The 2009 Sundance Film Festival will be opening with a film starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette. Whats the big deal? Well as opposed to watching the two actors in all their misery and angst in live action, we are going to see them represented through claymation. That’s right, fucking claymation, which will be shaping Collette into an 8-year-old Australian girl and will be apparently taking no liberties with Hoffman as he is being represented as a 42-year-old obese New Yorker.
The film follows the two as they fill the voids in their lives by forming a pen pal relationship. Sundance director Geoffrey Gilmore said the decision was made to have the film open the festival based on the moving themes it represents. “This portrait of a global friendship between two marvelously dysfunctional people is an exceptionally moving, funny and thought-provoking work.”
The director of “Mary and Max” Adam Elliot explained the long and arduous process they underwent to complete the film. “By Opening Night it will have been five years since Melanie [Combs] and I began working on the film. It has been a whale of a pregnancy and we are so thrilled that the birth will be in Sundance.”
The film premieres at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City Utah on January 15th, the full program will be released December 3rd and 4th.