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Eternal sunshine of a brilliant mind: Charlie Kaufman talks to Seven

Written by Alison Grist
Thursday, 14 May 2009 00:00

We caught up with award-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman to discuss his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York.

Inventive, quirky, award-winning screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich) has been in London promoting his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as despairing theatre director, Caden Cotard. Alongside him are British actresses Samantha Morton and Emily Watson as some of the many real-life characters, actors and döpple-gangers Cotard hires for an experimental project in a vast NYC warehouse. Art is to mirror reality, with actors playing out various scenes of Cotard’s existence. His master plan is to gain a greater understanding of the meaning of life.

This film will baffle many, especially cinema-goers who dislike using their brains. It demands imagination and interpretation; it has intriguing depths – layers of subtext, black humour and mise-en-scène revelations that surely demand more than one viewing. It’s monumental and ambitious. Here, Charlie Kaufman speaks to Seven.

 

Seven: The film has as its main themes mortality and existential angst – are these anxieties which were specific to you at the time of writing it or is it just something that interests you?

Kaufman: I think that mortality is a concern of everybody, isn’t it, on some level? Or am I just imagining that? But yes, it is. I don’t want to single myself out and say it’s a concern of mine, but it is a concern of mine, yes. I tend to write about the things I’m thinking about at the time. Perhaps I was arriving at an age where it was becoming more of a middle-aged experience where you’re dealing with your body changing and also watching people you know dying. Not to be dramatic about it, [but] as you get older, you’re surrounded by more of it.

Seven: I once overheard Oliver Stone telling his lead actor that he had to keep it simple because the audience wouldn’t understand. In that respect, I was just wondering what acting notes you gave Philip Seymour Hoffman in this.

Kaufman: I didn’t really give notes on this. The way that Phil and I worked together is that we did a lot of rehearsal beforehand, which consisted mostly of talking. We went through the script and rehearsed it, but mostly it was talking about the character, talking about issues of ageing and children and illness – all these things so that we could come to an understanding. 

And once we came to an understanding, he was Caden as far as I was concerned. So working with Phil…I don’t want to say it was easy, but he was definitely a self-starter and he’s definitely self-critical and he is definitely completely committed. The biggest thing I tried to do with Phil, as much as I could, was try not to make him do too many takes. Sometimes it’s so excruciating what he’s going through, I just don’t have the heart to ask him to do it again. He’s told me that the difference between stage acting and film acting is that film acting happens in the first take and it’s not repeatable; it’s got to be fresh. Stage acting is something you have to figure out how to make fresh each time. It’s a different process and knowing that’s what he thought, I tried to be all prepared – not only technically, but so that we understood each other by talking through things.

Seven: You’ve said that a big part of directing is about being a grown-up…

Kaufman: (laughs) I did say that. Where did you read that? I haven’t said that recently.

Seven: That was on YouTube. I wondered, therefore, do you feel that writing is actually removed from being a grown-up?

Kaufman: Yeah, what I meant when I said that is, as a writer on other movies, I’m a shy person who gets really awkward around actors. I could go off and sulk on the set if I wanted to. It just became clear very quickly that, as a director, I couldn’t do that. I have to be the person whose mood is constant. I have to take care of the problems of the actors who tend to need to go off and sulk. I have to solve those problems, so I felt like it was similar to being a father – (removes sweet from his mouth) excuse me; I’ve realised that it’s very difficult to talk and have this in my mouth – which I am, of a young child. You are constantly deciding which of your terrors you should/could reveal. You have to feel safe; the child has to feel safe. And that’s what a director has to provide for the cast. So, I guess that’s what I meant by that. It’s a good exercise for me to do that, because it’s a discipline. There were times, especially late in the day, when I really didn’t want to be the grown-up but I was.

Seven: There’s a perception of you as a cerebral screenwriter and a lot of the critics commented on the fact that this film is an un-commercial film. Do you think, firstly, that that’s fair and, secondly, do you think that commercial considerations ever come into play when you’re coming up with a new idea?

Kaufman: I try not to think about commercial considerations, which basically means trying to figure out what people will like. I think that’s the way you have to do it. I feel that if I’m not going to do something honest to myself, then I might as well be selling potato chips because that’s what you’re doing. On the other hand, though, if no one goes to see my movies then I won’t be making them anymore. It’s tricky, especially with this one, because it opened in the United States and it really didn’t do much business. Someone said to me, ‘What I love about you is that you really did a big fuck you to the system; you said, I’m going to make a movie that no-one’s going to go and see’.

And I said ‘No I didn’t. I would never do that.’ I’m a nice guy. I would never take somebody’s money thinking that no one’s going to see it. I guess there’s always a chance of that, but I wouldn’t ever set out to do that. It put me into a weird situation, because the other movies I’ve done haven’t been giant box office successes, but they’ve been commercially viable so I could keep doing them. I felt okay about keeping on doing them. But now I’m thinking, you know a movie costs this amount of money, and if there’s only 40 people watching – and those 40 people are really important to me, by the way – then maybe I shouldn’t be making movies.  I should be writing books or something that doesn’t cost so much money up front. So it’s put me in a bit of a pickle. We’ll see.

Seven: When I’ve seen your films, I’ve listened to other cinema-goers’ comments and it’s often, “I’m not sure if it’s a work of genius or not.” I’m just wondering why someone would be confused as to whether it’s great. Do you think it’s the surreal nature that might play negatively to people?

Kaufman: Um...I have no idea. I don’t know why people think what they think. Maybe with this movie I’ve seen it more, but I’ve seen it with other things that I’ve written. I think people are really, really afraid of being conned. There’s a thing that I’ve read about; maybe because I get so much attention and people think it’s justified, they talk about me like the Emperor’s New Clothes. I think that if you thought that through, as a human being, that criticism, the idea that I would spend five years of my life trying to trick people…why wouldn’t I spend five years of my life trying to do something that interests me? What type of person would do that? I can understand them thinking that about a movie that aims to go out and make 200 million dollars because then there’s a motivation. That isn’t to say my movies are good; I’m just saying that my motivation is not to con people. People are so afraid of being conned and, I think, kind of rightfully, because so many people are being conned all the time.

Seven: What do you mean by conned?

Kaufman: You know, like movies do. Not that this movie is equivalent to that because it’s a different type of movie, but we’re constantly being sold things and movies are things we’re being sold. Get people into a theatre any way you can, with crap. Or, in my case, get people into the movie because ‘you have to see it because it’s an event and it’s an important cinema milestone’, and, you know, it’s not. They’re like, ‘fuck you; that’s not what this is; I’m not going to believe that.’

It’s almost meaningless anyway to me, to decide whether it’s a work of genius or not. If you don’t like the movie, you don’t like the movie; it’s fine. If you do like the movie, you do like the movie. I’m not suggesting my movies are smarter than anybody else’s. I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just trying to do work that interests me and I guess I have a hope that I can continue to do that and support my family while doing that. It’s a fairly honest thing I’m doing.

But I tell you something. Quite frankly, I have had a much more uniformly good reaction over here than in the United States for anything that I’ve done, so I don’t feel that over here. I’m sure it exists, but people have been very nice to me.

Seven: What’s next for you; what are you working on?

Kaufman: I’m writing something that I hope to direct. It’s kind of too early for me to talk about; it’s going to be a comedy of some sort. I spend a lot of time not writing. I walk a lot; I think a lot. The thing I’m working on now, I haven’t written a single page of script yet, but I have 60 pages of notes. I just don’t feel like I know what I’m doing with it yet. I just need to figure out this world. I don’t outline in a conventional way. I get to point where I don’t know where I’m going with it, so then I get stuck and then it takes maybe a few weeks for me to find something in it and I get back into it. I think that’s why it’s taken me so long to write these scripts. This one, for instance, has taken me two and a half years. It’s way too long; I’ve got to work out how to do it differently. If I’ve learned anything from Synecdoche, New York, it’s that I don’t have a lot of time left (laughs).

Synecdoche, New York opens in UK cinemas nationwide from Friday, 15 May 2009.

Check out this funny clip of people trying to pronounce the film's title: