Confessions of an extraordinary mind "Nobody in this town can make up a story like you, you are the king of that!" Adaptation (2002) People hardly ever talk about screenwriters. With the possible exception of writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, the chatter of the film world seems to revolve around directors, above-the-title actors, and the occasional oversized mogul. And now there is Charlie Kaufman.
Writer of five movies, including this month's Jim Carrey/Kate Winslet comedy, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman is the breath of fresh air in Hollywood. He comes not so much out of left-field, (as they say stateside) he's playing a completely different sport, with his bizarre confections, mind contorting ideas, and scripts you can scarcely believe made it past the first reading, let alone went on to become actual films.
Appropriately, this journey started in John Malkovich's head. In 1999, year of American Beauty, one plot summary stood out from all the rest. Being John Malkovich was described as the film where the main character, played by John Cusack, accidentally comes across a portal into John Malkovich's brain in a New York office block. Clearly, this wasn't another formula picture, squeezed out from sausage factory Hollywood. The film itself delivered on its promise. Being John Malkovich inhabits its own unique world where feckless puppeteer, Cusack and his dowdy girlfriend, played 180 degrees against type by Cameron Diaz, struggle to relate, after their lives are transformed by access to the "Malkotraz" brain. Like many great films, BJM is hard to classify. Its part concept movie, oh-so twisted love story, black comedy, and reflection on how celebrity is used and abused. Take John Malkovich. Charlie Kaufman did not know the actor personally, but used popular myths and a publicly held image to create his parody "Malkovich". The actor was commonly thought to be cultured, difficult, a dandyesque figure who was a driven thespian. That description, of course, is a fantasy version of the real man - which was the point. And John Malkovich played ball. You can only imagine the look on his face, when the script landed on his desk, prominent on the cover page and with his name all over it. The real Malkovich puts in a fine comedy performance as "himself", sending up his image, and creating a strangely believable character, considering he's working on a parody of himself, seen through other's eyes. Charlie Kaufman came to the London Film Festival in 1999, with the film's director, Spike Jonze, and was asked what would have happened if John Malkovich had rejected his script: "Ummm, errrr, we didn't, errr really know". This is a typical Kaufman response, infact it's a wordy one considering his shyness, in interview, "I don't like talking about myself". At that screening, when he and Jonze shuffled onto the stage to present the film, you couldn't imagine two more unlikely film people. Jonze looked like a school janitor, who'd come to the wrong place, and Kaufman resembled a New York accountant with his bushy beard and oversize suit. Both seemed hardly capable of putting two word answers together. Originally from Massapequa (in the Long Island area of New York), Charlie Kaufman moved to West Hartford to go to college. He was known as a comic actor at high school. When he got his break, he started writing for the TV sitcom Get a Life. It was meeting anarchic former commercials director, Spike Jonze, through mutual friends in New York , that gave Kaufman a partner in crime to visualise his twisted fairytales on the big screen. The script was known in Hollywood but it took years to get into production, because no one knew how to sell it. One producer even said he thought it was one of best scripts he had ever read, but would he commit? No way, too risky. Eventually the production company owned by REM's Michael Stipe bought the script and the wheels started turning.
If his first film made a name for its director, Spike Jonze, it was their second collaboration which established the name Charlie Kaufman, in the one of the most audacious conceits in screenwriting. Struggling to come to terms with his adaptation of Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief, Kaufman wrote himself into the story, making the central character of his script Charlie Kaufman (a pseudo Kaufman, just like the pseudo Malkovich before). Adaptation (2002) is the story of how screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (bravely played by Nicolas Cage) comes to adapt The Orchid Thief. In doing so, he gets writer's block and explains, in voice-over, how he is going to write himself into his own script, hilariously berating himself later as being "narcissistic and pathetic". In the stunning first hour of Adaptation , this perverse reality draws the viewer in, curving in on itself, and having enormous fun at Kaufman's (onscreen version) expense. Not to mention his fictional twin brother, Donald Kaufman, who shares a credit on the actual film, and plays a part in this house of cards that intrigues considering film's meaning. This is the CK film universe where a carefully constructed reality, founded in the absurd, becomes a playground for jokes, observations and intelligent entertainment. A perfect example is when Charlie, in a moment of introspection, says to himself: "How did I get here?". Cut to a shot of California, 4000 years earlier. We then see a montage, taking in primordial soup as early life forms stir; the dinosaurs, glaciers forming, and all of human civilisation until a stock footage shot of the baby Kaufman being born. A short sequence, but it shows how this screenwriter has the confidence to take his focus far and wide. Kaufman concentrates on some internal themes too. His characters struggle for self-confidence, identity, and in nearly every case find alternate versions of themselves, often triggered by bizarre fates, to help them achieve fulfilment and satisfaction. He seems free to pursue the ideas that interest him in a way that is so rare in Hollywood. On his origin of his ideas, Charlie Kaufman says: "I just start thinking, then stuff comes in and later I have to go back in and justify it, so if it ends up being surprising in its twists and shifts, then that's because it is surprising to me as well."
Recently Tom Charity, film editor at London's Time Out magazine, called Kaufman, "Probably the most singular voice in American screenwriting today." Even his least commercially successful film, Human Nature (2002) which went straight to video in the UK, has interesting moments - as you'd expect of a story with Patricia Arquette playing a woman whose body is entirely covered in hair, bumping into Rhys Ifans playing a man brought up as a chimpanzee. Throw in Tim Robbins as a scientist obsessed with table manners, who narrates half the film from heaven, and Human Nature becomes a flawed curio (on video) for Kaufman completists and monkey fans alike.
Human Nature's director, Michel Gondry delivers his second Kaufman film, in April 2004, the highly anticipated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The script has already been praised by internet readers. Eternal Sunshine has for its Kaufman-special-concept trademark the idea of a company that can selectively erase memories from your mind. Jim Carry goes for the procedure after being given a card informing him that his ex, Kate Winslet, has removed him from her memorybank. A shifting sands, multiple reality, mind-bender of a plot then unravels in what could be well be Charlie Kaufman's biggest hit to date. This little guy with his peculiar visions will doubtless be a writer people talk about for years to come. And for his next trick he has planned a horror film, and his third collaboration with Spike Jonze. Expect mental gymnastics. Johnny Messias Charlie Kaufman Filmography: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003) Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) Adaptation (2002) Human Nature (2002) Being John Malkovich (1999) |
