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Friday, November 7, 2008
By Matthew Odam
| Friday, November 7, 2008, 12:02 PM
Legendary film critic Pauline Kael once said of Marlon Brando that “his greatness is in a range that is too disturbing to be encompassed by regular movies.”
The same could almost be said of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Hollywood has allowed him to write his own movies, and they are anything but regular.
Kaufman has cemented himself as a writer of immense talent, unwilling to abide the conventions of modern American cinema. Three of his five previous screenplays — “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — were nominated for Oscars, and “Eternal Sunshine” ended up winning. His manipulation of time, space and narrative have made for challenging films that often confuse as they unfold, though they always seem to resonate with audiences both emotionally and intellectually.
In “Synecdoche, New York,” his directorial debut that opens Friday , Kaufman plumbs new depths of the collective unconscious, mining a beautiful and gut-wrenching story centered on the complex fears of death, love, loss and the attempt to achieve authenticity in life. Heady stuff to be certain.
Ostensibly, “Synecdoche” is the story of Caden Cotard, a distraught playwright living in Schenectady, N.Y., battling a plethora of sometimes real, but more often imagined, illnesses, mourning the pending dissolution of his marriage and struggling to find meaning in his life and art, which increasingly become simulacrums of each other as the film progresses.
Considering the pain inflicted by Cotard’s neuroses, the film could be seen as a harsh indictment on the pettiness of our egos and a stark reminder of the unequivocal loneliness life forces us to endure. But Kaufman’s tender screenplay and metaphoric portrayal of these universal fears bring the film alive and heighten it to the level of cinematic poetry. The viewing is not easy, but the reward is great.
I sat down with Kaufman at the Alamo Drafthouse downtown during the Austin Film Festival last month. Loathe to ever discuss the meaning of his films or their themes, we talked around the movie, eventually striking at its emotional core.
American-Statesman: You’ve said that you get your ideas for screenplays from character ideas, themes, or conceits such as entering the head of John Malkovich. Where did you get the idea for the screenplay to ‘Synecdoche’?
Kaufman: Originally, the motive for thinking about it was that (director) Spike Jonze and I were approached by Sony Pictures to do a horror movie. We talked about things that were scary in the real world. So the idea of writing about moving toward death, and time passing, and aging, and illness and relationship issues, and problems, and being left and having regrets was the impetus for what the story became. And then I just sat with it for two years and tried to think about these issues and let it expand into what it became.
Over the years of working on a screenplay, how do you stay engaged with the material?
I don’t have an outline and say, ‘OK, this is where it starts and this is where it ends,’ which seems a ridiculous way to work because writing as I like to think of it, is a process of exploration, and you can’t possibly know what you’re going to know at the end of a process when you’re starting it. What excites me is the idea that in six months after thinking about this, I am going to come up with a new direction, and I am going to allow myself the freedom to go in that direction with the material.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article recently about how we relate precocity to genius and talked about the idea that people who come to their creative greatness later in life come to it through a form of open-ended exploration, versus the conceptual thinking of young geniuses like Picasso. I wonder how you relate to both of those ideas — that of precocity and genius and the different ways of finding your voice as an artist, and if you ever felt you might not reach your potential.
I really, really wanted to be a wunderkind. I had that word in my head and wanted it to happen.
At what age?
Oh, God, 9? [Laughter] Seriously. The idea of that was something in my head that just thrilled me. As it didn’t happen, and then I moved farther and farther away from it, it started to seem less important to me, and I kinda gave it away… . If I had become successful or well-known when I was in my early 20s, I probably would be a really different person doing really different stuff and it might have been lesser. I don’t know. I had a lot of life experiences that put me in the world of people who were struggling. When I worked in TV, I worked with people who were very successful at an early age. And you don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg, but there’s a difference in the way they treat the people they work with. Not with all of them, but there’s sometimes a quality of being very, very spoiled and being very, very sort of out of touch with people.
The conceptual thing confuses me because I feel like my work is conceptual. But I do also want to use that as a framework for being expansive and exploring emotions and ideas and moving closer to some sort of realization of a truth. I read this thing where Isadora Duncan said, ‘I’ve strived my whole life to make one authentic gesture.’ And I love that idea and I love the idea of how hard that is.
I feel like there’s a sense if you put that [something authentic] in the world and you get closer to something that other people recognize, it does feed other people, it makes them feel less alone. And it’s not alienating in the way that I think a lot of popular entertainment is because it doesn’t in any way reflect people’s lives and they feel somehow it should and it doesn’t and you end up feeling really lonely with it.
Unlike ‘realistic’ films, there’s a way in which your writing and filmmaking is an active and accessible poetry, with the metaphor allowing for open-ended interpretation of the film.
I don’t think that what we say is realism is really realism. I think it’s another convention played out, and we all understand it as a common language of moviegoing. But I think in a way it’s its own form of stylized storytelling. Because you know, the truth is that we don’t live in an objective world. We live in a completely subjective world, all of us do. To treat the world metaphorically in that way is maybe closer somehow to reality. Even if it’s stylized or surreal or dreamlike… . I mean, why do we do dream the way we dream? Why do we tell ourselves stories symbolically in dreams? Everybody does that every night, and they’re gorgeous. And they’re very real, they’re visceral, you’re really talking to yourself. I guess what I’m getting at is that I’m not trying to obscure the truth or obfuscate.
Do you ever try and get out of your own head? And if so, how?
I do. I don’t know if I can get out of my head, but I try and find a different place in my head, might be more accurate. I read. On and off, I’ve tried to meditate for years. I’ve started to do yoga, which I find enormously helpful. I’m in love with the idea of yoga now. You can’t think about anything else when you’re in one of those poses. Everything is in the present tense, which is a very hard place for me to be. If I sit down and just try and breathe, I realize that my brain is not here … and how hard it is to just be here.
Because we can only know ourselves to a limited degree, how well can we really ever know somebody else? Don’t then relationships become a leap of faith made in hopes that the part of the other person that we know is a synecdoche representing well enough the whole of that person that we can actually trust it?
[Long pause] My feeling is, if you can, and when you are able to be present and open to the world, then you’re going to invite that in from other people and it will be apparent. I think that we’re so afraid of it not happening because we feel very vulnerable and we’re afraid of being hurt and humiliated and wrong that we stop the interaction. I think maybe it’s a leap of faith that is required, or a certain kind of courage and a certain kind of acceptance that there’s gonna be crappy people and crappy interactions. But that maybe that’s OK.
Do you feel a comfort in the idea that we’re all sharing this human experience equal to the anxiety you get from your own ego or neuroses?
I do when I can. And it’s very hard for me to get there, and I do feel very isolated and alienated a lot of the time. But when I can get to that point in my thinking, through whatever experience, I do. And I think that’s a large part of what I feel I was working on expressing in this movie.
“Synecdoche, New York,” starring Philip Seymour Hofffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and many more, opens Friday, November 14 in Austin.
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