In this “animated documentary,” viewers see parts of Larkin’s past relationship with former girlfriend Felicity, and as she meets him again in Ryan.

GS: Your film goes into the psyche of its characters, where you are outwardly portraying their inner life. Your work has been described as “psycho-realism.” Can you speak about this?

CL: Psycho-realism was a term that I came up with about three years ago when I was trying to think of a title for a talk I was about to give. It deals very much with a belief I have in using advanced tools and CG. Unlike the way they’re generally used, to doggedly recreate photorealism or to tell superficially imaginative stories, what I think they can also be used for is to show, in a very detailed and realistic way, something that is not necessarily, literally realistic — which, in this case, is the psychological makeup of people and characters; often ordinary characters who nonetheless have very complex psychologies and personalities and behavioral dysfunctions. Wouldn’t it be cool if you can portray those things in a visual manner? What kind of storytelling might that open up that wouldn’t have been there otherwise? That’s what I tried to do with the imagery in a piece like Ryan.

In painting, that has precedent. My favorite example is the painting of Francis Bacon. He tends to take a very realistic approach to painting, but he is able to twist and to dismember and to fracture the appearances of his subjects. Although they have these horrifically disjointed, disconnected appearances, they nonetheless look uncannily realistic with the likeness of their subjects. For example, he does a self-portrait that is more realistic, really, than a photograph of himself.

GS: A more accurate representation... When Ryan is talking or listening in the film, there are colors playing on the inside surface of his face. What was that representing?

CL: Sometimes it represents literally what he’s seeing in front of him, or how he’s comprehending what he’s seeing in front of him. He looks at Felicity, and you see the young Felicity in the back of his head. When he’s looking at a sketch that he’s done of his friend, Derek, you see the real Derek sort of talking there on the back of his head.

Landreth shares a common fear among artists that their creativity will disappear.

GS: His memories... At the end of the film, when Ryan is panhandling in front of the restaurant, his reflection in the window is a full-bodied, healthy looking man. Is that his vision of himself, or is that Ryan once upon a time?

CL: Yeah, that is him once upon a time. In the beginning of the film, we established this mirror motif, where you’ve got “real” Chris [the narrator] who doesn’t have all those [emotional scars] on him. Then he points them out on his mirror image, which does have those things. So you get this through-the-looking-glass setup. What I was trying to do with that last scene was to invert that. So, you’ve got weird-looking Ryan in the front part of the scene, and normal-looking Ryan in the back part. You may have noticed that all of the writing is backwards in the cafeteria and in the street scene there. So, we’re in this reflected world, and any reflections that you see in the other side are in the unreflected — if you will, the real — world. That’s what we were trying to do there.

GS: There is a saying:“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.” In the film, you briefly reference your own emotional scars, and we see your character struggling with the impulses that have clearly consumed Ryan. What is the fear that artists have, whether they’re animators or writers or musicians or what have you? Is it that one’s artistic drive is going to consume them? Is it that, wherever one’s creativity comes from, it’s going to dry up? What’s your own personal experience or observations?

CL: My personal take on it is that the wolf is at that door, that I’ll never be creative again; I’ll never be able to think of anything worthwhile to do again. Therefore, I’ll just descend into this spiral, this nothingness. I’m not saying anything about that is unique in me. I think, in fact, I’m almost stereotypically describing what artists, filmmakers, musicians go through... If you want to see a really good representation of the artist’s worst fear being played out, Fellini’s 8 1/2 [1963] is a great movie to check out.