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).

Charlie Kaufman: On Screenwriting

Being John Malkovich (Directed by Spike Jonze)

One of modern cinema’s most celebrated screenwriters, Charlie Kaufman’s work includes surreal fantasy Being John Malkovich, cerebral sci-fi Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and comedy dramas Human Nature and Adaptation. The following extract is taken from an interview with Creative Screenwriting in 2001 in which Kaufman discusses his work with David and Jeff Goldsmith.

CS: When you write, do you take into consideration commercial potential or how an audience might respond to the writing?


CK: I think it’s my responsibility to write about the things that interest me. I feel that I’d be doing a disservice to anybody and everybody to not do what I thought was good. Because other than that, you should be in advertising or something.

CS: Unfortunately, too many screenwriters approach the job like they were in advertising.

CK: I think that’s what you’re trained to do. I think that’s what the studios do to a certain extent. But I think you have to ask yourself, ‘Is this interesting to me?’ ‘Is this funny to me?’ ‘Is this something I’d want to see?’ That’s something I always ask myself: ‘Is this a movie that I would go to see?’ And if the answer is yes, then it’s something to pursue. Otherwise you’re being cynical.

CS: It seems to me that your stories resonate with audiences because they’re as honest as they are imaginative.


CK: I’m fortunate to be able to do that. I guess at some point I may not be able to write that way, and I’ll have to make a living. Then I’ll have to write what other people want me to write. But right now I’m going to grab the bull by the horns and do what I want.

CS: How do you go about deciding on subject matter?

CK: I don’t conceive of things from a very conscious place. I just write about things that interest me – that I find moving – and then I trust it. I don’t think it serves me to do it any other way because that’s where I get the most passion and intimacy in my work. So I don’t know the answer; I like an idea, and then I tend to have three or four ideas that I might combine – which I did in Human Nature. Then I try to force myself to figure out how these things might fit together. I did the same thing in [Being John] Malkovich, and with Adaptation. It’s taking disparate ideas and then working out how and why they should fit together. How the story should be told.

CS: You began in TV and years ago wrote some TV pilots that remain produced. One was called Ramblin’ Pants, the other Depressed Roomies. Are there any plans to get these off the ground?


CK: I actually wrote four or five and nothing happened with them. They already made the rounds years ago.

CS: But you’re a different person now, those could be greenlit overnight.

CK: I am, but I think that I’d rather come up with something new than just go back to those.

CS: There are some fairly successful screenwriters who view their work as a grind. I get the feeling you’re someone who really loves writing.


CK: It’s important to me to do the best I can; I don’t think I’d want to approach it in any kind of weary way. I’d be ashamed to do that. Human Nature was a spec script. I wasn’t even working as a screenwriter professionally when I wrote it; I was working as a television writer. The same with  Malkovich. They were written during my television years; I just did them during hiatus.

CS: That was a while ago. How did Human Nature come to be made now?


CK: Both of those scripts had been kicking around for several years. I think I wrote them in the mid-nineties. Malkovich got made and it got positive attention; then people were interested in this one. Michel Gondry wanted to direct it. There had been others interested in directing it – at one point I was going to direct it – but Michel wanted to do it. I figured that would be good, so I came on as a producer, along with Good Machine and Spike Jonze.

CS: What was your involvement as a producer?

CK: I was involved throughout the production in every stage: pre-production, production, casting, and post. I was very involved in the editing along with Michel and Russell Icke, the editor; and the other producers, Anthony Bregman, Ted Hope, and Spike.

CS: Was that a new situation for you?


CK: This is my second film as producer. The first one was Malkovich, which I was involved in unofficially because I had a relationship with Spike, and he respects my opinion...

My involvement as producer is creative; I’m obviously not scheduling and doing that sort of stuff. It’s important for me to be there because it’s a way of having my voice heard and protecting my intentions... I’m engaged and involved because the people who direct these movies realize, correctly I think, that it’s important to have the person who wrote the material there to talk to. It doesn’t happen a lot, but I think it’s stupid, very stupid, not to utilize your resources, and the person who invented something is a very valuable resource. We’re doing post-production rewrites as things get moved around. There’s a lot of stuff to finesse or fix.

CS: Do you mean moving scenes around? Or rewriting and re-shooting?


CK: We didn’t do any re-shooting for Human Nature. We did some for Malkovich and we’re going to do some for Adaptation. But when you’re cutting a movie down and moving scenes around there’s stuff that doesn’t work anymore. You have to cheat in dialogue, to smooth it, so there’s that kind of writing to do.

CS: Being involved in the editing process must give you a new perspective on screenwriting.

CK: It really does. I think editing is most akin to writing the movie, more than any other aspect of production. It really is writing, you know? You’re doing a lot more than I would have imagined: finding connections that weren’t intended, but that work in this new form. It’s very interesting, and it requires you to really let go of what you’ve gone in with. You’re not really in service of the script anymore. Now it’s, ‘This is what you have,’ and, ‘This is what it is; now how do you make this work?’ As opposed to keep going back and saying, ‘Well this isn’t what I wrote.’ Or, ‘this isn’t how I wrote it.’ I’m fortunate because all writers should be in this situation. But it’s good for me that I’m a partner in this because I know a lot of stuff gets taken away from writers and it doesn’t resemble what their intentions were anymore.

Human Nature (Directed by Michel Gondry) 

CS: Has producing changed the way you write?

CK: One of the things I’ve realized is that in all three of the movies I’ve been involved in is if we see a softness or a problem in the script, it should be corrected at that point. The idea of ‘you’ll fix it later’ or ‘nobody will notice’ is insane. Maybe nobody does notice, but we notice and it becomes a major issue in post, like, ‘How do we solve this problem,’ etc. And then it’s glaring, and we have to do all this extra work to fix it. It happened again and again, and the thing that struck me in all cases, without going into detail, is that in almost every case we saw [the problem] before and didn’t think it would be as big a deal as it ended up being for us. So, I think motivation, character intention to the most miniscule degree, needs to be attended to.

CS: Thanks, Mr. McKee. [screenwriting guru Robert McKee]

CK: [Laughs] Right, I guess he would say something like that, but he’d be right.

CS: What’s it like for you to enter the editing room as both a writer and producer and be creatively involved with those important decisions?


CK: It’s hard, but it’s great. I definitely wouldn’t trade it in. It’s exhausting, and it’s frustrating, and it’s an enormously long process. You lose track gradually over all the different versions of the movie. You lose perspective; you don’t know what you’re watching anymore, and that’s where test screenings become very, very important.

CS: You actually like test screenings?

CK: Yes, for that reason. I don’t mean the test screenings with the numbers or whatever those things, the official ones, are. For us, I mean you can cut out a whole scene in a movie that you’ve been working on for three years, and your brain makes the connection between this moment and that moment because you have the information from the previous draft. But you can’t really know if an audience will make that same connection. So you get people saying, ‘I don’t understand the ending. I don’t understand what happened here,’ and to me that’s the most valuable thing about screenings. ‘Do we like this character?’ or ‘Is the character redeeming?’– that kind of shit I don’t care about, but I do care about if the movie makes the sense that we wanted it to make. What’s most interesting is when someone interprets something differently than you had expected them to, like the reason a character does this is because of something you wouldn’t have even considered, but it makes sense now and you understand where they’re coming from.

– Extracted From: ‘Charlie Kaufman Interviewed By David F. Goldsmith & Jeff Goldsmith. Creative Screenwriting, Volume 9, #2 (March/April 2002) & Volume 9, #6 (November/December 2002)’.

 

Charlie Kaufman: On Adaptation

Adaptation (Directed by Spike Jonze) 

Adaptation tells the story of a misunderstood and socially inept screenwriter called Charlie Kaufman struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s dense book The Orchid Thief about John Laroche, a colorful character who was arrested in Florida for stealing rare orchids from a state-protected preserve. Facing severe writer’s block, Nicolas Cage (playing Charlie Kaufman) early on states his fateful goal of: ‘I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a ‘Hollywood’ thing. It’s like I don’t want to cram in sex, or guns, or car chases or characters overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.’ While the film deliberately meanders through the first two acts, the appearance of screenwriting guru and seminar leader Robert McKee sends the third act into motion when he tells Kaufman, ‘You can have an uninvolving, tedious movie, but wow them at the end, and you’ve got a hit.’ The initial draft of Adaptation took this advice and the third act sent Kaufman and his brother, Donald, into the drug lair of Orlean and Laroche, who’ve kidnapped Charlie and plan to kill him in a Florida swamp. Donald bites the dust while trying to save Charlie, but just as the gun is turned on Charlie, an act-two throwaway joke about a mystic Swamp Ape manifests itself into the scene and saves Kaufman. The finished film ended up taking a different course, however...

The following extract is taken from an interview with Creative Screenwriting in which Charlie Kaufman discusses how he came to write the script of Adaptation and why the Swamp Ape never made it into the final cut of the film:

CS: When you began adapting The Orchid Thief were you given free rein to do what ever you wanted?


CK: They approached me with the book, and I liked it a lot. I was getting other kinds of offers, but this one just seemed more substantial to me. It seemed to be about something other than the usual stuff I get offered. So I took it. I kind of thought I would figure it out, and I guess this is how I figured it out. Or not. They certainly left me alone. I don’t think they imagined... I didn’t tell them 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! I don’t think they expected this kind of script; they expected something a little more faithful.

CS: You essentially blew your assignment and handed in a script about yourself. Most writers would either be fired or sued for doing this – why weren’t you?


CK: I wasn’t fired when I turned it in for two reasons. First, my work was done. I guess they could’ve fired me and hired another writer to do it at that point, but I think the other reason is that they liked it. I didn’t know that they were going to like it, but I lucked out, and they liked it.

CS: What did your agent think?

CK: I don’t think my agent saw it until [Jonathan] Demme’s company saw it. I don’t remember the chronology exactly, but by the time my agent saw it, I think it was a good thing, not a bad thing. I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing, because by the time I came up with this idea to do it this way, I was pretty much out of ideas. I thought I’d better do it rather than pitch it because if I did, they would say no and I had no other ideas. I wanted to try it even though I thought it was going to be a disaster.

CS: Were you ever worried about the repercussions?

CK: Yeah, I thought I wasn’t going to work anymore. I thought it was gonna be like, ya know, like you said, they paid good money for this thing, they hired me, I took a very long time to write it, and this is what I finally gave them after they’d been waiting all this time. But at the same time, I’d been talking about the movie/script to people, and I got the sense that people thought it was a funny idea, so I had a little bit of confidence that it might not be so terrible.

CS: Do you have any sort of support group, close friends, etc., that reads your material before you go out with it?


CK: No. No one reads anything I write until I turn it in. I thought the mentions in the film of the Casablanca screenplay were a hilarious insider writer’s joke. Most in the industry know that Casablanca was rewritten continually on set, as opposed to being a screenplay that was simply written and then filmed. I’m actually just quoting verbatim Robert McKee. That’s all McKee always talks about, so I was doing a Robert McKee thing.

CS: Interesting. I assume you went to a McKee seminar?

CK: Yes, I didn’t go to it for the reason that Kaufman goes in the movie. I went for research on this film.

CS: Were there ever any plans to have the real McKee in Adaptation?


CK: We talked about it, but we weren’t putting anyone else real in there, so we thought it’d be weird.

CS: What’d he think about being a character in your film?

CK: Ultimately, he really liked the movie. He came to a screening recently and was very pleased.

CS: I was sad to see McKee’s one-page speech about how you can’t do a one-page speech in a movie go. Why was it cut?

CK: 
I think it was filmed but cut because the movie was so long... a lot of that stuff was filmed, and the assembly of the movie was so dense, so much stuff happened. Even as it is now it’s a little bit overwhelming. So, we’re trying to get the movie moving at that point, and that was obviously, intentionally a complete stop in everything, so I think that’s why it’s gone. I think we’re going to publish the script as we went into production with it, so that will be in there.

CS: Do you think the film remained true to the tone of the screenplay?


CK: Adaptation is an interesting thing because it’s an extremely modular structure. The order is completely open. It isn’t arbitrary. I mean it’s all intention al on my part, but at the same time when you’re cutting any movie, you’re moving stuff around because you have to, or because you’ve cut out scenes and you need to make things work again. Inevitably, you do move things, and with a more linear story there are certain constrictions; it leaves you options but not as many. There are infinite number of options to Adaptation. It’s sort of a godsend, but it’s also daunting because you never really know how to ultimately structure it. You say to yourself, ‘Oh, you could do this.’ Or, ‘Wait, we could do this. Move this here.’ And it goes on and on. So it’s been tricky. We’re probably about two-thirds of the way through at this point, and we still have to shoot. So we’ll see what kind of shape it takes...

CS: Do you ever take rewrite assignments?

CK: No. I’ve thought about taking rewrite work or production polish stuff, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been busy with my own stuff; it’s what I prefer to do. But I guess at some point maybe I will.

CS: Do you plan to direct?

CK: I’ve been writing something now. I’ve cleaned my plate a bit; I’ve been dealing with stuff that I had to do for a long time now. I finished a draft of another script which Michel [Gondry] is going to direct, and that was something that’s been haunting me for quite a while. So there’s a draft in, and there’s more work to do, but it frees me up to start a new spec. My intention is to direct it.

CS: Tell me about your new project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s set to star Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, right?


CK: Yes. What initially happened was Michel Gondry had a friend in France who had an idea – he’s kind of a conceptual artist – and the thought was, ‘What if you got a card in the mail one day that said you’d been erased from someone’s memory?’ So, Michel came to me with that idea, and we kind of worked it into a bit of story. And we pitched it –

CS: Don’t say ‘pitched’; that’s what Donald Kaufman would say.


CK: [Laughs] Yep, Kaufman’s dialogue in Adaptation. I hated when Donald would say that. Anyway, it was my one sort of pitching experience, and I went around to a bunch of different studios with Michel and ended up selling it. I started writing it probably in 1998, and because there was all this other stuff happening with Adaptation and Human Nature, it kind of took a while. It was also very complicated for me to write. The conceit is sort of tricky, because not only is it going backward, but the memory is being erased while the character is going through it, and there are a lot of technical problems there.

CS: I really liked the screenplay. I heard you cut out the sci-fi beginning and ending from your first draft in order to keep things more rooted in reality?

CK: 
Yeah, I like starting it this way because it doesn’t tell the audience anything about what they’re going to see. I like the idea of taking the audience in one direction and then jerking them in another direction and having them have to catch up to figure out what’s going on, and I think this does that.

CS: Okay, now for the question I’ve been waiting to ask. I loved the Swamp Ape from the first draft of Adaptation and was sad to see it go –


CK: Oh, no...

CS: I’m curious about the decision to leave that and a lot of the other surrealistic scenes from the first draft behind.

CK: It’s a discussion and an argument that Spike [Jonze] and I had for a long time. I think that was Spike’s decision or insistence. The difference in the last part of the movie that we shot and the last part of the movie as I originally wrote it is that it’s less broad. Spike felt it was important that there be no demarcation between the first part of the movie and the last part of the movie – that they blend together so that you could watch the whole thing and be emotionally engaged and then afterward think about it and go, ‘Oh, wait a minute, isn’t that what he said he wasn’t going to do?’ So, that’s the reasoning why it’s not there, and I think ultimately I agree with it, especially in the form that the movie has taken – even though I had an affection for the Swamp Ape too. But I think looking at the movie the way it is, it would have been very out of place.

CS: Were you worried about changing an ending that so many of your various executives and producers loved?


CK: Even Malkovich got changed. Malkovich was a lot sillier than it ended up being as a movie. The last third of Malkovich is completely changed from my original draft. It was very much more comedic, less angst-ridden...

– Extracted From: ‘Charlie Kaufman Interviewed By David F. Goldsmith & Jeff Goldsmith. Creative Screenwriting, Volume 9, #2 (March/April 2002) & Volume 9, #6 (November/December 2002)’.