User:Pearcejack

'''thanks for doing this. when are you writing your piece for the paper? are you still thinking about the same idea regarding the teacher?'''

'''2-5-06 Jack, Good job! You are on the right track. Keep going. The week of Feb. 12 can you start writing the bare bones of your ideas for your script in your journal? We need to meet again on Weds. Ms. Finley '''

'''Jack Pearce Senior Ex Project-

The Writings of Charlie Kaufmann'''

Journal entries 

11/19/06

Charlie Kaufman, the Man behind "Malkovich", by Anthony Kaufman, indieWire.com, October 27, 1999

- Never expected to get "Malkovich" made, just wrote it "beacuse [he's] a writer.

- He never "sold out". He wrote a very odd spec tv show and it got him in.

- "I don't understand why there is this rule about how screenplays have to be, and what they have to be, and how they have to be written, so I rebel." [against Syd Field]

- Malkovich began as a story about the relationship between Craig and Dottie. Malkovich came later. [Five years later...]

- "Writing is exploring. You can't have it established before you begin."

- Thinks a lot. Carries a small pad with him for ideas.

- "because I have a reputation now because my stuff is weird and people like it, that maybe they're giving me more freedom than other people might get."

- Well received scrips for pilots but failed because of the "Can this sustain for 5 years?" perspective. Money from syndication.

- "I intentionally don't do anything or write anything or think anything that I don't feel is risky. Not even if I've taken a job, if I can't see what the risk is or danger is or how it could fail miserably, then I can't do it. Because I feel like that's cheating and it's not worth anything. You're not giving anybody anything. You're not doing anything. And I want to do something. I want to put something interesting, as interesting as I can be, into the world. I'll still take chances."

- Steven Golin takes chances.

- The writer-director relation ship is key [Spike good example]

- He doesn't like to answer questions about his work. Likes people to form their own experiences.

- Hates to have his work reduced to "Its about [blank]"

- "I was interested in the characters, I was interested in the struggle of the characters and their desperation and their unhappiness and all the other stuff that came with it."

11/20/06

Charlie Kaufman Au Naturel, On Human Nature, by Rod Armstrong, Reel.com, April 11, 2002

- Get a Life and The Dana Carvey Show

- No master plan. Just writes freely.

- Write stuff that feels different and feels new.

-"It's more interesting to take a risk than try to do some kind of formulaic thing...I'm not necessarily trying to do something larger than what I'm doing."

-"I have an idea of what I want to explore, or I have some feeling I want to explore. I figure out a story that fits or allows me to explore it."

-It's not always the same process.

-"I'd say the feeling thing is important to me. That's something I can't even articulate; just sort of I wanted to have this tone or this feeling and I just leave it open. I start to work and don't have any idea of where it's going, necessarily. It's better for me to work that way."

-He reads reviews and goes "Thats what I do?". Would rather keep it on an unconscious level.

-"I figure the stuff that's funny to me, or painful, or interesting to me is something that's worth exploring. I tend to gravitate toward those elements, and stuff starts to form and kind of evolves and I get a clear idea of what a story is and I try to base the characters on stuff I understand from my own experience in the world. In Human Nature, I guess there's a lot of conspicuous issues about isolation and manipulation in that movie."

-95' and 96', his show gets canceled and writes a script [Malkovich or Human Nature] while waiting for hiring season.

-Observation: people suck at interviewing writers.

-Wasn't that involved in the production of Confessions. Confessions a hired assignment. Really involved in Adaptation.

-Likes to be involved with all forms of production then removes himself because he has "nothing to do with how people respond".

-To Kaufman a collaborative side seperates screenwriting from what a novelist does.

-Coens, David Lynch, Tom Noonan [What Happened Was..], Mike Leigh [Naked]

11/29/06

Interview with Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, by Ray Pride, Movie City News, March 17, 2004

-Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind story cocreated by Gondry and french artist Pierre Bismuth.

-Started with just the idea of 'a card that you would receive...' and went from there.

-Pitched all over--eventualy sold it to Propoganda [Steve Golin], which was aquired by USA and then became Focus.

-Started as "Untitled Memory Project" then Mary's quotes and then the Bartlett quote. [check 1/29/06 for clarification]

-"People say banal things..."

-Remember: Joel's lines in memory are him speaking to his own projection of Clementine.

-A draft is a draft and is not necessarrily a rewrite. Cut out 'mouthfulls'.

1/29/07

Interview with Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, by Brendan MacDevette, Independent Film Quarterly

-ESOASM possibly inspired by or a response to an Ian Frazier story.

-The story involves two people at a marriage counselor. The man talks and talks, then the women goes "I have no idea who this man is"

-Not writting for an actor--writing for a charactor. Wrote for Jim only in post preduction voice overs.

-Never had an actor in mind [except of course John Malkovich].

-Patricia Arquette's interest really got the movie rolling.

-" The first time I saw Nicolas Cage masturbating in Adaptation with my name attached to his body, it was embarrassing, but I got over it really quickly, you have to separate yourself from it. But I have no choice other than to use my head to write my work, so that is the job Ive chosen to do and I do it willingly instead of unhappily."

-A line has to 'feel good'...

-"Well, the scene could have been like 100 times better if you didnt do that but it certainly works now."

-Gondry and Kaufman are like old highschool friends in that they could be your best friend but you really don't choose them.

-They have a lot in common--particularly refusing to compromise.

-Pitched it as a skeleton idea and then Kaufman figured out the logic problems. Not a science fiction movie!

-You can always read something back and go 'oh ok, I get that' but film is constantly moving.

-He wanted the anchor of the movie to be the relationship between two people--the rest is just a conceit.

-The paradox of being both inside and outside a memory simultaneously was a difficult issue to solve.

-Toyed with having two Joels, but finally arrived on using the present tense and the past tense alternately.

-Mary searching for a Bartlett quotation to impress Howard and Kaufman found the quote and decided that it spoke to the plight of the characters.

-"I have an affection for Eloisa to Abelard. I thought it was very serendipitous and decided to use it and I liked that it was long and hard to remember. I thought that was counter-intuitive for a title to a movie, so I went for it."

1/31/07

http://www.channel4.com/film/reviews/feature.jsp?id=130455

-Charlie never thought of it as someone else’s idea—just an idea (a sentence) that he could craft. There was nothing attached to it.

-The memory aspect opened a door that allowed him to tell a relationship story in a different way.

-It allowed Kaufman to get inside someone’s mind, “which [he] tend[s] to like to do”

-The characters, the specifications of the storytelling, and the complications of telling the story make it Kaufman--unique.

-Eternal Sunshine took 11 months to edit. Adaptation took 13.

-Both films were very mutable but especialy Eternal Sunshine, where suprising emotional connections between scenes were found.

1/31/07

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/04/30/bfkauf30.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/04/30/ixartright.html

-"I think a lot about why am I me. And why am I not this person. And why am I not happy with me. What that’s about?"

-The entire memory aspect of the film is just a "window-dressing" that allows him to tell the story of a relationshio in an extremely intimate way.

-Malkovich initially thought Kaufman was a stalker because of parallels between the script and his actual life

-(For example, the 7 and a half floor of a building--Malkovich actually lived on 7 and a half street)

-“It was just a coincidence. I had no idea. But they didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t have believed me.”

-Kaufman enjoys his popularity among good actors noting that its an acknowledgement of a screenwriter, which is nice because all too often it's assumed that everything comes from the director.

-Kaufman adds, "I resent that incredibly."

-He went to highschool in Connecticut. Then had a brief stint at Boston University before transfering to NYU to study film.

-He moved to L.A. to begin his career in 1991.

-For years, Kaufman was paralyzed by a fear of showing his work to others--something definitely not conducive to getting films produced.

-“I had an enormous struggle with that, and I had to get over it."

-He’s still noticeably shy which is suprising considering his early hobbies of theater (starting at 8) and super 8 cameras.

-In many ways, he truly is the angst-ridden artist portraid by Nicholas cage. For example:

-"I don't know what I'm doing," he says. "I'm working on something now. It is the same thing. I am completely lost. I have no idea what it is going to be about."

-“I’m never expecting anyone to get it and I become especially interested if it feels like there is no possibility of it ever getting made. I think that everybody has very tried and predictable thought patterns and stories to tell. To push against that to me seems interesting. But by doing that you get stuck and lost”

-Jim Carrey recently titled him "the voice of our generation"

2/1/07

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3664683.stm -When I heard of Momento I called Michel and said I was quitting!” [work on Eternal Sunshine]

-Elements of autobiography filter through all of Kaufman scripts.

-Donald, Kaufman’s fictional twin, got a credit and became the first fictional character to ever be nominated for an Academy Award.

-“I think sometimes my fantasies and nightmares are combined in movies”

-Kaufman tries to relate his writing with his experiences and what’s important to him at the time.

-Eternal Sunshine: truly about picking through the debris of a failed relationship and finding the love beneath.

-“I was interested in writing a movie about a relationship, not a romance”

-"Growing up I had expectations about my life that were never met."

-Confessions of a Dangerous Mind left Kaufman with “a lot of sadness”.

-He spent a lot of time working on the scrip but didn’t feel Clooney was interested in the things he was interested in.

-"I've moved on and I don't have any animosity towards Clooney, but it's a movie I don't really relate to."

-He’s currently working on a horror movie with Spike Jonze where he wants to make it scary without using the conventions of scary movies.

-"I dont have any interest in trying to copy a formula" (A Kaufman Montra)

-“In person, Kaufman doesn’t resemble the media-shy, introverted loner he is often described as.”

-“However, his quiet, unassuming demeanour hides a clear determination not to get caught up in the Hollywood game.”

-“I embrace the notion of failure”

-“The only way to do something interesting is not care if you fail” (Another Kaufman Montra)

2/2/07

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7943-1085332,00.html -Interviewers often seemed puzzled whether they are talking to the real Kaufman or one of the semi-fictional doppelgangers from his parallel universe subplots.

-Kaufman was the only screenwriter on Priemere magazine's 2003 Hollywood power list.

-He’s become a one man brand, a byword for provocative ideas, quirky intelligence and bittersweet humor.

-He wanted Eternal Sunshine to be a conversation with the audience allowing the audience to leave thinking what they think.

-Manipulating audiences with cheap sentiment is Kaufman's biggest fear.

-Kaufman claims he was “damaged” at an early age by “the simplistic expectations aroused by Hollywood films, and now considers it his mission to present more authentic emotion on screen.”

-The means he often draws on his fears and neuroses for "more authentic emotion".

-He beleives everything that everyone writes is autobiographical, whether they want it to be or not. So he doesn’t shy from using his own experiences. “It’s sort of all I have, it’s my arsenal, so I use it. Otherwise I would be writing with no anchor, no grounding.”

-When asked whether Carrey’s shy, alienated, lovesick character was another Kaufman Clone, Kaufman responds, “I don’t know. Looking at the male leads in all the scripts I’ve written, I would say there is a similarity between them. So the shyness and awkwardness in Joel, the loneliness, are probably things I feel.”

-He spent most of his twenties and thirties as a classic bedsit writer, paying rent by working at a newspaper delivery warehouse in Minneapolis.

-Eternal Sunshine's influences lie less in the lean and linear world of typical movie screenplays and more in the dense, surreal depths of cult fiction.

-"It evokes Kafka and Beckett, Lewis Carroll and Thomas Pynchon, and especially the reality-warping science-fiction author Philip K. Dick, whose works, heavily diluted, provided the blueprints for Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report."

-Then it's no suprise that Kaufman loves Dick's bleak satirical style and even wrote an unfilmed adaptation of his novel A Scanner Darkly.

-Kaufman has often thought about writing a novel but says that “It’s been a very busy five years for me, and quite overwhelming, so there hasn’t been time.”

-Kaufman scripts often give the audience some sly philosophical wisdom smuggled Trojan-horse style inside the mouths of clownish characters.

-When asked if some of his situations were serious points or high-minded jokes on the audience (notably Donald's final words in Adaptation)? Kaufman responds, “It’s all part of the same tapestry, but it is very serious, even though it is in Donald’s part of the movie. It’s stuff I’ve thought about seriously, a struggle in my life. If you watch Nicolas as Charlie in that scene, he was really crying! I don’t feel like a cynical writer. I may write things that are cynical but I’m not interested in making fun of my characters.”

-He avoids face-to-face interviews and photo shoots, eluding the attempts to package him as a “celebrity” writer.

-He reportedly lives with the actress Mercedes Ruehl and her two children in Pasadena, but it is often wondered if this may be part of the metafiction he spins about himself.

2/4/07

http://www.stanforddaily.com/article/2004/4/2/beingCharlieKaufman

-Kaufman has the apperance of a writer who would explore the themes of unfconfidence, failure and regre--small, pale, with scraggly facial hair and a mop of reddish curls.

-He just tried to “tell a story that felt true”

-"I don’t care if people are interested, I guess. I have to be interested and then hopefully someone else will be interested. If you start thinking [about how the film will be received] when you’re working then you’re second-guessing and it’s nonsense and you’ll come up with something that’s insincere.”

-You can do anything as long as the characters are based in something real—as long as their reactions have something to do with human beings and you’re focused on that element of it.

-He wants to be fanciful, but you can’t be fanciful without having people in it.

-"If you decide that people are turning into carrots or something as your story idea then I think that I would have to figure out why that’s important to me as a person and why that story resonates in some way. Otherwise there’s no story. It’s just kind of a gimmick."

2/6//07

http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=76

-“I think Michel and I are interested in the same things; we’re both interested in memories and dreams and that kind of world.”

-Eternal Sunshine was an easier script for Kaufman to come into than Adaptation, where he felt responsible for someone else’s work, and A Scanner Darkly, where Kaufman wanted to be faithful to the Philip K. Dick's story that he loved.

-Jim Carrey was asked not wear makeup in the movie to give him a certain true and real look.

-Jim worked for much less than his usual fee (which would have been the entire budget).

-The ‘set’ scene from Adaptation wasn’t actually the truth. Kaufman consideres both Jonze and Gondrey very collaborative and very welcoming.

-One important aspect of Adaptation is its ability to play with the truth. Take a number of stories that had some truth, fictionalize them, and (crucially) not say what’s what.

-"I don’t know, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m thinking about what I’m thinking about at the time and that’s what the scripts are about."

-Eternal Sunshine perceived as a romantic movie when its actually about an extremely dysfunctional relationship—this romantic feel comes honestly and wasn’t what Kaufman set out to do.

-Brian Cox said that every movie needs an antagonist and he was that antagonist in this movie. Kaufman took his word for it because, "I don’t know about such things!"

-Kaufman took a Brian Cox course and “thumbed through his book”. He says it was only for “research purposes”.

-He doesn’t like anyone telling him there’s a certain way to do something. Not to say there’s no value in that—it’s just not his way of working.

-Kaufman does a lot of ‘stalling’ because he has no idea of how to proceed. He values these stalls because they give him time to mull things over and come up with something that is more interesting.

-Writer’s Block: "I try to think about the particular trauma that is in my life at that moment and somehow incorporate it. In a very literal sense that’s what I did with “Adaptation”, the only thing I could think about was how I couldn’t manage to do the adaptation. Through thinking about these things I try to keep the work I do truthful to my own experiences. This makes all my work really personal."

-note: He’s not that wealthy yet! and is still driven by economic factors.

-He is acutely aware that his directing career “could make me a very public failure. But that’s ok; I’m interested in it so I’m going to do it.”

2/8/07

http://metaphilm.com/philm.php?id=296_0_2_0_M

-An answer to the massive question of "being".

-flexes metaphysical mussels both verbally and visually.

-Being is the focus of this film.

-The 7 1/2th floor is a red harring masking the true oddity, the portal into the mind of John Malkovich.

-The portal allows only 15 minutes. So initialy being only means experiencing the world as a witness through Malkovich's eyes. -Their experience begs another question: "What is authenticity?".

-The concepts of fallen and thrown are refferences to Heidegger who says that when we are born we're thrown into the world and we are involuntary recipients of the enviornment into which we fall.

-Visitors into Malkovich's mind go along for the ride (like Heidegger they will never be authentic in the fallen state).

-When we have seniors lining up to fall down the portal into the younger Malkovich's mind, we see that none of these are authentic because how can dozens of souls occupying a single vessel be authentic?

-This climax is when Malkovich falls into his own portal and enters (for lack of a better phrase) Malkovich world.

-This excelent film really helps the audience come to grips with some truly intimidating concepts.

-"Malkovich plows right on through to reincarnation and solipsism. And for this, one part of me wants to smack them upside the head, but the other just wants to applaud them loudly. The former is my philosopher self, while the latter is my entertained spectator self. One of these selves is authentic. One of them is a puppet on a string. One is being, the other is becoming."

2/9/07 NEW

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/quirkyhn.htm&2

-He's always been interested in people whom society deems culturally unacceptable, and basing the film on a woman marginalized by long body hair seemed like a good way explore human nature.

2/9/07 'NEW

http://movies.ign.com/articles/355/355413p1.html

- "They did like it. To my surprise. I really thought I was ending my career by turning that in!" ' -"I didn't tell (Columbia Pictures) what I had in mind because I wasn't sure what I'd do when I took the job. And when I decided I wanted to take the material in this direction, I felt like I needed to write it before showing it to them. Because if I pitched it, I thought I'd be, you know, dismissed! ... (The book) seemed to be about something other than the usual stuff I get offered. So I took (the job). I kind of thought I would figure it out, and I guess this is how I figured it out. Or not. The reaction should be interesting."

-"Adaptation is an interesting thing because it's an extremely modular structure. The order is completely open. It isn't arbitrary. ... We're probably about two-thirds of the way through (editing the film) at this point, and we still have to shoot. So we'll see what kind of shape it takes."

2/9/07 'NEW

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/bcksymkus.htm&2

-"The shooting script is pretty close to the first draft," he says. "But the first draft is something that I’ve already reworked. Once I put it out there and give it to an agent, it’s already been reworked a hundred times. It’s hard to say how much it changed from when I first started, because I wrote it so long ago and it becomes what it’s become. I don’t have any record of what it was originally."

-‘These movies will never be made; they never can be made.’

-"As far as the rumor that Clooney took it upon himself to rewrite the entire third act of Kaufman’s Barris script, he replies, "I don’t know what Clooney did. I do know he did some rewriting of the script But I’m not really involved in that production so I haven’t read the draft they’re shooting." And does that bother him? "Sure," he replies.

-"I hope to hear them [his characters]," he says. "That’s why I want to keep everything open when I’m writing — to allow them to kind of come to life and start to exist. If I’m too regimented about who they are when I start out, then it doesn’t give them a chance to do that."

-"But I am interested in making people understandable, so that you can know what’s happening. I think that serves to make them appealing because it makes them human. But I do like all of my characters. And that’s essential for me to do my best work."

2/10/07

http://metaphilm.com/philm.php?id=295_0_2_0_M

-Being John Malkovich is actually about living your life vicariously through other people, especialy through celebrities.

-In the screenplay: Lester living inside Malkovich due to a deal with the devil. So by staying in Malkivich Craig is unknowingly keeping the world safe from the devil.

-The script is far crazier than the actualy movie.

-The script ends with Flemmer (the devil) controling Derek and Derek controlling Craig in a world where everything is painted grey and the population springs into dance at Flemmer's wish.

-And finally, Craig is stuck forever in inside the child vessel, doomed to watch the world through her eyes, ultimately powerless. At the very least, this is a comment on how media infotainment can come to take over the majority of your waking hours--leaving you powerless.

-When you think, dream and watch the world through the TV and magazines, you are watching the world through other people's eyes.

-In this society, we want to be the samurai Tom Cruise potrays, we want to be Tom Cruise or we want to be Tom Cruise's love interest or....

-People who take the films or celebrities they endlessly watch as blueprints for living their lives can easily be considered puppets.

-This film is about reversal. Its the reversal of the puppeteer to the puppet. Everyones either a puppet or a puppeteer. And those who are puppets want nothing more than to be puppeteers. So they are trying to switch other puppeteers into puppets, because there can only be so many puppeteers at once.

-The writer controls the actors. The actors manipulate the audience. And the audience (some 40000 of them) move out to L.A. to become an actor or a writer.

-But its the audience that decides what gets made, what sells and who gets the roles--the audience control the writers (the writers are the puppets of the audience). -"Being John Malkovich allows the audience the metaphorical equivalent of our own reversal, from in front of the screen to behind the camera. It’s about the move from filmgoer to filmmaker, from consumer to creator. It’s about trying to escape the high-chair of spoon-fed entertainment and actually learning to think for yourself—even perhaps to evolve some sort of creativity. Or its cycle into madness might just be an object lesson to prod you to get a life."

2/11/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/fadein04.htm&2

-“A preternatural willingness to lay bare his insecurities, fantasies and fears, then wrap them in a cloak of skewed comedy and heartfelt romantic longing.”

-Kaufman gives the impression that if he were standing on the edge of a cliff, he would lean at the very edge, at a dangerous trajectory, just long enough to feel what it would be like to jump. Then he’d wake himself up, laugh and walk away. All while scribbling furiously on a tiny notepad.

-Kaufman lists “personal truth” as one of his greatest strengths.

-The Kaufman-esque leitmotif of time, shape, gravity and the cosmic continuum.

-His agent about working on Eternal Sunshine: “This is an amazing idea. Oh, my God, this is so commercial, you have to do this. Do This!”

-Gondry was frustrated that he would have to wait to direct Eternal Sunshine (because of The Orchid Theif deal), so he said, “While you are writing Adaptation, can I direct Human Nature?” Kaufman felt guilty. So he said yes.

-Kaufman considers film school a matter of public record, so he can say, “Yes, I went to the NYU film school.”

-The person that was head of his class that is most well known is Chris Columbus. “Chris Columbus and I went to school together.”

-His senior year film was very ambitious (twenty-five locations with thirty actors).

-The film took place in the head of an insomniac as he tried to fall asleep. He had different fantasies and distractions. “Perhaps I am writing the same thing over and over, differently”

-“I tend to be an obsessive person and go over and over the same things, but what is important to me is finding whatever true thing” (??)

-“No music for me. Dead silence. It has to be dead silent.”

-He use to write for National Lampoon with film school writing partner, Paul Proch.

-“Shyness is a neurosis. Then again, I am talking to you on the phone, in a completely dark room with infrared goggles on.”

-Fascinated with the eternal mind-body problem: “literally splits himself in two (Adaptation), lover’s memories are deliberately separated from their hearts (Eternal Sunshine), and actually venture into the body of another human being (Malkovich).

-He tends to be interested in puzzles, structurally, and intricate complications.

-Often he has no idea where he’s going when he writes.

-“I really believe that film as a medium is inherently dead. It exists only when you go into the theater, and that’s it.” No matter how many times you see a film, “it’s going to be the same in that you are going to see exactly the same reactions on the actors’ faces, the ending is already what it’s going to be.”

-So Kaufman tries to put things in a script that you can’t possibly see the first time through to make it alive. So if you see it multiple times it might change your interpretation or your interpretation of a moment…and then “it’s almost like it’s alive”

-He loves the author Shirley Jackson and her ability to show how horror and levels of humiliation can come in very small increments.

-Adaptation: Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep’s characters are also Kaufman?

-“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot: eternal sunshine of a spotless mind! Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned.” Alexander Pope

-Kaufman likes that at the end of Eternal Sunshine, you don’t know if they are happy because it means the movie holds different ideas and allows the audience to pull out what is really important to them.

-There’s no cheesy “love conquers all” or “learn from your mistakes” moral message in Eternal Sunshine. In fact, even though these people are wrong for each other, they are going to get together—chaos.

-“I am shy, but it’s weird to be dissected.”

-Doesn’t want to put himself in the celebrity culture world—where there’s the struggling public and the celebrated celebrities that make the public feel like they haven’t done enough. “I do a particular job, and I don’t want to be anything else in the world.”

-“All anyone ever talks about when they write about me is how obsessed I am with sex.”

-He fears having his work sound like a sitcom. Sitcoms gave him experience writing scripts.

-He didn’t even work with Clooney. He didn’t have much involvement at all with Confessions.

-Spike Jonze’s Adaptation… if there is ever a movie that can’t be attributed to the director, that would be Adaptation.

-“I don’t work with anyone when I’m writing”. Human Nature and Malkovich were done long before Jonze and Gondry got involved.

2/12/07

http://www.chicagofilm.com/features/kaufman_gondry/default.asp

-"It's like in music. You can invent a new melody and it might be interesting but it sounds like nothing. It's a fine balance. Personally, I like to try different things and be creative every time, but sometimes we are reminded that people won't understand and so we have to go back, which is an interesting process."

-Gondry and Kaufman undertake staggering narrative and conceptual risks, to continually push the bounds of meaning.

-Kaufman's work is makred with a self-conscious sense of irony and humility.

-"Before I started with Charlie, I spoke with some producers and writers about this idea and it was always about having some secret that had been erased and having somebody trying to kill him, but I was like, 'no, this isn't how I want to do this."

-"I want to do something human, something poetic, to explore a person's life. To me it's more fascinating that you can be attracted to a person and then not be attracted to them in one period of time."

-[Gondry cont'd] "I don't understand why most movies discuss things that we don't experience in real life. I've never faced a gun in my entire life. "

-Kaufman's work is described as "meta-textual canoodlings"

-"Disorganization is helpful for me," says Kaufman. "If you know too much where you're going then you can do it too expediently. This happens a lot to me – I'm really stuck and I can't think of anything for a week and a half and then I'll think of something and I'll be like 'oh my god, I'm so glad I got stuck. What if I'd come up with another idea a week and a half earlier? This movie would have gone in a completely different direction and I'm really glad I got stuck. It happens again and again to me."

-"I really don't think about other people when I'm writing. I think about what I'm interested in and how I can struggle to do something interesting and honest, no matter how that might turn out," says Kaufman. "I'm perfectly happy to fail in my attempt. In fact I welcome it – I think that if you're going to do something original you'll have to embrace the idea of failure and I do."

2/13/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/multimedia/video/Charlie.Rose.Charlie.Kaufman.interview.mkv

-Kaufman's first and only tv interview!

2/13/07

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0318/p11s01-almo.html

-In research for Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman recorded a dinner conversation with his wife. The next day each of them seperately wrote about the evening. "Our notes were completely different from each other's," says Kaufman, "and the tape was completely different from both of us. And that was just the night before." This led Kaufman to a few conclusions about memory and how memories work.

-"It's not a video playback, as you instinctively think it is...You comment on it as you're remembering it.... And that allowed me to come up with the way [the main character] is able to interact with his memory."

-The cards were a conceptual art piece by Pierre Bismuth.

-Title: "The funny thing is I could never remember the title myself."

-For the Lacuna Inc. subplot (Elijah Wood and friends), Kaufman drew on his own experiences doing customer service work at the Metropolitan Opera, prior to becoming a professional screenwriter.

-'Come Back'

2/14/07

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/movies/165373_Kaufman19.html

-This interviewer describes him as "shrewdly intelligent, extremely confident, rather humorless and otherwise not much like the nebbish character he created of himself in 'Adaptation.'"

-He wrote the first draft of Eternal Sunshine in 1998 (way before all the other memory movies).

-Kaufman implies that the Eternal Sunshine idea was originally a joke--the french guy sent a card to all his friends saying they were erased from his memory.

-The budget was 27 million. (Carrey's normal fee is over 20 million)

-"Yes. The usual thing for a writer is to deliver a script and then disappear. That's not for me. I want to be involved from beginning to end. And these directors know that, and respect it."

-He talks about the 'general misinformation' that's out there about him.

-In response to the Premiere 100 most-powerful people in hollywood: "That's very flattering, but not very realistic. I don't have anywhere near that kind of power. No screenwriter does."

2/15/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?menu.htm&1

-When Variety listed "Ten Scribes To Watch" back in September, the 30-ish Kaufman was the only one not pictured. In Esquire's recent group portrait of up-and-coming screenwriters, his name was prominent, but again he was the photo's only no-show.

-Story seminars feel like "factories for people to make a product."

-I think it's crap, taking advantage of people, and I don't think we need more people learning to write that way. Why would you want to impose these limits on yourself?

-I hate movies that lie to me. Should I sit there thinking my life sucks because it's not like the ones on the screen, and I'm not getting these life lessons? My life, anyone's life, is more like a muddle, and these movies are just dangerous garbage.

-I just start thinking, then stuff comes in and later I have to go back and justify it, so if it ends up being surprising in its twists and shifts, then that's because it was surprising to me, too.

-"If your goal is to create yourself as this character, a hip, cool director or writer, then everything you do is just gonna be garbage."

2/15/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/beingcharlie.htm&2

-"I want to create situations that give people something to think about. I hate a movie that will end by telling you that the first thing you should do is learn to love yourself. That is so insulting and condescending, and so meaningless. My characters don't learn to love each other or themselves."

-Compares Kaufman to Lary David in Seinfield who created a show about nothing.

-Fears the 'thats what the writer said--so its the truth' stuff.

-"I do have some theatrical background. I've written plays and seen plays and read plays. But I also read novels. One thing I don't read is screenplays."

-Scrips: "I try to write mine so that they can be pleasurably read. You put as much feeling into it as possible, and as economically as possible try to create the world of the script and get across your feeling for it and put some ideas in the reader's head. I also think that's a good thing for the people who are producing it."

-Kaufman contributed to The Dana Carvey Show as well as Get a Life (the Chris Elliott series) and Ned and Stacey (which starred Thomas Haden Church)

-He read writers ranging from Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick and Steven Dixon to Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmit.

-The last two are specialists in "the queasy, really subtle shit that happens between characters; it can seem like nothing's happening, but it's horrible just the same."

-Reading O'Connor made Kaufman fear "that I wouldn't have a voice because I didn't seem to come from anywhere -- I was jealous of other parts of America. I don't want to veer into that personal area, but I grew up in the equivalent of Levittown, that kind of post-World War II development." Part of Kaufman's own development came from recognizing the "weirdness" within his purview. -Picked Malkovich partly because of how funny his name sounds in repetition.

-"What would be funny is if the movie stays this 'hot' -- and that everyone starts to want something like Being John Malkovich, a film that took five years to get made. That would be like an episode of The Twilight Zone."

2/15/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/explored.htm&2

-John Cusack said, "Only a person who never thought a movie could get made would write... like that."

-Malkovich's public persona: self-serious, scary, unapproachable, accomplished and admired for playing sometimes damaged or demented characters.

-"People have their problems and their problems are their problems, and they're real," he said. "It's very important to me that I don't try to teach people things with my work. I don't feel like I have the authority to do that; I don't feel like I have anything to say in that regard, about how to live a better life or be happier."

2/15/07

-Being John Malkovich's greatest achievement may be its wringing of real emotion from its Warholian conceit.

-Blending philosophy with social critique in an almost offhand way, Jonze and Kaufman take their oddball premise and develop it into a perpetual motion machine of transferred desires, misplaced affections and cultural confusion.

-Kaufman started writing about a married man who fell in love with somebody else. "That was the beginning. Everything else came later. I don’t start out by saying, "This is a movie about identity." I just have certain things that I am anxious about, and they wind up in my script."

-"I just start with an idea and then connect it to another idea, and then figure out who the characters are, and what would happen if this happens here and that happens there."

-Kaufman's response to the interviewer's "And a lot of what people consider "hip" is actually deeply ironic. It does seem that amiss all of the crazy humor of your film, there are serious issues which are being worked." was only "Sounds good!"

2/15/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/barnesnoble.htm&2

-Both Kaufman and Jonze made an effort never to say what they thought the movie ment. "The reasoning behind that was that we wanted people to have their own experience, and we didn't want to dictate what that experience would be. It was difficult because people wanted us to say things we didn't want to say, but I think the fun of it was reading all the wildly different reviews and critiques of the movie. I loved that, and people said lots of interesting and surprising things about what it meant to them. It's really wonderful to have people thinking about something you did and talking about it."

-Get a Life is the sitcom most people are interested in--sort of a cult thing?

-"I was just writing it, and once you decide something's going to happen in the story you have to go back and rework things. I mean, it's not like it's automatic writing. But I didn't even know there was going to be a portal when I started writing the screenplay. I just decided that one day, and it changed everything."

-Looking back at his notes--it goes from the relationship to the 7 and a half floor and then John Malkovich. Each addition changed the tone.

-" I think there's a specificity to the characters that drives how they react in certain situations. I was interested in the desperation of these people, and once I figured out who they were, then that drove the story. Later, when I brought the portal in, I made certain decisions based on that plot element. I asked myself, Well, now that there's this portal, what does Craig's wife [Cameron Diaz] have to do with it? And then I thought about the possibility of her going through the portal, and how she and Craig would respond to it. And that kind of led me in the direction of her involvement with Maxine [Catherine Keener]."

-At his first Q&A, Kaufman was asked "What writers do you like?"--"I mentioned, among other people, Kafka. Later there was a reception and everyone kept coming up to me saying, "I can really see how Kafka influenced your script!" But he didn't. I mean, his work only influenced me as much as everything else that I've ever read in my life, that's floating around in my head. There are a million other things you could say were influences too. But I specifically don't want to be like anybody else. I always try really hard to find my own way of doing things." -Malkovich was his very first screenplay.

-Craig is a struggling tortured artist--a Charlie Kaufman.

-Problem with Television: "I actually think the problem with television is that the people who run that business need a show to run for 100 episodes, because they make their money in syndication. So if you write a funny pilot that everybody seems to love, they'll say, "But, can this sustain for 5 years?" so what happens is that everything gets bland and bland and bland. So I think there's more money at stake for producing 100 episodes of a television show or losing money for the first two years....the batting average for these networks is just atrocious with doing the safe stuff, so why not make part of your shows as insane and different as you possibly can and see what sticks? They're not winning this way. But there is the mentality that if you pick something safe, as an executive, and it fails, you're not blamed, because you can justify it."

-He wrote it five years before it was released. (wrote it in 1994)

-"I was interested in the characters, I was interested in the struggle of the characters and their desperation and their unhappiness and all the other stuff that came with it."

2/16/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/scribegags.htm&2

-"What's important is what the movie is about to the person watching it, not some stupid thing I would say."

-"I have no interest in watching it or being involved in [making] it. I have more respect for a work that tries to explore something, even if it ultimately fails, than I do for something that feels slick and feels like it is produced by General Motors, which many movies do."

2/16/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/nytcartoon.htm&2

-Kaufman is a champion of the freak within. His heroes are not dashing or charming or even heroic. They are, instead, self-loathing, painfully observant and often profoundly unattractive.

-"In all his work, the central conflict is the push and pull of reality and the hope provided by fantasy. His central theme is the war between what is innate in human nature and what is taught, the clash between the natural world and what society deems acceptable. There's a compelling arrogance about Kaufman's work -- he believes that if man bows to his true, elemental, even savage nature, he will be rewarded."

-He is compared to other young novelists like David Foster Wallace and David Eggers.

2/16/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/writeoffs.htm&2

-Kaufman describes Human Nature as "a comedy, but sad".

-Stephen Soderbergh tried to get Human Nature off the ground. "Marisa Tomei committed herself to the film; Frasier star David Hyde-Pierce was interested. Soderbergh proved his commitment by turning down the more obviously commercial Out Of Sight, which had George Clooney attached to it. Kaufman was about to achieve the impossible: emerge from nowhere and have his bizarre vision turned, intact, into a medium-sized film. This wasn't supposed to happen, not for a writer - always considered Hollywood's most despised citizens. And it didn't happen. Soderbergh ended up making Out Of Sight after all, and saved his career. Human Nature got booted around between studios. All was as it should be."

-"Being John Malkovich wouldn't have existed without Charlie Kaufman," admitted Columbia Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal. (ahaha)

-America's greatest novelists, playwrights and wits left to drink themselves to oblivion while the culturally barren studio bosses got some hack or other to take the fancy words out. Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler and Dorothy Parker - all shafted by the studios.

2/16/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/writingjm.htm&2

-The differences between the first and final draft of Malkovich were the opening scene and the last 20 pages.

-"The movie is different from what I wrote because it has to be. You've got a director who has got his ideas. You've got actors who bring their character and personality to what they play and you've got a DP (director of photography) and a production designer and it's a collaboration. It's not a novel or a short story where it's just your vision, and in a way that is good. It's kind of nice. I like seeing what Catherine Keener did with Maxine and what Cameron [Diaz] did and what Cusack did. It's surprising and sort of exciting."

-"Desperation is a word I've used a lot to describe the characters, so I agree with you. They're very desperate, very lonely, and needy. I think that juggling those two elements is the trick. I don't have a lot of interest in comedies that don't do that."

-Kaufman tries not to start with a genre.

-It's easier to get a movie made that is odd than it is to get an odd TV show made.

-Soderbergh initialy read Malkovich and wanted to do it but Spike was already attached to it--that's how they (Kaufman and Soderbergh) originally met.

-Spike introduced Kaufman to Michel because they both worked at Propaganda.

-David Fincher was going to direct Confessions. Kaufman says he'd like to work with David Lynch someday.

-Had a Harold Pinter quote on his wall: "Everything I write has to be more naked than the last." (something like that)

-In response to the Seinfield compareson, "I think I read that, too. No, that kind of boggled my mind. I don't get that at all, really. I think it's fine, maybe I'm missing something. I'm not saying that the person's wrong, but I certainly didn't aspire to do a Seinfeld episode with this thing."

-It has to be simple and grounded in reality. "It's a pretty simple story, a story of people who are looking to be in love and aren't. That's what I started out with. It was the initial idea for the script."

-"It's important to write something [that] people want to read. I hear a lot of stuff about, "Well, a screenplay isn't a piece of literature, just a blueprint". I don't subscribe to that. I think it's important for a number of reasons. One, it's for my pride. I want it to be something that is enjoyable. On another level, if what you're writing isn't for the general audience, it's for the people making the movie, and you want to convey it to them — as much as possible — the feeling you're trying to evoke. Part of that is making it compelling to read and being economical and all that sort of stuff."

-Being Ozzy Osborne and Being Regis Philbin.

2/16/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/jonzevirgin.htm&2

-"It's not a morality tale. We're not saying he's the villain or anything. It just pretty much works out the way it has to. Maxine (Catherine Keener) and Lotte (Cameron Diaz) do bad things, but come out okay. Malkovich does nothing bad to anybody, but doesn't come out well. I kinda designed the writing process so that it'd surprise me."

-"It's about four people who are victims of their upbringing, who have hard times of it. It's a romantic tragedy, in the form of a comedy. How's that?" (About Human Nature... but also Malkovich?)

2/16/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/ckguardian2001.htm&2

-"They (script writing seminars) do nothing but damage by teaching people that you need this many acts and this amount of conflict and so on. They get all this from analysing bad, successful movies, and they're basically telling people how to write even more awful movies - the one thing we have a shitload of - and charging them good money in the process."

2/16/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/hnscriptint.htm&2 Paul Thomas Anderson Spoof??? -He wanted to get back to work--so he wrote about falling in love (while falling in love with actress Mercedes Ruehl). He wanted to celebrate his love while at the same time looking at the relationship realistically. " I wanted to do all this without the shackles of portals or head invasions or any of the surreal trappings of Malkovich. Because that was a cop-out, maybe."

- I don’t want to come out of the gate every time being the guy who does movies about portals or John Malkoviches or anything else, for that matter. I want each movie experience to be fresh and exciting. -The first idea that got him rolling was "the moment when Lila buys that wetsuit. It was ultimately cut from the script, but that was the impetus for the whole project. I remember thinking about a woman, at the time she was called Aggie, going into a dressing room to try on a wetsuit. It was such a metaphorically ripe image for me. It was overripe, really, practically dripping with associations. And I saw the saleslady speaking to her through the dark burgundy curtain, saying, “Does it fit?,” which, I mean, I love that line: “Does it fit?” Now it’s not in the movie. I guess I’m going to use it in something else. The whole scene. Maybe I’ll resurrect the name Aggie, too, since I didn’t use it this time around either. Who knows?"

-"Human Nature. I guess I liked it because it was so motherfucking huge a concept. I mean, what is Human Nature? It’s every goddamn thing in the world. And I liked that. That spoke to me."

-Kids named Topper and Lena.

-He grew up on and loves Salinger. He really related to his characters (especially Franny and Zooey)."I was thinking about that at the time, not so much the book, but the title. The word Zooey really interested me mostly. I related to that name. I’d never known anyone with that name. I’d known a couple of Zoe’s. But no Zooey, who it turns out, if I remember correctly, was a guy. So I thought, guys in zoos. People in zoos. Then it occurred to me that we all really live in a zoo, if you want to think of human society as a zoo. And I guess it just snowballed from there, really. I thought maybe I had really come up with something. It was a heady time."

-"Without going into too much personal detail, I was immersed the last few years in lots of sadness, some of it involving an actual feral person. And there’s nothing funny about it. I wasn’t going to mock it or diminish it by playing it for laughs. Sorry, but the audience is going to have to accept that. Or not. It’s complicated."

-Kaufman breaks down every character in Human Nature in this interview.

-R. Ronald Agnew was actualy conducting research like Nathan's character. Basically trying to destroy nature by controlling it.

-Puff as a child: "I’ve always loved Spielberg’s portrayal of children. Only Salinger had been able to find that complexity. And when I saw Anna Pacquin in The Piano, I realized a kid could be so deep and fascinating. It was, like, a revelation, because normally you think of kids as just there, just things that play and cry. I wanted to investigate this new world."

-Come back to this.

New

2/17/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/bcksfexaminer.htm&2

-Declines to have his photo taken and will not reveal age.

-"I don't like to know myself," he says. "I don't want to know that kind of stuff when I'm writing. Now that I know, I'm going to have to start thinking about other things. I try to do different things every movie and take on different challenges, but if it comes out the same, then I guess that's just who I am."

-Malkovich was at least two different movies that he was thinking about and put together. "I like to collaborate with myself. I take ideas that don't go together and try to figure it out. It forces me to figure out a new way to do something."

-He works at home and refuses to structure his days.

2/17/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/hncinemaspeak.htm&2

-He wanted to write about a feral man--to make fun of the tarzan image. And about a woman on the outside who can't get in--the hair.

-The idea that it's unattractive to have hair in places where you naturally have hair, just seems like such a culturally enforced notion.

-He has always been interested in film and theater.

-Get A Life was the tv show he was most attached to. Death to Smoochy's Adam Resnick was also a writer for that show. Kaufman had a similar sense of humor to the shows.

-In junior high he was interested in 'subversive comedy'--National Lampoon and Monty Python. "Stuff that made me feel like there were kindred spirits in the world."

-"I really like a movie called What Happened Was..., which is by Tom Noonan; it's one of my favorite movies. I like Naked by Mike Leigh, Eraserhead, most of the Coen Brothers and David Lynch things. Ladybird, Ladybird by Ken Loach is a movie I like; Safe is a movie I like. I like a lot of movies."

-" I kind of bristle at happy endings in general, because they seem to be very seductive, but not very true."

-"I don't think of anyone as villains. I try to think about, as you said, what they're desperate about and what their needs are."

-"At the time I didn't think so, but looking back, I think getting a liberal arts education (would have been more beneficial)."

2/17/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/hnignck.htm&2 -"Taking seemingly unrelated concepts and forming them into one coherent piece is "a way of collaborating with myself, because I'm throwing in all these disparate things and it forces me to think in directions I wouldn't think if I had a very clear-cut, single idea."

-Kaufman's become something of a legend because of the popularity of even his unproduced scripts on the internet.

2/17/07

http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.htm?articles/jeprofile.htm&2

-Long-Island native

-“I like to live in the confusion. When you complicate things, that’s when things are more interesting.”

-Kaufman connects with David Lynch’s films, in which confusion serves as a literate linchpin for the plots.

-“My favorite character in all of Jewish history?” muses Charlie Kaufman. “Chuck Barris!”

Bibliography

External links Being Charlie Kaufman- A thorough fan site

Charlie Kaufman at the Internet Movie Database

Being Charlie Kaufman - An interview, by Michael Sragow in Salon.com, November 11, 1999

Arnold, William and Kaufman, Charlie; interview (2004). "A moment with ... Charlie Kaufman, screenwriter." Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 19, 2004.

More interviews Charlie Kaufman, the Man behind "Malkovich", by Anthony Kaufman, indieWire.com, October 27, 1999

Charlie Kaufman Au Naturel, On Human Nature, by Rod Armstrong, Reel.com, April 11, 2002

Profile: Wanted: Charlie Kaufman, Outlaw Scribe, by David Fear, Moviemaker

Interview with Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, by Ray Pride, Movie City News, March 17, 2004

Interview with Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, by Brendan MacDevette, Independent Film Quarterly

Why Charlie Kaufman doesn’t watch movies anymore, by Michael Koresky and Matthew Plouffe, Reverse Shot Online, Spring 2005

"The 'Quirky' New Wave" Alternate Takes