Erik Marshall

There’s an interesting interview here (thanks to Wiley Wiggins for the link) with Richard Linklater about A Scanner Darkly, a movie I have been anticipating for a long time. As a good deal of my dissertation involves rotoscoping, and, in particular, Waking Life, this holds particular interest for me. (Honestly, I was hoping to finish before this came out, both so I wouldn’t have to deal with it and for the timely factor, but c’est la vie). One of many interesting nuggets:

The software has come a ways since Waking Life, and I had in mind a different design altogether, a very consistent graphic-novel look to the whole movie, unlike Waking Life, in which [the animation style] changes. I knew [the animation] would be beneficial when it came to the scramble suit, but on the deepest level, I felt [the animation style] would work because it kind of forces your brain into this space where you are processing [the visuals] both as reality and as something else. I thought that the mind fuck [the animation] is putting on the viewer, whatever that is, would especially work for this story, where the hemispheres of Bob Arctor’s brain are competing. Arctor’s reality is shifting, it’s not consistent, and I thought that this animation puts the viewer in that state. But again, it wasn’t some super-intellectual thing.

I am interested in rotoscoping for that "reality and something else" thing, the border between the real and the created, the idea that the onscreen objects were filmed, but remain a bit unreal. The indexical becomes very muddy here, and the viewer has to decide between them, or, perhaps, embrace and process them both simulataneously. I also like the "super-intellectual" part of the quote for some reason. A little humility, I guess.