Charlie Kaufman

PORTRAITS BY FOUR FORENSIC ARTISTS BECAUSE KAUFMAN DIDN’T WANT TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED

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

Here’s an interview with the guy who wrote all those movies that you like. Vice: How have the screenings of Synecdoche, New York been going? Do you generally like to sit through those things?

Charlie Kaufman: You screened at the festival in Sarajevo. How was that? Do you get both extreme emotional interest and disinterest? extremes Well, I think there’s a point at which you have to be willing to let this film take you somewhere. I was telling myself things like, “OK, this is not entirely my worldview but I’ll just go with it.” And then I was totally devastated at the end of the film—I was blubbering. Oh yeah, by myself. It’s the kind of film that I think people should go to alone and then they should tell a friend to go alone and they should meet up afterward. They shouldn’t really see it together. And you’re a well-known writer, so this isn’t a film that’s going to sneak in under the radar and only go to the fests. People are going to see it. I was curious to know what you think its chances are out there. You need to work with that single viewer’s personal experience in mind. Early on in its development, wasn’t Synecdoche being described as a horror film? During the first 20 minutes of the film I was waiting for some kind of genre device to drop in so that everything clicked. But you didn’t do that. Synecdoche It probably is a terrible commercial mistake, but it’s an incredible artistic triumph. I think it’s your best work and I think it was overwhelming. I understand the themes of regret and aging and loss and the sense of reconstituting it all through art. The film doesn’t give you any cute way out. Synecdoche It’s wrong. You totally succeeded. How happy are you with what you’ve done here? I think there are a lot of things that you did incredibly well, like the way you did a lot of short scenes and managed to cover a lot of distance. Did you start out intending to direct Synecdoche from the get-go? Where the Wild Things Are

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

So I did my MA in film at NYU and I know you did too. What year did you graduate? OK. I graduated in ’98 and a lot of old theory got stirred up in my brain watching your film, like the idea of horizontal action and vertical action, or synchrony and diachrony. Your film is not very diachronic. Even though it goes through someone’s entire life, it has all these amazing vertical moments that lift out. I never really sat through a film with so many extended vertical moments, where it’s constantly being lifted out of this inevitable trudge toward death that this character is on. Did you choose the name of the movie after you wrote it? My impression is that you didn’t create this movie to oppose convention or to be willfully different. I think that’s the difference between something that ends up being pretentious and something that follows a real creative impulse. I think that’s art—when it goes out on a limb and challenges us, but without being provocative or countercultural just for the sake of shock. so I don’t even know what “hipster” means at this point. Lots of people throw it around angrily in the New York media now, and I guess they just mean people in their 20s who… Yeah, I don’t know what it means. I wondered: Are women reacting differently to Synecdoche than men? Catherine Keener’s character, Adele, seems to be the keeper of the secret of art and life and meaning. Some women might think, “Oh, you’re just mythologizing her as this symbol and not the flesh and blood he loves.” Onion Eternal Sunshine So was the character of Clementine just a type? And also you’re not saying that’s the only kind of woman out there and that it’s the only type of relationship a man can have with a woman. Synecdoche One woman that I know thought there was a misogynist quality to the film. You’re not a guy’s guy. It’s an expression of your experience. If you were a gay guy, you would have written a bunch of different male characters in the vein of Adele or Clementine… But it is complicated, too, that kind of idealizing of a loved one.
It’s confusing to be a person, period.