Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman talks the same way his films unfold: Philosophically, recursively, while giving you the sense that every answer will inevitably open a door to a larger existential problem. When asked “What is life?”, he gives perhaps the most Charlie Kaufman answer imaginable, pondering for a few moments before deciding “I don’t know. I’m trying to figure it out.” His candor and transparency is infectious and his way of seeing is profound. He started as a comedic writer but developed into filmmaking, exploring themes around identity, mortality and meaning. Kaufman has no interest in “selling a product,” despite being on an extended press tour promoting his movie. Instead, he emphasizes that he sees filmmaking as a deeply personal artistic exchange and approaches interviews as an opportunity for genuine conversation about the work.

TRANSCRIPT:

Tania Ketenjian:
Director Charlie Kaufman has a cult following. Oftentimes when your style is so unique, people who respond to that style band together and kind of follow you. The same is true for not only filmmakers, but musicians, fashion designers, artists, and Kaufman is in no way immune to that. What is distinctive about him, however, at least in my eyes, is the issues he grapples with in his work: love, identity, loss, death, grief, remorse. Not kitschy issues by any means. Charlie Kaufman, who's written such films as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich, has just premiered his most recent film, Synecdoche, New York. Not Schenectady. The city where the early part of the film is placed, but synecdoche, which according to answers.com means a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole, the whole for a part, the specific for the general, the general for the specific, or the material for the thing made from it. To be honest, I still don't really know what it means, and the term is nearly as complicated as the film itself. And while people may have trouble pronouncing it, the hope is that they won't have too much trouble watching it. That said, there are two seeming divisive opinions on this film. Either people hate it or they see it as a masterpiece. Although I know this isn't very journalistic of me, I'm of the latter group.

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman in nearly every scene of this film, this 2-hour film, Synecdoche, New York was 5 years in the making. Charlie Kaufman both wrote the script and directed the film, a first for him. With a star-studded cast: Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Catherine Keener, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Charlie Kaufman has made a film about, well, life in all its messy, exhilarating, confusing, frightening, magical glory. At least that's how I see it. But as Kaufman points out, the film is in the hands of the viewer, much like Beauty, and can only be interpreted and understood through that viewer. He says there's no point in explaining what it is about, really. You just have to experience it. My name is Tania Ketenjian:. This is Sight Unseen. And this week, the voice of director and writer Charlie Kaufman, whose film Synecdoche, New York will be showing in theaters on November 7th. Please stay tuned for that and more on this week's Sight Unseen.


Tania Ketenjian:
So I read several interviews. One interview said that you don't really like talking about yourself in, you know, in interviews. But another interview said that, you know, your films are so much a reflection of, you know, current preoccupations that you have. So I don't know, I thought that was an interesting contradiction in a certain way, because that means that you are really talking about yourself, but in I guess in a very different medium. I mean, not through your own voice, but through your own work. So I don't know, I want to explore that a little bit.


Charlie Kaufman:
Well, I think one is about artwork and the other is about celebrity. And also I want to protect myself and the people in my life. You know, I don't want to talk about— my personal life is not my artwork, but I use my personal life a great deal in my work. And I think that that's that's what I choose to do and that's my generous sort of participation in the world, you know. But the other stuff is sort of separate. This, what I'm doing now talking to you is not, I mean, it's sort of marketing or something. It's not my work. So that's it. I'm kind of also, I mean, there's a lot of reasons, some of them very personal, some of them more sort of political or something where I don't, I'm not really a big fan of the celebrity culture, and I don't want to present myself as someone who is that. I don't think of myself that way. I don't want to think of myself that way. I don't want other people to think of me that way. But I think it's an obligation of an artist to use his or her life in their work. I mean, that's the only thing you have to offer that's truthful, which is important.


Tania Ketenjian:
I mean, a lot of people ask artists, 'Was this autobiographical?' or 'How much of it is about you?' and that's not my question, but now as you're talking, I just kind of think it seems like a stupid question because how can it not— how can anything not be autobiographical? How can anything not come from your own life?


Charlie Kaufman:
I think it's true. I think everything is autobiographical, whether you want it to be or not. I think you could say that someone who chooses to write a Transformers movie is telling you something about himself, you know, just by his choice of, "This is why I'm— this is how I'm going to spend my time." Now you know something about that person. And that's true of anything, as much, you know, as autobiographical as you choose to be or choose not to be, you're still doing it. And, you know, I mean, there's— in this movie, there's obviously things that— I mean, all of it is generated from me. And my perception of the world. And that's not only true of the character that Philip Hoffman plays, but of every character in the movie somehow. They're like in your dreams, you know, that people say that your dreams are really all sort of aspects of yourself. Probably it's true in your, in, you know, in this type of writing as well.


Tania Ketenjian:
And I mean, it's true in your perception of everything in your life that it's part of yourself. I mean, everything is filtered through you, so nothing is really something in and of itself, just like, yeah, exactly what you're saying.


Charlie Kaufman:
Right, exactly. You don't exist except as I perceive you. I mean, I'm not saying that you don't exist, but you don't exist— you exist through the filter of my perception to me, you know, all the things that sort of, you know, all the associations that I might have, or, you know, being who I am about you, or vice versa. You know, there's lots— there's a lot going on here, I think, in you know, in both directions that we don't talk about, you know.


Tania Ketenjian:
That was one of the things that was so powerful about this film, amongst many things, one of them being that the notion that your life or who you are could be reflected back to you and that you could actually observe it in some way. I came out of the film and a lot of people asked me, you know, "Well, what was it about?" And I said, you know, my short answer was just that it was kind of about how life is this really— life is suffering to a certain extent. And it becomes this choice that you have every given moment to make a choice of how you're going to look at it and how you're going to treat it and what choices you're going to make. And if those choices pass you up, then you kind of end up at the end of your life thinking, what happened? And things are kind of dictated by something outside of you. So that's the kind of— that's my perception. As you've seen many times, as I've read many times, you're not hoping for a particular perception from others. They each come to it and they take what they take from it. But I'm sure people ask you what it's about. And I don't want the marketing answer. I want what it is about for you, you know, for you as you spend all this time writing it. I just want to know what it's about for you.


Charlie Kaufman:
I mean, I don't really talk about what things are about because for the very reason that you just said, because if I say what it's about to me, then people will assume that their interaction with it is incorrect if they don't— if it doesn't agree with mine, and I don't want them to. So what it's about for me really is that I'm choosing to explore these particular issues in the world, you know, issues of aging and illness and death and isolation and family and regret and what that means in life to a person. And I'm— and and this is my exploration of it. And then when I'm done with it, I put it there, and it's like a conversation, you know, it's like a conversation with another person, with every other person who watches it. Some people will not want to engage in this conversation for whatever reason. Other people will engage in completely different ways, will pull stuff out of it that they relate to at this point in their lives. They may watch it again, and hopefully— my goal is that there would be enough information there in different levels of— for different levels of discussion at different points in your life. You know, like when you read a good book, you know, when you're 15 and then read the same book again when you're 40, it's a different book if it's good. That's what I'm hoping for, that it's dense enough and there's enough complexity to it that it allows for this kind of ongoing reinterpretation of it.


Tania Ketenjian:
When it was over, I kind of thought, I should just sit here, I wish we were playing again, you know? I should just sit here and watch it again, 'cause I know that there are all these things that I missed. And I know that there are all these different ways of taking it, but one thing that was just remarkable was Philip Seymour Hoffman running with this script. I mean, it became as much his film as, well, to a certain extent, it became as much his film as it is yours. I mean, he's just so, he takes on the character so well. In the press packet, I read that he said that it was really challenging for him. Emotionally. And I wondered if that was common for your actors or people that act in your scripts and now in your film, because you've directed this one, that because it's so real in certain ways that they really find— they find it challenging.


Charlie Kaufman:
I, you know, it's hard for me to speak to that because this is the first time I've directed one of my scripts for a film. So, so I'm not sure, you know, how other actors have interacted with the material, but I think Phil is also a very specific actor, and this was a, you know, this was a kind of a massive, a massive role for him emotionally and in terms of the age range of the character. And, but I, but I mean, to sort of go back to something you said in earlier part of that question, I consider, I think I consider Phil my sort of major collaborator. I had a lot of collaborators on this movie, as you you always do in making movies, but I see him as the one who's the major collaborator on this film because he, you know, this character is in every scene virtually and we talked about so much and so many brought so much to this role and so much truth and fullness to it that I do agree with you. It's certainly his movie as much as mine.


Tania Ketenjian:
I mean, it's hard not, as a viewer, it's hard not to see it that way because You know, we experience so much of the film through the actor, and we— that's who we become close to. We don't see the script itself, the written script in front of us. It's only until you actually see the script that you think, "Oh yeah, someone sat down and actually spent time writing this."


Charlie Kaufman:
Right. Well, I mean, I think actors always— and I've been really lucky with the actors in this movie and any movie I've worked on— but the actors always bring so much to the characters. I mean, they are the embodiment, and they have their— and, you know, and if they're good, they have their own ideas, and they have their own sort of philosophy that the characters are imbued with, and certainly Phil did. So, yeah, they're so important. I mean, it's a medium for performance, you know, it's not a written medium.


Tania Ketenjian:
The actors are really important. Is the audience really important? You know, there was a— I realized while I was writing some notes, I don't know if this is giving anything away, but you know, the play that, that Caden writes and creates over the course of this film is not necessarily seen by the public. Is the public necessary for a play to exist or for a piece to exist?


Charlie Kaufman:
Well, I mean, I'm interested in the audience seeing it and I'm interested in their, them having reactions to it, but in the sense that my work and the work of the people who worked on the movie is done. I mean, what happens to the movie now is outside of my realm. I mean, it'll exist in the world or it won't exist in the world, or people will love it or hate it or not care about it. I have nothing to do with it anymore. I made it for myself, but I made it for myself with an eye on having people interact with it. But that's there, it's theirs then. It's like, you know, when I introduced it in Toronto, I said, "This is yours," to the audience. "This is your movie. I'm done. You know, this is my conversation with you, and now it's your turn to interact with it, if you choose to." And I feel that way, and philosophically, I think that's the way I have to work, because otherwise, what you do becomes pandering. And I'm very dead set against pandering. I mean, I don't want to think about what an audience wants or what they're going to like or what they're going to pay money to see. I want to think about what I can give of myself in this work. And that, in a way, is independent of them. Although, you know, then they can— then hopefully it gives them something. But it isn't— my goal isn't to trick them into watching this and— You know, I have no interest in marketing this movie. I don't think of it as a product. I mean, I'll talk about it. I'm going to talk about it. I am talking about it. But I'm not gonna try to get people to go see it. I don't consider myself selling a product, and I really don't want to think of myself that way.


Tania Ketenjian:
Does it make it hard to do, you know, to do these press— to do this press stuff, you know, to do these interviews and—


Charlie Kaufman:
No, I mean, I like— I generally like doing these interviews. They're fun, and people ask interesting questions, and I get to talk and stuff. And I mean, sometimes it's hard just because, you know, it's their schedule, so you do so many in one day, and it's a little intense to, you know, here's the next person, here's the next person, here's the next person. And you want to be— you want to give, and you want to be generous, and you want to be real, and I'm trying to be, but, you know, that's the hard part. But I mean, As long as I'm doing it in a way that doesn't feel unethical to me, then I don't have any problem with it.


Tania Ketenjian:
So, I mean, we should obviously get into the whole, what's directing and writing and the comparisons or actually the symbiosis of the two. As you were writing this piece, the way in which you saw it in your mind and the way in which you actually directed it, how similar and how different were those two?

Charlie Kaufman:

I think it's always the case, and I think this goes back to one of the things I said before. You know, there's a— there's a— like, for example, you bring an actor in, Philip Hoffman or Samantha Morton, and they're going to— you write a character, but then they're going to embody it in a very specific way. And so you're looking now at Hazel as Samantha Morton, as opposed to Hazel on a page as somebody I'm imagining in my head. And that's true with every actor, and not only true with the actors in and of themselves, but it's true with the actors in their dynamic. So now you've got Samantha Morton playing against Philip Hoffman, and what does that mean? And those are— you have to be open and flexible to what it is that's coming in from the outside. That's true of the actors. It's true when you've got a cinematographer and a production designer and all the different people who are creative collaborative people.

So what you start out imagining is never going to be the movie, and it can't possibly be the movie, and you need to be open and excited about what this thing is going to become, and you need to be able to manage the situation, and you need to be able to be spontaneous and alive in the moment so that you can see what needs to be adjusted and what needs to happen here and what is the You know, what is the relationship between these two people that you already have in place that you can utilize to make this scene work? And I think that's the goal and the work of the director. And at every stage of directing, you're dealing with practical issues like that. Those are practical issues. When you're editing the movie, you're dealing with the practical issue of Okay, this is the movie we shot. You know, no longer is this anything, anything possible. This is it. This is what we have on film. What do we do with this stuff to make this stuff, which is never going to be exactly what we imagined, work in its best possible incarnation? And that's an ongoing process. And, you know, and then you've got in your mind, this is what this movie looks like when you're writing it, but you only have this amount of money to build sets. So, how do you do that? How do you change? What you're thinking or adjust so you can do something that you can afford and still have it be aesthetically correct. And that's a constant state of adjustment. And so I think that it's never going to be that. It's never going to be what you imagined, but it could be better. And it's certainly going to be different and exciting to watch it happen.


Tania Ketenjian:
It's like when you anticipate a situation with a friend or, you know, date with a loved one or whatever it might be. You've got all these ideas of how it's going to go, and then they get into the picture and everything— it's all destroyed. No.


Charlie Kaufman:
To me, it's like that scene in Annie Hall, which I think is so brilliant, the lobster scene, you know, the two lobster scenes. I don't know if you remember that, but, you know, just the idea that he's trying to duplicate this thing and it just isn't going to happen. And there's something so human and sad about that, you know. I remember once I had this girlfriend and I was really young and I decided— I was meeting her at the airport and I decided that I was going to do this thing where I saw her and I like ran up and spun her around, you know, like they do in movies. And first of all, I really wasn't into it because I didn't feel that way. And second of all, she was completely not into it. And it was the most— I was like, I was a really— it was a really despairing moment for me to sort of like, have this thing not happen. And, but it was like because I wasn't there and I was like somewhere in my head that I was trying to play out.


Tania Ketenjian:
I think that's, you know, all too common. I think that's the whole point of, you know, that's what disappointment is, you know, it's all these expectations. And it's funny that you should mention Annie Hall because I was just watching it last night because I was recording parts of it for another radio piece I'm doing. On therapy, and I was recording Alvy talking about therapy. But what would you say was the biggest, what would you say is kind of not your regret, but the mistake that you think of most often when you think of directing and your experience with directing? I could say what are the great things that you did, but it's a great film. I mean, it speaks for itself, but I wanna hear what are the challenges too. There could be none.


Charlie Kaufman:
I'm trying to think. I mean, I don't come away with it feeling that, "Oh my God, I wish I had done that." I feel like the movie was a struggle and we were somewhat limited by our budget. And that because of that, we had a lot of scenes to shoot and we didn't have very much time to shoot them. And it would have been nice to have more time with each scene. More time for more coverage in terms of the photography would have been helpful to me at various points in the editing process. I don't know if that was a mistake or just a reality, but I would like to make sure— I know now, like, you know, I would have these discussions with the AD early on about how impossible it was to make the particular days that we had scheduled. And I didn't understand really. I thought, "Oh, I can do this. I could do this." He was exactly right. And there are days like, you know, we just had to rush, rush, rush, rush, rush without any time to be introspective. We needed to get what we needed to get. You know, like we need, okay, this is the bare bones version of this scene as we can shoot it. Let's do that. And, you know, it's fine. And this was the challenge we had. But if I could schedule it differently next time, I would. I'd either try to get more money or I'd try to get more— less scenes, you know.


Tania Ketenjian:
I mean, it sounds like a friend of mine was just describing visiting Israel and she, you know, she went through, you know, just the Sea of Galilee and to Jerusalem and to the Wailing Wall and all these places that you've heard so much about and you so want to spend more time and really take it in, really think of it, and you can't because you're just there for a short period of time. You take what you can. I think Spike Jonze, again to lift from the press packet, said that you're just a natural at this. I mean, it didn't seem at all like a big move, a big chance, a big risk in any way. Do you feel that way?


Charlie Kaufman:
I like doing it, and, you know, I directed some plays last year which I think gave me a certain amount of confidence in working with actors because they came out well. I might not have had that going in if I didn't do those plays. And I don't know. Yeah, I think I'm okay at it. I think I did pretty well considering it was my first time and it was such a big project in terms of its, you know, scene number and cast and scope. There were a lot of special effects we had to deal with. There were a lot of, you know, a lot of prosthetic makeup, a lot of— like, it really was a trial by fire. And so, Yeah, I'm pleased. It's sort of like, you know, I did it. And so it's sort of, it'll make the next one easier just because I did it. You know, regardless of whether or not the movie is any good, at least it's done. And, you know, when you project it, you can actually see something on the screen. It's not just black film. Which it could have been.


Tania Ketenjian:
I'm sorry. I've often asked filmmakers what they're most proud of with a film. And they always say, I mean, almost, I would say 90% of the time they say that it's done, you know, that they did it. It's not this particular scene or, you know, sometimes they say, sometimes rarely, but often it's that they actually did it. So you mentioned the plays, were those the sound plays? So I looked up what a sound play is since I'm a sound person. I mean, this is gonna be a radio piece and I also do sound pieces. And I also was particularly attracted to that idea because the sound at the end of the film is so fantastic. It reminded me a little bit of The Conversation. But so what is a sound play? I couldn't seem to get my hands on it.


Charlie Kaufman:
I don't know if it's a real term. We kind of coined it because we wanted to call it something that separated it from the idea of a radio play. It was similar in construction. We had actors and musicians on stage and a Foley artist on stage. And we created— I did a play. It was an evening of two plays. I did one and the Coen brothers did one and Carter Burwell wrote and conducted the musicians. And, you know, it was— then the Foley artist was visible and the actors were just sitting there and creating— trying to create this world that clearly wasn't happening. You know, there wasn't any action on the stage at all. And, you know, we did these things and they came off really well and audiences seemed to really like them. But that's what they were.


Tania Ketenjian:
So there wasn't any action on the stage. It's interesting that you, you know, you've said before that something about theater is that it's really vibrant, it's alive, and film doesn't have that feeling. But when you actually directed some theater, it was kind of— it didn't have action, but what was the liveness for it for you?


Charlie Kaufman:
And the thing that distinguishes— and this was the first one that I did. I did two of them, but the first one I did was sponsored by Sirius, yeah. And so it was played on Sirius, and it loses a lot because, like, for example, my play took place in the theater that you were watching the play in, and two of the actors on stage were in the play, and the third actor on stage was supposedly in the audience, and it was inside her head as she's watching the play. So, her voiceover almost is interacting with what the stuff is that's supposedly happening on stage. And her phone rings at one point, her cell phone in her purse in the audience. And the actress on stage, who's also just really sitting next to this woman who's supposedly in the audience, stops the play and starts yelling at the woman in the audience. And this is Meryl Streep and Hope Davis plays the woman in the audience. It's called Hope Leaves the Theater. And she goes into this tirade about audiences today. And this character that Hope is playing is so embarrassed at this attention that she gets that as soon as the play starts again, she leaves and goes home. And we follow her since we're inside her head. We follow her as she makes her way home. Through her thought process, her interactions on the street. And at this point, the two actors who are on the stage in this play that we were supposedly watching, it's Meryl and Peter Dinklage, become everyone she interacts with. They become the bus driver, they become people on the bus, they become all these other people.

And so, the live part for me was based on the fact that this is a play— this was the— these were the limitations of the evenings, that there was no action. I had clearly the no action being replaced by imagined action, even though Hope never leaves the theater, she never walks, and we have a Foley artist pretending she's walking, we have the sound of buses, we have all this sort of stuff. The audience's interaction with what they can see is really happening on stage and what they could hear if they closed their eyes, it's totally opposite. And that to me was a very enjoyable thing. So that's how I utilized that. I did definitely, I definitely tried to figure out what I could do that would make this feel like it was happening in a kind of an exciting way.


Tania Ketenjian:
I mean, it's ideal for you because, you know, it's this whole thing about imagination and what is actually real, how much more real is your imagination than the reality. I mean, so—


Charlie Kaufman:
Yeah, I mean, and it was fun and it was like, and, you know, and then she has an interaction with someone online. She's a very lonely woman. She's got this sort of online lover that she's never met, and there's this whole sort of like online thing. And then at the end, the play is reviewed by a critic who is sitting in the audience, who reviews the whole thing. And basically that's being played by Pete Dinklage, who hates the play and hates me and hates all my tricks, you know. So it's kind of like— then I had fun with that sort of taking it even sort of farther afield into this other realm. Where someone's typing up a review. It's actually a flashback. I'm telling— this is too confusing for me to be telling you about, but there's a flash— the reviewer exists in a flashback to the Hope character as a young woman. So, it's actually— he's reviewing the play, but he's reviewing the play like 20 years ago. But he's her father, and she's— and you get to see why she's so sort of screwed up because of this father that she had. It was just like you could go anywhere with it, and that was what was fun about it for me. Okay, I'm done.


Tania Ketenjian:
Well, it's great that you explained all that because that is the challenge of explaining your films as well, is that there's so many different things going on. And it's also personal as well, that you want to get everything in there, but you can't really get it in unless, you know, you actually tell the person to actually go and see it. I'm gonna ask you one big question. You know, to me, you know, this film, which I refuse to say the name of until I have the actual pronunciation in front of me, Synecdoche is about life and I— and just life, L-I-F-E, big letters, life. And I just wanted to ask, you know, if your child were to ask you, Dad, you know, what is life? What would your answer be?


Charlie Kaufman:
I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. I guess that's what I'd say. It's the process of being alive, I guess, is trying to understand life. And I think it's an ongoing process. And I think that if you allow it to be, I choose at this point to allow it to be something that I will be trying to figure out for the rest of my life.


Tania Ketenjian:
All done. That's it. Those were the words of Charlie Kaufman, writer of Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine The Spotless Mind, amongst others, and now writer and director of Synecdoche, New York, his latest film that is opening in theaters on November 7th. My name is Tania Ketenjian. This is Sight Unseen, and to hear this interview with Charlie Kaufman or other interviews that you've heard on this program before, or not heard on this program before if you're a new visitor, please go to radiotania.org. T-A-N-I-A.org. You're listening to Resonance 104.4 FM, the UK's first radio art station.