Read Part 1 and Part 2 of Joe Strike’s interview with John Canemaker in which he talks about his early career, teaching at NYU and his influences.

The Moon and the Son is John Canemaker’s latest short film. © John Canemaker.

The Moon and the Son
John Canemaker: After The Wizard’s Son I went on to do films that were more free form, the kind I like to do. Now, after The Moon and the Son I’m getting the bug to do another film on a serious subject. It might be something adult that would again be freeform in its graphics and visuals, but with a strong narrative. I like variety. The Moon and the Son is also eclectic in terms of design and style. It’s built around remembered or reconstructed conversations that were then performed by actors.

Joe Strike: Eli Wallach and John Tuturro are the father and son. Did you direct them, or just let them rip?

JC: No, it was definitely scripted. The dialog is based on actual conversation I had tape recorded with my father, plus actual transcripts from his trial [John F. Cannizzaro Sr. spent five years in prison for setting fire to his failing business] and remembered conversations.

JS: Eli’s performance sounded a little on the caricatured end of the scale — was that on purpose?

JC: No, I’ll tell you the truth. My father spoke broken English — that’s just how he sounded. I told Eli the voice had to be done with an Italian accent and when he first did it the microphone was blocking my view of him. I read with him on that, and I started to tear up because it sounded just like my father — exactly like him.

I began working on this film some years ago, thinking about how to do it. In 1999 I got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Bellagio, Italy, which is on Lake Como for a month to develop this film.

JS: This wasn’t the area of Italy where your father came from?

JC: No, it wasn’t which was ironic, but there I was in Italy, there was a certain puissant feeling about it. They picked us up in Milan, then we drove to this villa — everything was given to us.

JS: Nice work if you can get it.

JC: It was great. I stayed at the Rockefeller villa with poets and musicians and other artists — we were each given a separate studio. They would feed you and you got all your meals. We all looked at each other’s work and commented on it. I had this wonderful stone studio with nothing in it but a computer and drawing tables. It was a tiny thing but I could look out on Lake Como every day.

The Cannizzaro family, circa 1960. Canemaker stands second from the right. All photos courtesy of John Canemaker.

JS: When you went to Italy you had this idea in mind, “I want to do this film about my dad and myself,” but you didn’t have a visual or a story thread yet?

JC: No, nothing. In fact, I went over there and I thought to myself, “Now you’ve really gotten yourself into something. You got here saying you were going to do a story. You have no story… “but the creative process is such that you make one drawing and it leads to another. You take a piece of research and it sort of inspires something else. And the thing just came out. Again, that may be part of my overall philosophy of “things will work out,” but you have to work at it and have the research and material to go with. I have the trial transcripts, my father’s interview, I had photographs that inspired me, drawings, sketches that I had already done.

I started to work on the film for real there, pinning up new sketches in my studio and watching it come together. By the time the month was up, I had a script and a storyboard pretty much worked out. I Fedexed it back to the States, made copies of it, then came back home and worked on it a bit more.

In the meantime I lost a year working on animation per se. I was writing and coming up with more books, but I lost a year because I became the chair of NYU’s undergraduate film and TV department for the school year beginning in the fall of 2001 — the 9/11 year. It was an extremely stressful and involving time.

After that I made up for lost time. I had the layouts, I did all the animation myself. It was the summer about a year or so ago in which my students helped, pitched in and helped color it. Bit by bit I did things, I contacted Eli and got that recording done, got the exposure sheets worked out. I was the original voice for the son, but I never liked my voice [laughs], so I fired myself and decided to get an actor.