Fresh direction for Charlie Kaufman
Long known as a Hollywood original, screenwriter makes his directorial debut with ‘Synecdoche, New York’
There is no more creative force in modern American movies than Charlie Kaufman. And there will be, for sure, no gutsier, more ambitious and more audacious film this year than the great screenwriter’s debut as film director, too, in “Synecdoche, New York,” currently scheduled to open here next Friday.
What other screenwriter in Hollywood history has ever had the temerity to title a film with a pun on an obscure literary term? (It means a part that stands for the whole, as in “the long arm of the law” or referring to the monarchy as “the crown.”)
Preview
“Synecdoche, New York”
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Hope Davis.
Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. 123 minutes.
Rated R for language and some sexual content/nudity.
Opens next Friday in area theaters.
Kaufman’s first film, then, is about a theater director who spends his life creating a monster drama that, in fact, subsumes every part of his “real” life.
It is utterly unlike any contemporary American film you could possibly imagine — except, of course, those small miracles that Kaufman previously wrote: “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (whose title came from Alexander Pope).
In some ways, no American movie this year will be more important.
“As you know,” Kaufman says in a recent phone interview, “eight of the 12 companies that make movies like this went out of business. The remaining ones are running scared and trying to do a lot of comedy kind of things to get people to the theaters.
“I think then it’s a really difficult time for this kind of movie. I hope that it turns around — for my sake, obviously, but I think it’s a good thing for our society too. … I’m hoping that it doesn’t become only ‘product.’”
When you think of the last decade of Hollywood’s truly miraculous “Oh, my god, they Really Made That” movies (P. T. Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “There Will Be Blood,” along with Kaufman’s jaw-droppers), Kaufman admits that “we’ve been lucky.”
“I think that times were good for a while for movies like this,” he says. “There was a good deal of excitement about them; 1999, which is when ‘Malkovich’ came out, seemed to be a very exciting and good year. It carried people through for years. But now I think it’s become more difficult, and having very expensive marketing campaigns has become very necessary for audiences. And they have to pay off. Independent films can’t afford to do that. So you start to lose money.
“It’s like the publishing business — or even the news on television. There used to be a kind of prestige factor. News shows would lose money and publishers would want prestige books because they would be important to them. The same thing was true of film companies. It’s become more and more difficult for these companies to justify that.”
Little opposition
It ought to go without saying that any time at all spent talking to Kaufman under any circumstances (this interview took exactly 18 minutes and 31 seconds) is precious. He is that frank, that articulate and that representative of everything that is probably best in American movies in our time.
And yet, almost miraculously, Kaufman reports a startling lack of opposition in getting this gloriously challenging film made.
He admits the punning literary title wasn’t exactly a breezy sell to executives. “There were concerns about whether people could even pronounce it,” he says. “Initially, they were going to put a phonetic spelling on the poster. I kind of nixed that.”
“It’s not an easy word to say,” says the 50-year-old man who sounds, on the phone, like a youthful 25-year-old. (For the record, it’s pronounced sin-eck-doe-key.)
Nor did anyone pass on being in the film and working for him. Its cast is jammed to the rafters with film actors who may not be inhabitants of BIG MONEY Pitt-Jolie-Julia-Clooneyville — such actors as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Tom Noonan, Emily Watson and Jennifer Jason Leigh. But it’s an acting aristocracy of its own in our movies. And no good actor in his right mind these days would say “no” when Charlie Kaufman calls.
“I got really lucky. I got all my favorite actors to be in the movie. So that was sort of exciting on a bunch of levels. First of all, I got to meet them. Some of them, I knew. Obviously they brought so much to the film.”
First time out
As for directing his first movie — a complex one in so many ways — he says: “It went OK. I kind of felt going into it that I wasn’t as nervous as I might have been at a different point in my life — and probably should have been. I thought, ‘OK, you’re going to do this. It’s an adventure. I don’t care if I fail. I need to sort of accept the possibility that it could be a disaster but I want to do this.’
“It’s a lot of work. It’s certainly exhausting; it was an exhausting schedule. There were certain miserable elements to the daily work, too. It was in the middle of a heat wave in New York. We were filming it three stories up in an armory for a lot of it. There were a lot of complicated technical things we needed to do. And a lot of prosthetics [for the actors] and all that stuff. But day to day, we did our work. I had a great cast. The technical people in the movie were enormously helpful and creative, and we just did it.”
He didn’t need to consult the previous directors of Kaufman scripts (Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry) according to Kaufman because “I’ve had a lot to do other than writing in all those movies I’ve been involved in — the editing process and the music and the sound design. I felt that working with them, I already had some expectation of what the job was. And I really wanted this to be mine. That’s why I did it.”
And now contemplate this, if you can, when you see “Synecdoche, New York”: Only 15 years ago, the man who made it was getting his start in such television shows as Chris Elliott’s “Get a Life,” “The Dana Carvey Show” and “Ned and Stacy.” He’d even written for the ongoing tantrum of Cybill Shepherd’s sitcom, too.
A Charlie Kaufman kind of professional life right out of a Charlie Kaufman movie.
And thank heaven for it.
