From Pen to Screen: Charlie Kaufman

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Directed by Michel Gondry)

Prior to his career in movies, Charlie Kaufman worked in the circulation department of a newspaper in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He eventually relocated to California and began writing for the tv sitcom Get a Life, starring Chris Elliott as a 30-year-old paperboy. 

Kaufman continued to create television comedy throughout the early 1990s, before his breakthrough screenplay for Spike Jonze's unexpectedly successful Being John Malkovich (1999). The black comedy stars John Cusack as a puppeteer who discovers a doorway leading into the brain of actor John Malkovich. Kaufman's screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award and received several other accolades. His screenplay for Adaptation (2002), directed by Jonze once again, was motivated by his struggles adapting writer Susan Orlean's nonfiction book The Orchid Thief for the screen. The film's dual storyline blurs the borders between reality and fiction, exposing Kaufman's writer's block and mocking his initial aversion to make material dazzling enough for Hollywood. Meryl Streep portrayed Susan Orlean, while Nicolas Cage portrayed both Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious twin brother, Donald Kaufman, who was given a cowriting credit on the screenplay for Adaptation.

Kaufman next penned the screenplay for George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on the allegedly true storey of Chuck Barris, host of television's The Gong Show. Kaufman's screenplay for the genre-defying Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) uses a broken timeline to tell the narrative of two former lovers (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) who undergo a scientific procedure that permanently erases their memory of the relationship. Kaufman won his first Academy Award for best original screenplay for this film. 

Kaufman made his directorial debut in 2008 with Synecdoche, New York, a complex investigation of mortality and art that is even more self-reflexive than Kaufman's previous work. Philip Seymour Hoffman starred as a physically declining theatre director embarking on a years-long production of his magnum opus, a sprawling drama that eventually spans a city-sized stage filled by hundreds of perpetually working actors. Though the picture had mixed reviews and a small audience during its theatrical run, it garnered multiple accolades and critical acclaim.

In the following extract acclaimed writer-director Charlie Kaufman discusses his early days growing up in New York, his transition from acting to screenwriting, and his unique creative process.


Were you an avid filmgoer in your early years and, if so, which films were particularly meaningful to you?

I wouldn’t say I was obsessed with watching movies. I liked movies and I went often, but I’m not like Quentin Tarantino, I’m not that person. I gravitated more toward theater and acting, and film was kind of an offshoot of that, as it had acting and theater in it. I also made a lot of movies when I was a little kid. I had a Super 8 camera, and it was a real passion of mine. I made films with stories, little dramatic things, and I’d write scripts for a monster or vampire movie. We’d shoot in graveyards, and I did some animation. I’d direct the films, and my friends and I would act in them.

You started out as an actor in high school and performed in several plays. What made you decide to make the transition to screenwriting?

Since third grade, I wanted to be an actor. I went to school for it in my freshman year of college, and then I switched to film in my sophomore year. I think I became self-conscious. I was very shy, and I became kind of embarrassed about it. I struggled for a long time because I really loved it. It was the one thing in my life that gave me some sort of joy. Then I thought, did I make a mistake by leaving it, because I don’t feel the same way about anything else? I always thought about going back and I never did, but I don’t feel that way about it anymore. I don’t think I could do it anymore.

What are the main differences between writing a screenplay for someone else to direct and directing your own screenplay yourself?

With the exception of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), I haven’t written specifically for any director. Spike was not initially engaged to be part of Adaptation (2002); that was for Jonathan Demme, and then he decided not to do it. Being John Malkovich (1999) was written before I knew Spike.

I think the difference is that, once I began directing, I started thinking, how am I going to do this? Practically, how am I going to make this happen on film, which is something I had never thought about. When I worked with Spike, if I had been doing a rewrite and I had an idea, he would say, “Well, don’t worry about what it costs. We’ll figure it out.” So I was kind of given carte blanche. But when I’m on my own, there is this feeling of, well, am I going to know how to shoot this scene? Am I going to be able to afford to shoot this scene? That’s the difference.

I’m interested in how you build and structure your screenplays. Do you follow a similar pattern every time?

It depends on the piece. When I’m on my own and I'm doing something for myself, I don’t do an outline. I build it, little by little, as I’m working on it. I think about it for like six months, and I’ll think, “Oh, that’s interesting here!” It’s going in a cool direction, but I don’t know in advance how it’s going to end. I like to have the freedom to see where it goes. I don’t like to cement myself into something.

Sometimes it can take me a few years; it’s not an efficient way to work. I do like the idea that sometimes I come to a new thing, six months into writing it, and that changes everything. Adaptation is an example of that. It was a struggle for me in the first six months, until I came up with the idea of putting myself in, and then suddenly I knew how to write it. If I had forced myself to write any more, it wouldn’t have been the same, and I don’t think it would have been as good.

You mentioned loving the theater earlier. Who are some of your favorite dramatists?

I like Pinter, I like Beckett, Ionesco. When I was in high school, I was actually in a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Pirandello. I was really struck by that, and it was very influential on me. Interestingly, I think Woody Allen has a play in one of his books, where the characters on stage talk to the audience. I like stuff like that. I liked Lanford Wilson when I was a kid, and I like John Guare.

I also loved musicals when I was a kid. I mean, when you’re in school theater you do a lot of musicals!

Finally: you’re on a desert island and are allowed to take one film with you. Which film would it be and why?

A movie I really love is Barton Fink. I don’t know if that’s the movie I’d take to a desert island, but I feel like there’s so much in there, you could watch it again and again. That’s important to me, especially if that was the only movie I’d have with me for the rest of my life.

– Excerpted from ‘From Pen to Screen: An Interview with Charlie Kaufman’ by Neil McGlone (article here).

Kurosawa, Tarkovsky and Solaris

Solaris (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

‘I was on very intimate terms with Tarkovsky. I always felt like he was my younger brother. Drinking together, we sang the theme of Seven Samurai. His expression of the element of water! It was unique, indeed. Watching this film [Solaris] always makes me want to return to Earth.’ 
- Kurosawa on Tarkovsky

Akira Kurosawa first met Andrei Tarkovsky in Moscow on his first visit to Russia in July 1971 when Kurosawa attended the Moscow Film Festival. Dodeskaden was screened and won the Special Prize. Tarkovsky then went to Japan to re-pay the visit that same fall and the two directors remained friends until Tarkovsky’s untimely death in 1986. Tarkovsky told Kurosawa that he always viewed Seven Samurai before shooting a new film. Kurosawa replied that he would always see Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev before shooting...

Originally written by Akira Kurosawa and published in May 1977 the following article titled ‘Tarkovsky and Solaris’ recalls the early relationship between the two great directors. It was translated for Nostalghia.com by Sato Kimitoshi and was subsequently adapted by Criterion for use in the insert booklet of their Solaris DVD.

I met Tarkovsky for the first time when I attended my welcome luncheon at Mosfilm during my first visit to Soviet Russia. He was small, thin, looked a little frail, and at the same time exceptionally intelligent, and unusually shrewd and sensitive. I thought he somehow resembled Toru Takemitsu, but I don’t know why. Then he excused himself saying, ‘I still have work to do,’ and disappeared, and after a while I heard such a big explosion as to make all the glass windows of the dining hall tremble hard. Seeing me taken aback, the boss of Mosfilm said with a meaningful smile: ‘You know another World War hasn’t broken out. Tarkovsky just launched a rocket. This work with Tarkovsky, however, has proved a Great War for me.’ That was the way I knew Tarkovsky was shooting Solaris.

After the luncheon party, I visited his set for Solaris. There it was. I saw a burnt down rocket at the corner of the space station set. I am sorry I forgot to ask him as to how he had shot the launching of the rocket on the set. The set of the satellite base was beautifully made at a huge cost, for it was all made up of thick duralumin.

It glittered in its cold metallic silver light, and I found light rays of red, or blue or green delicately winking or waving from electric light bulbs buried in the gagues on the equipment lined up in there. And above on the ceiling of the corridor ran two duralumin rails from which hung a small wheel of a camera which could move around freely inside the satellite base.

Tarkovsky guided me around the set, explaining to me as cheerfully as a young boy who is given a golden opportunity to show someone his favorite toybox. [The director] Bondarchuk, who came with me, asked him about the cost of the set, and left his eyes wide open when Tarkovsky answered it. The cost was so huge: about six hundred million yen as to make Bondarchuk, who directed that grand spectacle of a movie War and Peace, gaze in wonder.

Now I came to fully realize why the boss of the Mosfilm said it was ‘a Great War for me.’ But it takes a huge talent and effort to spend such a huge cost. Thinking ‘this is a tremendous task’ I closely gazed at his back when he was leading me around the set in enthusiasm.

Concerning Solaris I find many people complaining that it is too long, but I do not think so. They especially find too lengthy the description of nature in the introductory scenes, but these layers of memory of farewell to this earthly nature submerge themselves deep below the bottom of the story after the main character has been sent in a rocket into the satellite station base in the universe, and they almost torture the soul of the viewer like a kind of irresistible nostalgia toward mother earth and nature, which resembles homesickness. Without the presence of beautiful nature sequences on earth as a long introduction, you could not make the audience directly conceive the sense of having no-way-out harboured by the people ‘jailed’ inside the satellite base.

I saw this film late at night in a preview room in Moscow for the first time, and soon I felt my heart aching in agony with a longing to returning to the earth as quickly as possible. We have enjoyed marvellous progress in science, but where will it lead humanity after all? This film succeeds in conjuring up sheer fearful emotion in our soul. Without it, a science-fiction movie would be nothing more than a petty fancy.

These thoughts came and went while I was gazing at the screen.

Tarkovsky was together with me then. He was at the corner of the studio. When the film was over, he stood up, looking at me as if he felt timid. I said to him, ‘Very good. It makes me feel real fear.’ Tarkovsky smiled shyly, but happily. And we toasted vodka at the restaurant in the Film Institute. Tarkovsky, who didn’t drink usually, drank a lot of vodka, and went so far as to turn off the speaker from which music had floated into the restaurant, and began to sing the theme of the samurai from Seven Samurai at the top of his voice. As if to rival him, I joined in.

For I was at that moment very happy to find myself living on Earth.

Solaris makes a viewer feel this, and even this single fact shows us that Solaris is no ordinary science-fiction film. It truly somehow provokes pure horror in our soul. And it is under the total grip of the deep insights of Tarkovsky.

There must be many, many things still unknown to humanity in this world: the abyss of the cosmos which a man had to look into, strange visitors in the satellite base, time running in reverse, from death to life, strangely moving sense of levitation, his home which is in the mind of the main character in the satellite station is wet and soaked with water. It seems to me to be sweat and tears that in his heartbreaking agony he sqeezed out of his whole being. And what makes us shudder is the shot of the location of Akasakamitsuke, Tokyo, Japan. By a skillful use of mirrors, he turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, multiplied and amplified, into a vintage image of the future city. Every shot of Solaris bears witness to the almost dazzling talents inherent in Tarkovsky.

Mirror (Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Many people grumble that Tarkovsky's films are difficult, but I don't think so. His films just show how extraordinarily sensitive Tarkovsky is. He made a film titled Mirror after Solaris. Mirror deals with his cherished memories in his childhood, and many people say again it is disturbingly difficult. Yes, at a glance, it seems to have no rational development in its storytelling. But we have to remember: it is impossible that in our soul our childhood memories should arrange themselves in a static, logical sequence.

A strange train of fragments of early memory images shattered and broken can bring about the poetry in our infancy. Once you are convinced of its truthfulness, you may find Mirror the easiest film to understand. But Tarkovsky remains silent, without saying things like that at all. His very attitude makes me believe that he has wonderful potential in his future.

There can be no bright future for those who are ready to explain everything about their own film.

– ‘Akira Kurosawa: Tarkovsky and Solaris’