Since launching onto the scene in the early aughts, Dustin Yellin has found a niche in almost every corner of the art world. He made his name with glass sculptures embedded with morsels of imagery sourced from printed media. Pioneer Works, the nonprofit art space he opened in Red Hook in 2012, similarly acts as a social condenser, drawing artists, playwrights, performances for a few months or one night only with the chance to mount something truly radical.
In recent years he has delved into the fraught but no less paradigm-shifting frontier that is the virtual, an interest he’s cemented with his first film, produced by Darren Aronofsky’s A.I.-forward studio, Primordial Soup. A love letter to his daughter Zia in the form of a hero’s journey to rescuing her favorite stuffed animal, Goodnight Lamby sees the artist unfreeze the practice he’s called “frozen cinema.” To mark the short’s premiere at Cannes, he called up his friend Paul Rudd, who plays the role of “Papa,” to talk about where he’s heading next.
Paul Rudd: How long was the entire process, soup to nuts?
Dustin Yellin: That’s a tough question because I’ve been thinking about bringing the art to life for many, many years. When I look at the sculptures that I make, it very much feels like frozen cinema; there’s all of these stories that are trapped and unmoving. When I look at them, they are moving in my mind. I started experimenting more deeply with animation the last two, three years. Then I teamed up with Darren, who helped coach me on writing the script. I was all about “world, world, world,” and he said, “You need story, story, story.” We started actual production last fall.
Rudd: You had always imagined making a film with animation, but once you had your daughter, did you think, This is the story that I want to tell.
Yellin: This was the first story I wanted to tell. I’m ready to tell more stories within this visual world. Having a daughter who’s always running around the studio and staring at the sculptures and saying things in her own interpretive way really inspired me to then combine her world—which is her fixation and obsession with her Lamby—and mine. I’ve had to drive an hour or two to go get the Lamby if it didn’t appear in her room. I couldn’t fool her either; I got multiple backup Lamby’s, which she named Lambo. I don’t know how they know, but they know. I think it’s smell.
Rudd: Do you feel like now that you have ventured into this world and you’ve made a film, is it like you imagined it?
Yellin: Yes, the animation is really catching the artwork and at times feels even one-to-one with the artwork. If anything, I want to keep going, this was just a taste. There’s these new worlds being born within it, and now I kind of want to keep pulling those threads.
Rudd: Did you always know you’d venture into film? Did you have any kind of grand scheme? How far has this gone back in your brain?
Yellin: For four and a half billion years. [Laughs] I don’t know, because I don’t have a lot of walls between ideas that come into being. Whether I’m working on a sculpture where I’m painting on layers of glass, or on a canvas, or I’m building stuff out of rocks, or in this case, with animation, I always feel like it’s about how ideas are born. It all feels like one congruous medium. It all feels like a collage. I was always interested in movies, but I didn’t know where my art would end up now to think that my obsession is more to make an animated film rather than a live action film.
Rudd: How did you meet the animators? How did you find what you need to make it a reality?
Yellin: Well, I just ask my friends.
Rudd: That’s definitely how it happened with us. But the animators are so good. Did you ask Darren?
Yellin: I directed a little music video for David Byrne where we were bringing his drawings to life. And I worked with Ricardo [Villavicencio] and this animation team to do that and had just such a good time with them that it was a natural thing to call them for this. They were just so wonderful to work with because they really understood how to bring the art to life and how to like take what was there and start animating it. We had a base DNA.
Rudd: Has Zia seen it?
Yellin: Oh yeah. I took her to a sound mix. She was watching constantly as it was being built. She’s fully keyed in—as keyed in as one is when they just turned 4.
Originally Zia was gonna play Zia and I was gonna play Papa. Then it just made more sense [to look for an actor]. Paul just felt like kind of the perfect person. It was very instinctual; there wasn’t a lot of thought around it. It was very last minute; thank God Paul was in town.
Rudd: We were friends, so that was easy enough. And I had seen the sculptures. It was interesting to talk about what was happening in the sculpture, to say it as if I had made it. It made me look at the work in a unique way. I had to memorize what it meant. But it happened quickly. As far as the filming, it was really only a day or two. I haven’t seen the final final, but I saw a pretty close.
Yellin: It’s definitely tightened up a lot since you watched it. I’m always like obsessing over how a splash looks or the tone of a blue. It’s just like working on a painting or a collage in the studio. I get to a point where I have to say to the producers, “Tell me to stop.” My lens is super visual, and no one else is going to see that, you know?
Rudd: Is it like that for you on paintings? You force yourself to stop?
Yellin: Yes. At some point, it’s like a world within a world within a world. You just keep seeing into it deeper.
Rudd: I was honored because I think you’re such a great artist. I had been to your studio a few times and we hang out. Normally we’re just a couple of dudes hanging out, talking about whatever it is that we’re talking about. This didn’t feel like it was anything too far removed from that. I’d say the majority of the things that I’ve done have really been just dudes hanging out.
Yellin: Just watching you work was cool because I remember when I said to Zia, “That’s papa.” And she was like, “That’s not my papa,” and started to get upset, like, “I’m not doing this. What are you talking about?” Then I said to Zia, “Okay, that’s not papa. His name is Papa. Like, his parents named him Papa. Like, you would call someone Tom or John or Stuart.” She was like, “Okay.” Then you did this other thing where you made yourself into a puppet as if I was directing or holding the strings and Zia was helping move your body. That really helped Zia connect to the process. But I was also just amazed at how effortlessly you got into character, like a surgeon. It was incredibly believable to the point where I was like, “Wait, maybe this isn’t my daughter.”
Rudd: You can have a script, but when you’re working with a 3-year-old, they might think differently. It’s always just, “Well, I’m just gonna go off of whatever Zia’s doing and let’s not worry so much about what’s written if we’re not able to get what we think we need to get.”
Yellin: One of the great accidental lines, which you completely improvised, was when you said, “Oh, look at the pizza,” referring to the palette of paint. Then Zia said, “This is not a pizza,” which was a perfect reference to, “This is not a pipe.” When I was a young person, “This is not a pipe” was such a cool idea to me. And now my daughter saying, “This is not a pizza,” but completely improvised was a really special moment.
[If we were to work together on another project, I have been] thinking deeply about making an animated feature and I have a sci-fi script that I worked on for years that needs some rewriting, but I definitely want to expand on building out this visual language and telling stories with it.
Rudd: I need to see if I can score an audition for Dustin’s sci-fi feature. No doubt it’s going to go to Ryan Reynolds.
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