Though Swedish director Tarik Saleh is from the same neighborhood in Stockholm as his “Metropia” voice star Alexander Skarsgard, the two never connected until meeting at a Christmas event in Los Angeles years ago. The two quickly became friends, and Skarsgard became the first actor to sign on for “Metropia,” Saleh’s animated film about a dystopian 2024 society were an office drone (voiced by Vincent Gallo) starts hearing the voice of Skarsgard’s character Stephan in his head.

Saleh says production on “Metropia,” a film six years in the making, began with the actors’ recording of their roles, some in Stockholm (like Juliette Lewis, who voices the mysterious character of Nina), some in L.A., like Gallo. Given that the film was animated, Saleh made sure he was in the recording booth with his respective actors, so he could guide them through their scenes and help them dig deeper as characters. “I was prepared, but I also opened myself up to what the actors could bring,” says Saleh. “For instance, Vincent asked a lot of questions and was very method about his approach. Juliette was very physical and impulsive. Alex has a comic inside of him and responds to funny descriptions. If you tell him not to sound so pathetic, he’ll get a lot more pathetic. It’s like a patchwork.”

After recording his actor’s lines, Saleh storyboarded his film and sketched out various versions of each character. He purposefully made their heads very big and bright, because his overall ideology for the film was that every character had symbolic lightbulbs within them. “The light has gone out of their world, so the people are the light,” he says. Original versions of the characters were also very extreme and caricature-like. “Because I come from an artistic background — I’m a painter — I look at ‘Metropia’ as being like a moving painting,” he says. Read More »