Charlie Kaufman is in a funk. The genius screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, the devastating Buñuelian comedy of mortality that he also directed, can’t get a movie off the ground. “I’m having great difficulty,” he sighs. “I’m not a person that people want to trust with their money. It’s very frustrating.”
Earlier this year, production of a film he was preparing to make – Later the War, starring Eddie Redmayne as a manufacturer of dreams who diversifies into nightmares – was shut down in Belgrade; he hopes it will resume. To make matters worse, he sorely needs some shut-eye. “Not to get into it, but I’m not a great sleeper,” he says, reaching out of frame for his coffee. The webcam is angled in such a way that his bearded, bespectacled face is shunted into the bottom half of the screen, leaving ample space above him where a big, fluffy thought-bubble might go.
He has just arrived back home in New York from the Venice film festival, where he was presenting How to Shoot a Ghost, the second of two lyrical shorts he has directed, both written by the poet Eva H.D. This one features Jessie Buckley, star of Kaufman’s 2020 film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, in which she shuffled through an entire Rolodex of different identities as she was driven through a blizzard to meet her new boyfriend’s parents. Now she plays a recently deceased photographer wandering around Athens in a blue wig, armed with a Polaroid camera and accompanied by a queer translator (Josef Akiki) who is also newly dead. Together, they savour life from the afterlife. Think Wings of Desire Goes to Greece.
The short is poignant and oddly consoling. “I like what the ghosts come to feel and see about their lives and their deaths,” says 66-year-old Kaufman. “I think it’s a hopeful film. Maybe that has more to do with Eva, since she wrote it. I think she sees beauty as well as pain, and sees that they are not mutually exclusive.” I ask whether he can see beauty, too. “I can,” he says after a long pause. “I have a lot of anxiety. And I think that gets in the way of the experience of being alive.”
Later this month, Kaufman will bring How to Shoot a Ghost to Bristol’s Encounters film festival, where he will also appear on stage with Michel Gondry before a screening of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Gondry directed. That 2004 gut-punch of a love story, which won Kaufman an Oscar for best original screenplay, stars Jim Carrey as a woebegone soul undergoing a cerebral deepclean to erase all memory of his ex-girlfriend (played by Kate Winslet, beating Buckley to the blue hair by two decades).
Kaufman and Gondry spent several days in 1998 driving around Hollywood, pitching the idea for Eternal Sunshine to studio executives. “I had an infected tooth,” Kaufman grimaces. “I’d never been in such pain. But I didn’t have time to go the dentist because we were doing this.” Positive responses offset his agony. “Everybody was, like, ‘It’s a new way to tell a love story’. They knew how to sell it and that was exciting to them.”
Once the idea for Eternal Sunshine was sold, Kaufman had to set about writing it, which took time (“It always does”). Gondry wanted to get cracking on a film, so Kaufman pulled an earlier unproduced script from the drawer for him to make in the meantime. The result, Human Nature, starred Patricia Arquette as a hirsute writer, Tim Robbins as a repressed scientist with a “minuscule penis” and Rhys Ifans as his laboratory subject, who was raised as an ape. Full of unruly charm, it flopped and is hard to find these days. “Is it?” asks Kaufman. “I haven’t looked for it.”
Eternal Sunshine, though, was a breakthrough: the most sincere and effective marriage of mainstream and avant-garde ingredients since Groundhog Day, and a hit to boot. “Though the people who own the rights report back to me regularly that it’s still in the red,” he says dubiously. “‘Hollywood accounting’ is what it’s called.”
Wobbles along the way were mostly to do with the coincidental resemblance of other movies to Eternal Sunshine. Kaufman has said previously that the release in 2000 of Christopher Nolan’s memory-loss thriller Memento gave him pause during the writing process. Perhaps that’s why the bloviating fictional film critic B Rosenberger Rosenberg, who narrates Kaufman’s 2020 novel Antkind, has several digs at Nolan, referring to Starbucks at one point as “the smart coffee for dumb people. It’s the Christopher Nolan of coffee.”
John Woo’s 2003 science-fiction thriller Paycheck, released before Eternal Sunshine but now fittingly forgotten, also gave Kaufman a fright. “The trailer showed Ben Affleck with this memory-erasing machine on his head,” Kaufman recalls. “Michel and I were, like, ‘Holy shit!’ We called one of our producers and said, ‘We can’t put the movie out now.’”
Perhaps the success of Eternal Sunshine was a mixed blessing for both men. When Gondry was asked in 2023 why he hadn’t made more films in Hollywood, he said: “It’s very hard to work after having worked with Charlie Kaufman.” Other writers’ scripts, he reflected, “all seem very dull”. Maybe those first five spectacular years of being a screenwriter also skewed Kaufman’s expectations of how the rest of his career would pan out. “Well, I’d spent much of my adult life not being successful,” he says. “But, yes, there was this brief moment – beginning when Malkovich opened and ending with Synecdoche – where I was, you know …” He pauses, and I wonder if he is going to say “hot”, a word I can’t imagine ever crossing his lips. “In demand,” he says finally. “Or something.”
In 2008 came the global financial crisis – “From which I still don’t think the film business has recovered,” he says – and the release of Synecdoche, New York. The movie, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as an anxiety-riddled and insanely ambitious theatre director mounting a replica of his own life inside a vast warehouse, made no money. “I don’t care,” says Kaufman defiantly. “I’m very happy with it.” Yet, its box-office failure had clear consequences. “My films are well regarded and yet I’m constantly up against this wall of not being able to get financing. And I’m not asking for a lot.” How will the situation ever change? “I guess if I directed something that made a fortune,” he suggests.
Would it be intolerable for him to take on a movie he didn’t believe in just to get the clout for his own projects? “I think the world is in a terrible, terrible situation right now,” he says, his tone suddenly grave. “I don’t think that Hollywood has nothing to do with it. I could argue that Hollywood has everything to do with it. And I have a responsibility, as I see it, not to put garbage in the world. I’m not going to do that. If you start trying to figure out what it is that people want, you are doing what AI does. The idea of AI precedes AI itself because that’s the Hollywood machine. It’s why they remake the same five movies every 10 years. It’s why they have a formula for what a movie is.”
The looming horror of AI is much on his mind today. “The most valuable thing to me in terms of my mental health is to read a poem or see a painting or listen to music which speaks to me, which breaks me open for a moment, and where I feel an experience honestly and delicately portrayed. That’s another reason AI can never create anything artistically. It can trick us into thinking it has, but it doesn’t have the experience of being alive. It doesn’t know loss and joy and love and what it feels like to face mortality. I’m very worried about the future in so many ways, and if we don’t allow ourselves to connect with other humans who have the experiences that we have, then I think we’re lost.”
The evidence is already around us, he argues. “That’s where the greed and acquisitiveness and all of this garbage comes from. It’s people who are really lost and don’t have anything, so they’re desperately trying to make themselves feel better by acquiring, by lording it over people, by being powerful and wealthy. They’re damaged people doing so much damage.”
He throws up his hands. “I’m a damaged person too!” he says. “But I’m trying, you know? I’m trying to be truthful about it.”
