At last year's MTV video awards ceremony, the prize for best directed video went to deejay Fatboy Slim's Praise You, which featured a motley group of bad dancers led by a gangly young man in a shopping mall in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance. When Fatboy Slim called the video's director Richard Koufey to the podium for his award, the gangly young man from the video came forward.
"The Torrance Community Dance Group and I have been together for seven years," Koufey declared, "and this is by far the most amazing thing that's ever happened to us." But there is no community dance group in Torrance, and Richard Koufey is really Spike Jonze, the award-winning director of pop promos and commercials, who makes an assured feature film debut with the hilariously offbeat and remarkably original fantasy film, Being John Malkovich, which has been nominated for three Oscars, including one to Jonze as best director.
Before we go any further, it ought to be explained that Spike Jonze is not really Spike Jonze either, but the professional name adopted by Adam Spiegel, a 30-year-old prankster from Bethsead, Maryland and the heir to the Spiegel catalogue company which turns over $3 billion a year.
And Koufey/Jonze/Spiegel - let's call him Jonze - recently married Sofia Coppola, who made her own acclaimed directing debut with The Virgin Suicides, which opens here in May. Their wedding took place at the home of her father, Francis Ford Coppola, who once directed great films like The Godfather and The Conversation and now makes better wine than movies. Spike and Sofia met on the set of the first music video he directed - Sonic Youth's 100%. His subsequent work included such arresting commercials as the Nike ad in which Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi take over a city intersection for an impromptu tennis match, and the Levi's commercial set in the emergency room of a hospital where a seriously injured accident victim whips off his breathing mask to join the staff in a karaoke version of Soft Cell's Tainted Love.
Among Jonze's prodigious output as a music video director are such classic promos as the Beastie Boys' Sabotage, a witty pastiche on 1970s TV cop shows; Weezer's Buddy Holly, an affectionate evocation of the Happy Days series; Bjork's It's Oh So Quiet, which was given the full-on Busby Berkeley treatment; and Daft Punk's Da Funk, a moody, haunting spin on Beauty and the Beast in which a man with a dog's head is befriended by the woman of his dreams in Manhattan.
Jonze has also directed several videos for Michael Stipe, whose company, Single Cell Pictures, co-produced Being John Malkovich. The film features John Cusack as Craig, a struggling puppeteer whose wife (Cameron Diaz) is altogether more interested in the pets with whom she works and lives. Craig gets a job with a company which is based on the seven-and-a-halfth floor and is only five feet high - and contains, he discovers, a portal leading into the brain of the actor, John Malkovich. This experience lasts 15 minutes before the explorer is abruptly ejected on a ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike.
Along with Maxine (Catherine Keener), his icy colleague whom he desires, Craig sets up a scheme whereby they charge the public to get their sense of 15 minutes of fame through the surrogate experience of temporarily being John Malkovich. This deliriously bizarre premise is taken to unimaginable extremes in an intricately plotted screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, which is entirely unpredictable as it takes one daring leap after another, richly and consistently funny, and unexpectedly affecting.
Remarkably, this brilliantly inventive scenario is the first screenplay by Kaufman to be filmed. Described in one recent interview as "a diminutive, young Joseph Heller lookalike", Kaufman is a graduate of the film school at New York University and has some experience of writing minor TV sitcoms such as The Dana Carvey Show and the short-lived Get a Life. Kaufman well deserves the Oscar nomination his screenplay has received, and he is the only serious contender who conceivably could stop American Beauty writer Alan Ball from taking the best original screenplay Oscar tomorrow week.
Spike Jonze first attempted to get into movies five years ago, with an adaptation of Harold and the Purple Canyon which would combine animation with live-action footage. When a screen treatment of the story was submitted to TriStar Films by writer-director David O. Russell, the company balked at the budget and dropped the project. However, Russell went on to cast Jonze as the redneck soldier, Conrad Vig, in his stylish, black-humoured anti-war movie, Three Kings, which is now on release here.
Meanwhile, Jonze received Kaufman's screenplay for Being John Malkovich. "I read it," he says. "I liked it right off the bat, and I knew I wanted to do it. The writing was simply amazing - very smart and very funny, with good characters and a good pace. One thing Charlie doesn't do is overwrite."
The film's star, John Cusack, concurs: "It's totally original, totally new, intricate, twisted, sophisticated, and low-brow - all at the same time. It's like an Escher painting. It has doors and stairways leading into themselves. It's totally wild."
In a film so concerned with the nature of celebrity, it was crucial to choose the right actor as the vehicle for the surrogate sensation of fame. Somehow Being Mel Gibson or Being Harrison Ford doesn't have quite the same ring to it - perhaps because neither actor is remotely as interesting as John Malkovich.
It was Spike's future father-in-law, Francis Ford Coppola, who made the initial approach to Malkovich, asking him to meet Jonze. Malkovich responds in the movie with a laudably self-depracating line in humour, sending himself up as a self-obsessed actor of jaded hauteur. A running gag turns on how easily recognisable Malkovich is, but nobody remembers any movies he's been in apart from "the one about the jewel thief" - even though he has never made such a movie.
The real Malkovich is one of those rare American actors who chooses to live in Europe - his home is in Paris - and who appears as much at ease in an arthouse movie for Michelangelo Antonio, Raul Ruiz or Jane Campion, as he is in big-budget Hollywood productions such as In the Line of Fire, The Man in the Iron Mask and Con Air.
"Whether it's Con Air or Portrait of a Lady my work is the same, meaning, how I go about my work never changes," Malkovich told me when I interviewed him at Cannes three years ago. "I don't really mind any genre. I'm totally un-elitist about that. When the cameras roll I always enjoy myself. I have learned over the years to have fun in front of the camera. I've always had that in theatre.
"It's harder in cinema because there are so many distractions, a lot of waiting, a lot of technical details which can be absolutely maddening, and very little bursts of activity. But now I am what I am. As Popeye says, I yam what I am." Which would make a perfectly appropriate sub-title for Being John Malkovich.
Being John Malkovich is on general release