Repo Man), and we would help out Cox on his low-budget Western moves. So all I knew about Dan was that he did Ennio-Morricone-type music. But I didn’t know any other composers, so I asked him and showed him the first six to eight minutes of the movie and tried to explain my point of view. But then we immediately bonded and I was able to really be surprised by the score.
RM: It’s really exciting because then you get to react to it. “Oh, that’s cool. I didn’t think of it like that.” I think it’s very important to keep that excitement and freshness alive.
For me, sound is 50% of the film, especially on my shorts. I have always been very involved in the sound process. Sometimes I’ve done the entire soundtrack myself – I’ve edited every single footstep and every single squelch. It goes back to the microscopic detail of stop motion, but in sound.
For this film, I had a fantastic sound designer named Ben Baird, and I had a great composer, Lola de la Mata. This was her first score, as well. Those two things combined were just fantastic for this film.
It was Ben’s idea to introduce the subtle squeaking of the armatures in the movie. I said to Ben, “Armatures don’t really squeak! Like, if they are, you’ve probably got a problem.” But he correctly told me that it doesn’t matter, and if you establish it, you can use it in other ways that are appropriate. So we use it when humans are moving around, as well and it became this weird thing where, as far as Ella is concerned, she’s looking at people as potential material.
PT: One thing suggests another thing. In your film, for instance, you’re able to then make a transition between the squeaking of an armature and the opening of the door. You wouldn’t necessarily have thought about that, but someone with a different perspective was able to. It just transforms the film.
RM: Exactly. And then, with Lola’s score, it was very much about using acoustic sounds. There’s no electronic music at all. It’s basically just the mistreatment of acoustic instruments. It’s a lot of violin, and the percussive elements of her just thumping a violin. She was stretching the strings and making weird sounds out of them and making these discordant textured, sort of sound collages. She was getting very weird squeaks out of rubbing her thumb on the varnish of the violin. She’s basically an experimental composer; she is extremely creative and creates these very strange, very beautiful soundscapes.
I had the same experience while setting up the stop-motion shots. The way I interpreted it was almost as if the character started telling me what it wants to do. Halfway through setting up the shot, the character starts moving in a way that I wasn’t predicting. It’s like the inertia of the puppets pushing me in a slightly different direction. That was the idea of making this film, that you think you’re controlling it, but it’s got its own consciousness in a way. It wants to kind of come alive and do its own thing.
It’s all a very important point in the instinctual playing aspect of it, you have to make it fun and entertaining for yourself. It almost feels like you are playing with toys. I sometimes get the same sensation as when I was playing with Star Wars figures as a kid. I would create scenarios, and I would have them move, and I often thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool if they just moved on their own?”
PT: Exactly. I did an identical thing when I was a kid. You could get these Marx playsets really cheaply, and they would have cavemen and dinosaurs. You’d have them for a year, and you’d lose half of them or burn them up, or whatever. It was all these genres blending together and it became a training ground for scene construction for me. I was just doing a layout for an imaginary movie, and it became part of my education.
RM: I think it’s important not to lose sight of that, because that’s the core of it for me: the playing. The moment that it starts to become too pressured and too important, you start to lose the playfulness of it, and then it doesn’t feel like playing anymore. It feels like work. It’s like when someone comes along and watches you when you’re playing with your Star Wars toys. You suddenly feel self-conscious.
PT: I would liken it to pushing out a 300-pound turd.
RM: (laughs) Do you keep all of your characters and props and things? Do you archive them?
PT: We have display cases, but most of the characters are gutted, so I can pull the armatures out and re-use them.
RM: I do that too. People are always sort of horrified when they ask me if I keep my puppets. But those armatures are quite expensive! I perform an operation on the puppet, and I extract the armature. Basically, I’ve got loads of heads of the puppets, but the bodies have long been destroyed.
PT: I do a taxidermy job, and I’m usually careful about how I pull the guts out. They look pretty good then, but sort of frozen remnants, a replica of what it once was.
RM: I’m running out of space! I have just boxes and boxes of heads.
PT: Oh, hey, I had a question: did you go to art school or film school?
RM: I went to art school and then I…
PT: I knew it. I could tell. I could smell it, because I did too. There’s a certain kind of personality type that I recognize immediately, like, a David Byrne, or a Brian Eno, or a person that went to art school. There’s just certain stuff that’s different – it’s a learned voice.
RM: Texture and atmosphere and images are all extremely important to me. I just had an instinct to want to work with moving images, but I didn’t know anything about film. I was quite good at painting, and I was quite good at building things. So I built some puppets in the best way I knew how, with very crude copper wire armatures inside papier mâché puppets, and made a short film for my final art project. I sort of just fell into it, really.
At what point did you want to get involved in film? Was it from the beginning?
PT: I didn’t know it at the time, but I was bitten by the bug when I was five or six years old. The original King Kong (1933) was on television, and that was the spark where it all began. It planted the seed for this obsession.
RM: For me, it was a movie called Fiend Without a Face (1958).
PT: Terrible movie. (laughs)
RM: I was only four-years-old, and we used to get these 8mm highlight reels of just the best bits of the movie. My uncle had the highlight reel of Fiend Without a Face, and I had no idea what it was. It was just a weird black-and-white movie with these brains laying siege to people in a farmhouse. That’s all I knew – it was the flying brain movie. I was freaked out by it, it was quite violent and gory. But I knew that the brains were moving in a weird way. I didn’t know it was this thing called stop-motion animation.
PT: After King Kong, and other inspirations like the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, I wanted to take that idea of “spectacle” and reformulate it to create the illusion of a dream. With Mad God, you don’t really have time to absorb the whole thing, but you kind of get what’s going on, continuity-wise. You’re vaguely aware of the continuity, but you don’t understand the story. You give yourself up to it.
RM: I think that’s one of the strengths of Mad God. You can watch it five or six times and just see different things in it every time and find different things to latch onto.
PT: Well, this was great. If you ever find yourself in the Bay Area, we’ve got to get together.
RM: Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for everything.
IFC Films’ Stopmotion is now in theaters, and you can watch Phil Tippet’s Mad God streaming on Shudder.
