HOWZAT

Considering how much of himself he reveals on screen, Kaufman leads a fiercely private life. He rarely gives face-to-face interviews and shuns photo shoots, eluding attempts to package him as a “celebrity” writer. Reportedly, he lives with the actress Mercedes Ruehl and her two children in Pasadena, but this may be all part of the meta-fiction he spins around himself. After all, he has even printed fake interviews and pictures of himself in the past. Perhaps “Charlie Kaufman” is actually Kaufman’s most elaborate fictional creation.

“No, but he can be the fictional creation of other people,” he says. “When people write articles about me, and I feel this has happened many times, they take an angle on me. And often it’s the angle that everyone expects — that I’m a weirdo, which just isn’t true. But I write the ‘weird’ scripts, so I’m the ‘weird’ guy. So in that sense there might be a fictional version of me. But I’m not being fictional with you now . . .”

Whatever you say, Charlie. You and all the other Charlie Kaufmans.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is on general release from Apr 30

A WORLD OF WEIRD

Ed Potton looks back on into the oddball antics of Charlie Kaufman's parallel universe

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999)

Kaufman’s post-modern ingenuity announced itself to a startled world in Spike Jonze’s existential comedy.

HUMAN NATURE (2001)

A curious meditation on the conflict between instinct and civilisation starred Rhys Ifans as a man raised by apes.

ADAPTATION (2002)

Nicolas Cage played both Kaufman and his fictional screenwriting twin in a tricksy tale of artistic angst.

CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND (2002)

A TV producer moonlights as a CIA hitman in a dark directorial debut for George Clooney, whom Kaufman has criticised for taking liberties with his script.

Eternal search for the perfect script

Time was, screenwriters could come up with scripts for films such as Casablanca relying on their own resources. But since writing a screenplay became the intellectual version of buying a lottery ticket, screenwriting gurus have become a part of the Hollywood landscape, charging upwards of £200 per seminar. Indeed, Charlie Kaufman based an entire movie, Adaptation, on his ambivalence about the screenwriting guru’s ascendancy.

The gurus’ revelations should come as no great shock to anyone who has studied drama and literature from the Greeks on. Perhaps these seminars are filling the void left by the disappearance of a decent liberal arts education. And they can tell you what the mainstream industry expects to see.

The problem, of course, is that talent can be refined but it can’t be taught. You either know how to bring characters alive or you don’t. These courses are of most value to non-writers in positions that require them to sound knowledgeable about scripts (especially when they’re “improving” them). As Anthony Minghella said at a recent event held by the literary organisation PEN: “These courses are useful to learn how to read a screenplay, but they can ’t actually tell you how to write.” Julian Fellowes chimed in: “I don’t know what these people who go on about the pattern of the arc of the second act are talking about. Nobody else’s method can be your method. Find your own way of working and stick to it.”

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