Articles

Agent Provocateur: Charlie Kaufman's Subversive Scripts

Papermag
May 2002
by Jonathan Durbin

Charlie Kaufman is the camera-shy comedian behind the escape-through-celebrity satire, Being John Malkovich (directed by Spike Jonze). This month sees the release of his second film, Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry, a comedy about a love parallelogram between a naturalist, a behavioral scientist, his assistant and a wildman named Puff. Like Malkovich, the film mocks the idea of escape (in the former, it's escape into the head of an actor; in Human Nature it's running away to the woods), but is also about relationships gone awry. In the film, Patricia Arquette plays an extraordinarily hairy woman who falls in love with Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins), a lonely scientist. Together, they teach the rules of 19th-century British society to a naked man they find in the woods, but their relationship deteriorates when Nathan begins dating his sex-bomb assistant (Miranda Otto) and when Puff (Rhys Ifans) discovers sexuality through the wonders of prostitution. Visually, the film is strikingly different than Kaufman's first.

"I met Michel through Spike," he says of his two directors. "They're good friends and admirers of each other, but I think that they're completely different when it comes to personality and style."

Having garnered the public's interest in a way few film writers ever have, Kaufman's invested in keeping his projects different. He has two more films slated for release this year. The first, Adaptation (also directed by Spike Jonze), is a semi-autobiographical movie about Kaufman's struggle to convert Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, into a script. "It depends on what you're interested in," he says of Orlean's work. "If you like natural history stuff it's good, if you don't, then probably not." The second, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, directed by George Clooney, is the screen version of Chuck Barris' cult biography, in which the author, gameshow host of The Dating Game and The Gong Show, claims he was a CIA hitman. If all movies were this interesting, America would be a much weirder place. And if there's commonality between the films, it's in how Kaufman writes relationships.

"I was sort of playing with romantic myths," Kaufman says of Human Nature. "There are all these movies that deal with the purity of the human being who's been raised outside of society, and I think that they're silly. One of my initial interests was to make fun of that, which is why Puff is not raised in the wilderness by an ape, but rather by an insane person. There's no purity anywhere -- we're all victims of our circumstances and upbringing."

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