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Charlie Kaufman

Here’s an interview with the guy who wrote all those movies that you like.

PORTRAITS BY FOUR FORENSIC ARTISTS

BECAUSE KAUFMAN DIDN’T WANT TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED

(Clockwise from top left: Sean Nolan, Stephen A. Fusco, Chuck Jackson, Don Stahl)

Here’s an interview with the guy who wrote all those movies that you like.

Vice: How have the screenings of Synecdoche, New York been going? Do you generally like to sit through those things?

Charlie Kaufman:

No, I don’t sit through them. I mean, I did at Cannes, but usually when you go to film festivals you just come back to the theater right before the movie ends.

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You screened at the festival in Sarajevo. How was that?

I don’t really know how it went. I think the movie has a lot of varied reactions.

Do you get both extreme emotional interest and disinterest?

I guess so. But if there are going to be extreme reactions, then I hope that they really are

extremes

. Sometimes I think people just shut off.

Well, I think there’s a point at which you have to be willing to let this film take you somewhere. I was telling myself things like, “OK, this is not entirely my worldview but I’ll just go with it.” And then I was totally devastated at the end of the film—I was blubbering.

And you were by yourself when you saw it?

Oh yeah, by myself. It’s the kind of film that I think people should go to alone and then they should tell a friend to go alone and they should meet up afterward. They shouldn’t really see it together. And you’re a well-known writer, so this isn’t a film that’s going to sneak in under the radar and only go to the fests. People are going to see it. I was curious to know what you think its chances are out there.

I don’t know, but I’ve done a lot of soul-searching about the idea of appealing to a mass market. You have to be like, “How do you sell this thing? And why should you have to?” Well, you have to because it costs so much money and that’s got to be paid back and all that stuff. But when people look at a painting or read a book, it’s a more individual and personal experience, and I think that’s really the only way that you can…

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You need to work with that single viewer’s personal experience in mind.

You can’t have “How do I appeal to the most people?” in your head when you’re making a movie if you want something that’s real and true. Because then you’re going to make all sorts of compromises—you’re going to pander. But then, thinking about how to appeal to the most people, it’s almost built into the situation of filmmaking because of the expense. It has to be marketed, and that’s repellent to me.

I guess the answer to your question is: Not only do I not know how I’m going to sell this, but I also don’t know if I want to sell it. I don’t want to figure out a way to trick people into seeing this movie. If it’s not your thing, you shouldn’t see it. It’s not going to be for all people—that’s what I’m learning. There are people who are not going to respond to it. And that’s fine. I don’t want to trick them.

Early on in its development, wasn’t Synecdoche being described as a horror film?

Yeah, that was the initial thing when Spike Jonze and I went to Amy Pascal from Sony Pictures with it. She wanted a horror film from us. So there are elements of what’s scary in the world in the movie, but it’s not really a horror film. Horror is a genre and that means there are certain devices and expectations and certain ways of cutting it and certain music and there are cats jumping out to scare you and shit. There’s nothing like that in this movie. It’s ponderous and it’s weird and it’s emotional, but it’s not a horror movie and I didn’t want it to be. As soon as I sat down to write it I thought, “I’m not going to write that kind of movie. I don’t have any interest in doing that. I want to do something that feels real to me—about what’s scary about being alive, about being a person. And what’s scary about being a person to me is loneliness and illness and mortality and guilt.” So that’s what I put in the movie. Those are things that I think are really scary—along with regret and aging and time passing.

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During the first 20 minutes of the film I was waiting for some kind of genre device to drop in so that everything clicked. But you didn’t do that.

No, I didn’t. In my past movies there’s always sort of been a conceit or a gimmick or something that you can hang on to. I think people are going to expect that in this one, but I didn’t want to do that this time because it makes people feel very safe, and I didn’t want them to feel safe.

Synecdoche

is not going to give you anything like, “Oh, it’s a dream or it’s a portal into John Malkovich or it’s a secret memory-erasing drug or whatever the hell it is.” It’s not going to happen. This guy’s life is going to play out and you’re going to watch him age and you’re going to watch him not succeed at what he wants to do and have lousy relationships and you’re going to watch him die. That’s what the movie is. I felt strongly that I wanted to do it this way this time. That might have been a terrible mistake in terms of marketing the movie but…

It probably is a terrible commercial mistake, but it’s an incredible artistic triumph. I think it’s your best work and I think it was overwhelming. I understand the themes of regret and aging and loss and the sense of reconstituting it all through art. The film doesn’t give you any cute way out.

But I think that a sunnier outlook is also completely valid. I don’t think that I subscribe only to the outlook in

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Synecdoche

. That’s just this movie. I don’t know exactly how to articulate this but I don’t… the idea that I’m just morose and miserable is not…

It’s wrong.

I will explore other things in other movies, but in this movie I wanted to be truthful about this sort of feeling in the world, which is a real feeling. But it’s not the only feeling in the world and it’s not the only valid feeling in the world.

You totally succeeded. How happy are you with what you’ve done here?

It’s hard. I’m afraid of the movie failing in the marketplace for a bunch of reasons: because my feelings are going to be hurt, because I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to do this kind of work again if this movie doesn’t get an audience, all sorts of basic reasons. If people are bored with the movie it upsets me. I wish it didn’t but you know, I’m a sensitive, nervous person, I guess.

But I’m trying to answer your question and I guess the answer is: If I can watch it by myself, which is the way you said people should watch it, I kind of like it. I think it’s good. I think there are a lot of good things about the movie. We didn’t compromise. The acting is great. I think the music is great. We did what we set out to do without being scared of the possibility of commercial failure. And that’s good. So I think I decided that I need to watch the movie by myself, and unfortunately I can’t because I’m going to like 25 film fests.

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I think there are a lot of things that you did incredibly well, like the way you did a lot of short scenes and managed to cover a lot of distance.

There are over 200 scenes in the movie, which is about twice as many scenes as a film its length would normally have. It’s way more than a conventional film. It was a production nightmare—many, many, many locations, and we only had 45 days to shoot so we were really constrained by that in terms of how and where we could travel. And makeup time was a disaster. It was a real trial by fire to make this movie.

Did you start out intending to direct Synecdoche from the get-go?

No, Spike was going to direct it. We went in and pitched it together to Amy Pascal—at least the initial idea—and then I took a very long time to write it, as I usually do. By the time I had a draft, Spike was doing

Where the Wild Things Are

and couldn’t set a date to do this one. I really didn’t want to wait. I felt like it would be another five years and I didn’t want that. I needed something to come out. It would have been a very long time between movies for me, which would be a bad thing professionally. Then I felt like it was a personal thing that I wanted to do, and I felt like I could do it. So I asked Spike if he was willing to step aside, and he thought about it and very nicely agreed to.

Michelle Williams and Charlie Kaufman on the set of Synecdoche, New York. Photo taken by Abbot Gensler, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, All Rights Reserved.

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So I did my MA in film at NYU and I know you did too. What year did you graduate?

I graduated in ’80.

OK. I graduated in ’98 and a lot of old theory got stirred up in my brain watching your film, like the idea of horizontal action and vertical action, or synchrony and diachrony. Your film is not very diachronic. Even though it goes through someone’s entire life, it has all these amazing vertical moments that lift out. I never really sat through a film with so many extended vertical moments, where it’s constantly being lifted out of this inevitable trudge toward death that this character is on.

That’s interesting. I like that. Somebody in an early screening where we handed out papers for the audience to make notes said something like, “I was very impatient with the movie. I kept wanting it to be over. I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, another scene.’ But then I was so glad with each of those scenes that it wasn’t over yet.” I liked that note. You know, Todd Haynes was at the Sarajevo Film Festival and I was very nervous about him seeing it because I like him a lot. Afterward he was talking about the screening and he said he kept watching the audience get reengaged. That’s kind of cool, if it happened the way he described it. The idea that you can go away and come back and go away and come back. It’s a very different thing than what you do in movies generally—certainly in more commercial movies.

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Did you choose the name of the movie after you wrote it?

I thought of the name early on. I think that’s why I set it in Schenectady, so that I could do that play on words. But I didn’t settle on it as the title. It was an option for the title. I don’t settle on a title until I’m done because I never really know what it’s going to be until I’m done. It’s like putting the cart before the horse. But when it was done it was on the list of titles and it was the one that I felt strongest about.

My impression is that you didn’t create this movie to oppose convention or to be willfully different. I think that’s the difference between something that ends up being pretentious and something that follows a real creative impulse. I think that’s art—when it goes out on a limb and challenges us, but without being provocative or countercultural just for the sake of shock.

You know, I really hate stuff that does that and I think some of those movies have been compared to things that I did with Spike or Michel Gondry. People started calling me a hipster and it’s like, I’m

so

not. I’m not. I’m really a sincere person.

I don’t even know what “hipster” means at this point. Lots of people throw it around angrily in the New York media now, and I guess they just mean people in their 20s who… Yeah, I don’t know what it means.

Well, I’m not hip and I don’t want to be hip and I don’t know how to be hip. I’m way too old to give a shit about that. I want to try to do something that feels real to me. That’s my goal. I’m very disdainful of this other attitude that’s been attributed to me. It’s not true.

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I wondered: Are women reacting differently to Synecdoche than men?

I don’t know if I can figure out a general rule, but there are certainly women who like this movie. It seems to me from what’s happened with the advance screenings that we’ve had with magazine editors is that there are a lot of women who are not responding—female editors of magazines. I wouldn’t say it’s across the board. There are women who have responded, and I wouldn’t say it is exclusively women who are not responding.

Catherine Keener’s character, Adele, seems to be the keeper of the secret of art and life and meaning. Some women might think, “Oh, you’re just mythologizing her as this symbol and not the flesh and blood he loves.”

But we do that a lot with people. I was reading this thing online, this thing that came up the other day, about this certain kind of woman who pops up in movies—I forget what they called her—but I think it was in the

Onion

. They had an article about certain movies that have this character, which is like the free-spirited, kooky woman who only exists in order to teach the man how to live. I was reading this thing and I saw some comments that said, “Well, what about Clementine from

Eternal Sunshine

?” Then people started arguing about that.

So was the character of Clementine just a type?

The whole thing with Clementine was to take the fact that guys are attracted to this type and say that it is a real thing. And the fact that it becomes problematic is a real thing too. I was not unaware of this when I decided to make her. And also it’s completely interpretive inside Joel’s brain. The whole movie is his memory of her.

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I do try really hard to create actual female characters, as well as I can, but the fact that men can feel the need to be sort of raised by a woman is a real thing too. You can’t get mad at people for depicting that because it’s true. And not only that, a lot of women fucking play with it—they do that because they want to do it. You can’t have it both ways in the world. You can’t pretend this type of female doesn’t exist—there are a lot. She’s more than that, and she may be that way for a reason because she’s trying to fit in or she’s trying to get men to like her or whatever. But there are a lot of people who do that.

And also you’re not saying that’s the only kind of woman out there and that it’s the only type of relationship a man can have with a woman.

But it does exist. In

Synecdoche

I feel like Adele is… I don’t know. I feel like she’s given her due as a character. And bringing Catherine in to play her was also an intentional thing. It’s multilayered.

I try really hard to embody the female characters. When I’m writing the female characters, I am them. I try very hard to be inside of every character I write. Otherwise there’s a danger of making people into caricatures.

One woman that I know thought there was a misogynist quality to the film.

I am the opposite of a misogynist. My friends are all women. I don’t even talk to men.

You’re not a guy’s guy.

I’m not a guy’s guy and, you know, it’s weird—I have to be so careful how I phrase this because I know some people, women, if I say this wrong will say, “Well, there you go, he’s romanticizing now.” But the thing is, romanticizing people is not a terrible thing. It’s part of being a human and it’s part of how you connect to people. You need to open yourself up to people, but part of being a heterosexual man is to love women. I mean, what the fuck?

It’s an expression of your experience. If you were a gay guy, you would have written a bunch of different male characters in the vein of Adele or Clementine…

Probably, because they would be important to my life and their reaction to me would have an effect on me. It’s like the idea of the whole male-gaze thing—the whole history of that—I think there’s something incorrect about it. I recognize that there’s the history of men taking women in this way, but that’s because men love women. And yes, it’s an idealized thing, but it’s the only place where you can really have an idealized thing. It’s an expression of something so profoundly primal to being a heterosexual male, and it’s something beautiful in a way.

But it is complicated, too, that kind of idealizing of a loved one.

I think it can be confusing to the person who’s the recipient of it. But it’s confusing to be a person…

It’s confusing to be a person, period.

And it’s confusing to be so in debt to this thing that’s built into your brain chemistry. But it’s still the truth. You look at some of these paintings that people get mad about through history and, my God, they are so beautiful to me. I can’t be mad at a painter for painting a certain way. I think it would be a waste of the human spirit.