The stop-motion auteur now known as PES lived in a tiny New York apartment while working a day job at an ad agency when he asked the simple question that would launch his new career.
"These two chairs had been given to me by my parents," he told Wired by phone. "I was up one night in our bachelor pad with my roommate thinking, 'What would these chairs like to do after being cooped up in a house for 25 years?'"
The answer:
Roof Sex.
"When I told my parents I was going to make two chairs fuck, they said, 'That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.'"
Millions of web viewers begged to differ. The 2002 stop-motion short, which showed two stuffed chairs going at it atop a Manhattan apartment building, went viral and earned a Best First Film trophy at France's influential
Annecy Animation Festival. Then PES got really busy: His string of
strangely hypnotic short films has attracted nearly 34 million views on YouTube and cemented his reputation as one of the most inventive DIY filmmakers of his generation. Last week, his ingenious
Fresh Guacamole landed a slot on the Oscar short-animation short list.
Czech Mate
One day in 1997, PES walked into a screening of
The Conspirators of Pleasure by Czech animator
Jan Švankmajer. "I marveled at a person pulling off a feature film without any words and became curious about this stop-motion technique," PES said. "I remember seeing it in
Clash of the Titans but he was using it in a totally different way, as a language of objects."
To soak up the stop-motion sensibility, PES bought everything by Švankmajer he could find, including old VHS tapes and bootlegs. "I watched them over and over and over," he said. "The genius behind these films opened up this notion that I have ideas about objects, too. That's where my approach was born, though I wanted to do it with a little bit of a narrative versus surrealism."
Second in a series of Showtime-financed PES shorts,
Fresh Guacamole takes the viewer through a succession of meticulously staged steps in the making of an alternate-universe version of the avocado-based Mexican sauce. Hand grenades, baseballs and dice are in the frenetic stop-motion "recipe," which shows off PES' taste for bringing inanimate objects to strange new life.
"I haven't figured out exactly where this fascination comes from, but it's sort of embedded in my sense of humor," the 39-year-old Santa Monica, California-based filmmaker said. "I'll see something in an object and think it looks like something else. It's just something my brain does naturally."
Art and Underwear Paper
Born Adam Pesapane,
PES grew up in New Jersey. His mother, a hairdresser, and father, an elementary school principal, discouraged TV watching in their house but were happy to arrange private art lessons for their clever son. By high school, PES was staging art shows featuring his portraits, watercolors and illustrations.
Studying English at the University of Virginia, PES printed his own books using paper made from recycled underwear. "One of my professors at college had a paper-making machine," he said. "You could put old underwear into this machine, break it into pulp, and turn it into paper to print our books on. I'd get free paper from all this underwear my parents sent me from New Jersey."
PES became enthralled with printmaking. "I really got into using 15th-century copper-etching techniques to engrave text backwards," he said. "I published a little story about my grandmother, who served us disgusting meatloaf. I'd pretend to eat it but snuck it out in napkins under the table. I turned that into a book illustrated in the style of Dante's
Inferno and printed a copy or two."
PES did not study film at college, but when he arrived in New York after graduation, the gig he landed as an assistant to the creative director at
McCann-Erickson provided a portal into the world of cutting-edge short film.
"I'd see early work by Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze when they were doing music videos, and I'd see all this very adventurous stuff coming out of Amsterdam in the late '90s," he said. "I realized a commercial was just a tight story — a short film with a logo at the end. It occurred to me, 'Why does it have to be selling a product? Why can't I just make a freestanding thing that's just one minute long in a format that people have become familiar with for 50 years? You can't do much character development, but there's time for good ideas in 30 seconds."
See several of PES' amazing short films in the video gallery above, in which he also provides some background on his inspiration and a look at upcoming projects.
