San Francisco Examiner
April 9 2002
The last time I interviewed a screenwriter promoting a movie in San Francisco -- not an actor or a director but a pure meat-and-potatoes screenwriter -- was in 1998. And even then, the writer lived in Berkeley and only had to take a quick trip across the bridge.
Why after five years has another screenwriter made the trip? Because this one is different from all the others. When he wrote his first produced screenplay he did something unusual -- he wrote it for himself. He never expected anyone to make it into a movie. And what's more, if a single actor had turned down a certain role, the whole thing would have vanished.
The result was "Being John Malkovich," which was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar and won countless other awards. It was such an original, outrageous film, so full of throwaway ideas, that Hollywood took notice. So now writer Charlie Kaufman's second film, "Human Nature," is being billed as "from the creators of 'Being John Malkovich.'" ("Malkovich" director Spike Jonze acts as producer on "Human Nature" as well.)
Like "Malkovich," "Human Nature" also explores several bizarre themes and crosses them with each other in unusual ways.
In the film, a young woman (Patricia Arquette) begins growing hair all over her body and retreats to the woods to write nature books. When she gets lonely (and horny) she goes back to civilization and meets a scientist (Tim Robbins) whose studies include teaching table manners to mice. On a hiking trip in the woods, they meet Puff (Rhys Ifans) a man whose father thought he was an ape and raised him in the wild.
It gets more and more twisted and is complicated by the fact that the film is narrated by three characters: one in police custody, and one testifying before Congress and one dead.
Merging disparities
As might be expected, Kaufman comes across as a little eccentric in person. He has declined to have his photo taken, and will not tell me his age. Even the "Human Nature" official Web site lists little more than his screenwriting credits.
He sports a thick head of curly hair and the thin, long arms and fingers of a piano player or a typist. It's not hard to see that he's uncommonly intelligent and a little shy. Throughout most of our talk his gaze travels between his shoes and the carpet.
He talks about winning various movie awards for his "Being John Malkovich" screenplay, but not winning the Oscar (he lost to Alan Ball's "American Beauty"). "It was actually good for me because I didn't have to go up there. In England (for the BAFTA awards) I had to go up and make a speech and I was really bad at it. I was so nervous. I could hear my voice shaking. And the British audiences are not very demonstrative, so there was no good will coming up toward me. So I was glad not to have to do that in front of the many billion people who watch the Academy Awards."
Kaufman now has to deal with another kind of attention, the kind that comes from critics and movie people who want to know what kind of a storyteller he is, combing through "Malkovich" and "Human Nature," looking for similarities. Already one critic has found a link in the works relating to the connection between human identity and the human body.
"I don't like to know myself," he says. "I don't want to know that kind of stuff when I'm writing. Now that I know, I'm going to have to start thinking about other things. I try to do different things every movie and take on different challenges, but if it comes out the same, then I guess that's just who I am."
He continues: "'Being John Malkovich' was at least two different movies that I was thinking of that I put together. I like to collaborate with myself. I take ideas that don't go together and try to figure it out. It forces me to figure out a new way to do something."
Work is never far away
Kaufman already has two more films in the works, both of which seem to blur the line between reality and fiction. The first, "Adaptation," to be directed by Spike Jonze, began as an attempt to adapt the novel "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean, and ended up as a story about the process of adapting a novel into a screenplay with Kaufman and Orlean as the movie's main characters (to be played by Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep).
The other is an adaptation of game show creator/host Chuck Barris' autobiography, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," in which he claims to have been an assassin for the CIA and only worked on "The Gong Show" as a cover-up. (George Clooney is directing with Sam Rockwell playing Barris.) Kaufman reminds me that "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" does not really constitute a mixture of reality and fiction, because there's no proof of either in Barris' book.
Though Kaufman doesn't like to discuss his private life, he does talk a little about his writing routine. He began working as part of a creative committee on TV shows like "Get a Life," and eventually graduated to writing with a partner. Now he writes alone, or "in collaboration with myself," as he describes it.
He works in an office in his home, and refuses to structure his day with specific breaks for lunch and business meetings. "I can't work like that," he says.
On a typical day, Kaufman might "go out for walks, but I work while I walk, so the walks are good. The danger is taking phone calls and chatting on the phone, or reading the newspaper for a few hours. I'm not very disciplined. But I think about stuff all the time, which is kind of a downside. It's never out of my head. Working at home kind of contributes to that, because you're never out of your office. When does the day end?"
Most writers have horror stories about bonehead producers who try to change their work to fit a demographic or to copy some other hit movie's formula. But Kaufman says he doesn't really have any stories like that to tell.
"Writers don't really get a lot of respect, but I've been lucky. I've worked with good people. It took a while to get where I am and it probably won't last very long, but it's good for now."
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