Charlie Kaufman is a fascinating bunch of guys. Talking to the most acclaimed screenwriter of his generation, you are never sure whether you are meeting the real thing or one of the semi-fictional
doppelgängers from Kaufman’s parallel-universe subplots. Think of the balding, bloated, self-loathing Charlie played by Nicolas Cage in Kaufman’s mind-warping meditation on the writing process,
Adaptation.
Alternatively, there is the pale, shy, reclusive oddball whom many interviewers seem to encounter. A distorted caricature, protests the “real” Kaufman.
And then there is Hollywood’s most creatively ambitious wordsmith, confidant to the hippest directors and stars, and the only screenwriter to feature in Premiere magazine’s 2003 Hollywood power list. He may shrug off any suggestion of his high status in movie circles, but the truth is that Kaufman’s surreal and tragicomic fables — Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind — have made him the closest thing to a household name in the screenplay business. He is not some anonymous backstage scribbler but a one-man brand, a byword for provocative ideas, quirky intelligence and bittersweet humour.
Which explains why such talents as Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet and Elijah Wood dropped their asking price to climb inside Kaufman’s dangerous mind for the French director Michel Gondry’s darkly funny, visually dazzling psychodrama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which opens in Britain next week. As ever in Hollywood, a line or two of Charlie is a priceless commodity.
Based on an initial concept by Gondry and his artist friend Pierre Bismuth, Eternal Sunshine is a brilliant black comedy, but also Kaufman’s most melancholy work yet. “When I was writing Eternal Sunshine I discovered that it really wasn’t a comedy,” Kaufman admits. “I hadn’t written anything before that couldn’t be described as a comedy. But I liked that, I wasn’t following some formula. I feel like it’s more of a conversation with audience, and I tried to construct it that way, so people can leave thinking what they think — or what they have come to think.”
Manipulating audiences with cheap sentiment is Kaufman’s biggest fear. Growing up in upstate New York and Connecticut, the 45-year-old screenwriter claims he was “damaged” at an early age by the simplistic expectations aroused by Hollywood films, and now considers it his mission to present more authentic emotions on screen. Which often means drawing deeply on his fears and neuroses.
“It’s important for me to write something honest,” Kaufman nods. “I think everything that everybody writes is autobiographical, whether they want it to be or not, so I don’t shy away from using my own experience. It’s sort of all I have, it’s my arsenal, so I use it. Otherwise I would be writing with no anchor, no grounding.”
So can we assume that Jim Carrey’s shy, alienated, lovesick Joel in Eternal Sunshine is essentially another Kaufman clone? “I don’t know,” he shuffles uneasily. “Looking at the male leads in all the scripts I’ve written, I would say there is a similarity between them. So the shyness and awkwardness in Joel, the loneliness, are probably things I feel.”
Kaufman’s bitterness towards Hollywood’s shallow emotional horizons is no mere pose. Despite his grounding at NYU film school, and an early flair for comedy and amateur dramatics, he spent years in the wilderness before success finally came calling. His big break arrived in 1999 when Spike Jonze turned Being John Malkovich into the offbeat hit of the year. Although it was highly regarded by big-name directors, no studio would take a risk on such a complex and original script. Ahead of his time, Kaufman had to wait for the maverick young gunslingers Jonze and Gondry to graduate to full-length features after years directing videos for left-field rock superstars such as Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim. Meanwhile, he spent much of his twenties and thirties as a classic bedsit writer, paying the rent by working at a newspaper delivery warehouse in Minneapolis.
After moving to LA in the early 1990s, Kaufman then spent several years scripting doomed TV sitcoms such as The Dana Carvey Show and The Trouble with Larry. His own ideas for small-screen pilots, sporting titles such as Depressed Roomies, failed to arouse interest. But at least the long gaps between work gave him time to hone his style.
“The shows I was on were inevitably cancelled,” he says, “and there was a lull between the hiring season and the cancelling season, so I took the opportunity to write screenplays. But it was fun in the sense that it was my first writing job. Before that I’d been struggling for maybe ten years. In that sense it was exciting, it was a validation. And I was paid to be a writer, which is something I never imagined would happen when I was working in a warehouse.”
If Eternal Sunshine has any artistic ancestors, they lie less in the lean and linear world of typical movie screenplays than in the dense, surreal depths of cult fiction. It evokes Kafka and Beckett, Lewis Carroll and Thomas Pynchon, and especially the reality-warping science-fiction author Philip K. Dick, whose works, heavily diluted, provided the blueprints for Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report. It is no coincidence that Kaufman loves Dick’s bleak satirical style, and has even written an unfilmed adaptation of his novel, A Scanner Darkly. More surprisingly, he has no unfinished books of his own lurking in his bottom drawer. “I think about it often, but I don’t even have anything started,” Kaufman shrugs. “It’s been a very busy five years for me, and quite overwhelming, so there hasn’t been time.”
Like all Kaufman scripts, Eternal Sunshine is also rich in sly philosophical wisdom, often smuggled Trojan Horse-style inside the mouths of clownish characters. Remember Cage’s deathbed speech as Charlie’s fictional twin brother Donald in Adaptation: “We are what we love,” the bubble-permed Donald tells his fraternal alter ego, “not what loves us.” At such moments, is Kaufman making serious points or playing high-minded jokes on his audience? “It’s all part of the same tapestry,” Kaufman argues, “but it is very serious, even though it is in Donald’s part of the movie. It’s stuff I’ve thought about seriously, a struggle in my life. If you watch Nicolas as Charlie in that scene, he was really crying! I don’t feel like a cynical writer. I may write things that are cynical but I’m not interested in making fun of my characters.”
