The Oscar-winning fantasist responsible for Adaptation. and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind has turned director for his sixth absurdist screenplay. DONALD CLARKEtries to define what it's like being Charlie Kaufman
‘THERE WAS this modernist pianist I’ve read about,” Charlie Kaufman says. “People asked him what his piece was about and he sat down and played it again. That was his answer and I understand that. The piece is the answer.”
The piece under discussion is Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman's directorial debut has been dividing audiences ever since it opened at the Cannes Film Festival last year. Having furrowed their brows through Kaufman-scripted puzzlers such as Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindand Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich, critics felt they could take anything the bearded wonder could throw at them. But Synecdocheproved to be a rather different kettle of post-modern mullets.
The film follows a worried theatre director who, after encountering one too many health scares, hatches a deranged plan to recreate an entire city – with his own life featuring as the central fulcrum – in a New York City warehouse. Meanwhile, his daughter turns into a German performance artist, a girlfriend moves into a house that’s constantly on fire, and his bodily emissions change colour with alarming frequency. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the hero. Various female characters are played by the likes of Jennifer Jason Leigh, Emily Watson and Samantha Morton.
“Spike Jonze and I were approached by Sony Pictures and were asked to do a horror film,” Kaufman explains. “And we fairly quickly realised that we didn’t want to do a genre piece. We were interested in the truly frightening things in life, rather than fake scary things. We thought of issues involving dying, illness, regret and despair. That was what I started with. Maybe it still is a horror film.”
The picture shows Hoffman feeling for lumps, rifling through his poo and gradually becoming obsessed with the negative energies in life. This is, you might argue, a very pessimistic film about a very pessimistic man.
Kaufman, a small 50-year-old fellow with sallow skin, doesn’t encourage critics to view his films as autobiographical, but it’s impossible not to wonder if he shares his hero’s neuroses.
“It’s not a terribly big secret that I’ve got a focus on health issues, I am aware of things like that. I have come to worry more about that as I grow older.” Was he an angsty kid? “I was a worried kid, I think. I was worried about death when I was a child. I don’t think that’s an unusual thing, actually. It’s something that happens to kids when they become aware they are going to die. I worried about a lot of things. Some of which I am not going to talk about.”
As Jonze got increasingly tied up in his endless efforts to bring Where the Wild Things Areto screen, Kaufman decided to grab a megaphone and direct Synecdochehimself. The result is, to this writer's mind, a deeply thoughtful, extremely poignant piece of work. Not everyone agrees. The film ended up on a number of critics' top 10 lists, but it also had more than its fair share of rotten vegetables hurled at it. Not since David Lynch's Inland Empirehas a picture stirred up quite such vigorous debate.
“I did expect virulent reactions, but nothing like this,” Kaufman says. “People who don’t like it really hate it. People were genuinely angry and I definitely wasn’t expecting that. They were just so personal. ‘I want my money back. I want two hours of my life back. Worst thing I’ve ever seen.’ I’ve never read anything like it.”
Charlie is never a particularly jolly fellow, but when he says this he really looks as if he might be on the point of weeping. Cheer up. Plenty of people think that the film is one of the most extraordinary releases of the year. Heck, it got a rave in The Ticketand that's nothing to be snorted at.
“I guess so,” he says, shaking off the Eeyore eyes a little. “Hey, if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, the film is at about 67 per cent. That’s not too bad.”
Oh dear. Rotten Tomatoes, a site that gathers together American reviews, is one of those places that film directors almost never admit to visiting. I can imagine that an hour spent watching the figures go up and down could drive a sane man totally barmy. “I do admit to reading everything about me online,” he says. “Absolutely everything. But I do my best not to allow that to influence my work.”
Kaufman could regard the virulent response to Synecdocheas a kind of compliment. People really care about what this writer produces. Since breaking cover with Being John Malkovich in 1999, he has come to be seen as the signature screenwriter of his era.
On a superficial level, the self-referential games of Malkovichand Eternal Sunshinerecognised the arrival of post-modernism into the mainstream. But they also got at a certain godless misery that was afflicting the West and that, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the current financial meltdown, has only escalated. When historians come to write the cultural history of the recession they might find themselves referring to Synecdoche, New Yorkat length.
Born to a middle-class Jewish family in New York, Kaufman attended Boston University and New York University Film School before securing a job writing for various, mostly forgotten sitcoms. I wonder if he is ever tempted to go back to those roots and write something “straight”. Could he, for example, ever imagine himself making that horror film?
“I certainly could if I had to,” he says. “If I had to support my family I would do that. I enjoyed working on sitcoms. It teaches you a kind of discipline. But I do like to write scripts that work like a piece of literature. I want the viewer to be able to bring his own interpretation to it.”
Like David Lynch, Kaufman is enormously reluctant to deny any interpretations of his films, however outlandish. He goes on to discuss the two most common takes on Synecdoche– that Hoffman's character dies in the first act and dreams the rest in a coma, that the film is a tribute to Fellini's 8 1/2– with enthusiasm and humour. He's never seen the Fellini, and the coma theory had never occurred to him, but if people want to think those things, then that's fine. It's all cool with Charlie.
This slippery relativism is exciting stuff, but what if somebody decided that the film was, oh, I don’t know, anti-Semitic or an argument for eugenics. Would that be okay?
“What I would say is what I just said,” he mutters elliptically. “Which is that I am creating a piece of writing that I hope will work as a piece of literature. I want to create a piece that allows all these different interpretations. If I made a film that said: ‘It’s about this and it means this’, then there would be no need to make the movie. You could just say it.”
He’s an intense fellow, this Charlie Kaufman. In the same way (but so very differently) to John Ford or Sam Peckinpah, he exists as a kind of walking summary of his work. Unashamed of his conspicuous neuroses, intelligent in an endlessly twisty way, he breathes the same worried air as his twitchy heroes. No wonder critics try to psychoanalyse him through his movies.
“That was part of the abuse for this film,” he agrees. “They all decided that Philip’s part was me. All these reviews said: ‘It’s Kaufman’s latest alter ego’.”
Come along, now. He's already admitted drawing on his own hypochondria for Synecdoche. In Adaptation, for which he won an Oscar, he actually had a central character called "Charlie Kaufman". He is, surely, inviting us to see himself in these troubled heroes.
“I’m not inviting anybody to do anything,” he says. “That was just something that worked for the character.”
He looks confused, hounded and slightly hurt. Actually, he looks a little like “Charlie Kaufman”.
Confessions of an unusual mind: the scripts of Charlie Kaufman
When Being John Malkovicharrived in cinemas 10 years ago, critics could be forgiven for suspecting that nothing of its odd type would ever be seen again. Following John Cusack's troubled wage-slave as he entered a portal into John Malkovich's brain, the film looked as if it had invented its own genre.
“Nobody other than Malkovich would have worked,” Kaufman says. “Dafoe, Dafoe, Dafoe? Walken? Walken? Walken? It just didn’t sound the same.”
Michel Gondry's even weirder Human Naturefollowed and, when that film flopped, it looked as if Charlie might have to go back to writing sitcoms. In 2002, George Clooney's C onfessions of a Dangerous Mind, a treatment of game show host Chuck Barris's deranged autobiography, impressed adventurous cinemagoers. But it was Adaptation. that really confirmed the writer's reputation. The picture, starring two Nic Cages, follows both Donald and Charlie Kaufman – twins who represent, respectively, the populist and high-minded sides of the writer's brain – as they try to adapt a respected non-fiction book.
Then came the gorgeous, heartbreaking Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That admired picture, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a couple trapped in a morass of amnesia, managed to cross over from the art house and become a mainstream hit.
What next for Kaufman? “I am going to direct something myself again.” Can he say what it’s about? “Naaah!”
Synecdoche, New Yorkopens today
