Star Tribune
April 17 2002
Move over, Coen brothers. Step aside, Terry Gilliam. The title of Quirkiest Minnesota Expatriate in the Film Industry has a new owner: Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.
He staked his claim to the crown in his delirious debut, 1999's metaphysical farce "Being John Malkovich," which ripped the conventional screenplay template into so much confetti.
The film followed a woebegone puppeteer (John Cusack) who mounts street-corner shows such as "The Dance of Despair and Disillusionment." While working a drab day job in an office building's cramped 7 1/2th floor ("can't beat the low overhead") he discovers a portal that plops him temporarily inside the body of actor John Malkovich. He begins selling 15-minute Malkovich rides to curiosity seekers.
Kaufman's followup, "Human Nature," which opened Friday, is an equally mind-boggling tale of adultery, electrolysis and the afterlife starring Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette and Rhys Ifans.
A soft-spoken Long Island, N.Y., native, Kaufman lived in Minneapolis during the late 1980s before moving to Los Angeles in 1991, with no job and no prospects. The discombobulated "Malkovich" screenplay, which he created as a writing sample, landed him a position on the Fox-TV sitcom "Get a Life," starring Chris Elliott as a 30-year-old paperboy living above his parents' St. Paul garage.
Then, unexpectedly, "Malkovich" sold. Astonishingly, Kaufman was nominated for an Oscar and the movie mavens who frequent the Internet Movie Database voted "Malkovich" one of the 100 best films ever made. Suddenly hotter than a rock in a camp fire, his next two screenplays attracted such heavy hitters as Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Steven Soderbergh, Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep.
Kaufman has parlayed his impishly inventive comic vision into a rare degree of creative control. Rather than pursue lucrative script-doctor assignments or TV development deals, he is using his clout to defend his work. He shepherded "Human Nature" from first draft to final cut as producer to shield it from studio interference ("Malkovich" was abridged by one-third). He also produced the upcoming "Adaptation," in which Cage plays a self-loathing loser screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman.
The 30-ish Kaufman prefers to avoid cameras, keep his personal life private and remain as enigmatic as his movies. In Variety's list of "Ten Scribes to Watch" in 1999, he was the only one not pictured. When Esquire staged a group portrait of top screenwriters, his name was prominent, but again he declined to be photographed. With "Human Nature" now in theaters nationwide, he agreed to discuss his unexpected success, fear of failure, and the influence of the Twin Cities bus system on his work in a wide-ranging interview.
Q: How does it feel to be on your second project and have it called "the new Charlie Kaufman film"? That's an unusual position for a writer.
A: There are so many people who worked on the picture that I'm not sure I want to take that credit. I don't like it when directors get that much credit so I don't want to take it myself.
Q: When you're writing a peculiar story like "Human Nature," do you make an effort to be very descriptive and clear about the way you see things happening?
A: Yes, descriptive, and also I try to write in a way that creates a certain mood that hopefully will translate so the actors, the director and the cinematographer can understand what I'm thinking. It's a way of influencing people without their knowing it.
Q: When you were introducing the character Patricia Arquette plays [a woman with overabundant body hair] how did you describe her?
A: Very simply that she was covered with hair. But it became a problem when we actually had to implement it. Our big concern was that this could become a joke or a horror-show kind of thing. We wanted people to be with the character, sympathetic with her. So we did a lot of tests with Patricia.
Q: Do you begin with any kind of a plan or do you start with ideas that you chase wherever they lead you?
A: That's what I do. I also have different ideas that I kind of marry. I don't know where it's going to go but it forces me to think in a new direction. How do you get these two things in the same movie? I don't necessarily start with scenes but a tone in my head that I can't quite articulate and I know I want to do a movie that feels like this.
Q: Does that make it difficult to know when you've told your story and when it's over? "Human Nature" has a couple of false starts and false endings.
A: Yeah. It makes it difficult but it also makes it more interesting for me. You feel like it's going to potentially surprise other people.
Q: How do you get the money men to buy into such an off-kilter sensibility in an industry where there's such pressure to be safe and by the book?
A: I don't really try. I write the things, and people are interested or they're not. It took a while for both "Malkovich" and "Human Nature." People were interested but no one wanted to make them. Then suddenly it happened. I'm not out there networking or anything.
Q: In your upcoming film "Adaptation" [which takes absurd liberties with Susan Orlean's nonfiction bestseller "The Orchid Thief"] I understand you had an uncomfortable encounter with the author.
A: Yeah. I didn't meet with her and it was the last day of the shoot, so I went to the set. And she did, too. I heard that she was coming and I was really nervous. She came by and I think was surprised to see me. It was awkward.
Q: She told me that she was a little disturbed by what your screenplay showed that you knew about her. For example, that when she goes to a bar she always orders champagne. She wondered whether you had set spies on her or if you had stalked her.
A: No! That's so weird. I think Spike [Jonze, the film's director] wanted her to be drinking champagne. Maybe Spike sent spies after her. I didn't!
Q: What were your Twin Cities years like?
A: I lived there for about 4 1/2 years and I worked at the Star Tribune in the circulation department.
Q: Is that the inspiration for the 7 1/2th floor?
A: That was so many jobs I had. But, yeah, that was one of them. I would take missed-newspaper calls at 5 in the morning. It was a hard job, especially in the winter. I'd get up at 4 and take the bus downtown. It was freezing and everybody looked really sad on the bus. I worked at the art institute as well. I was the person who said "The museum will be closing in 15 minutes" over the loudspeaker.
Q: What was your first job in Los Angeles and how long did it take to establish yourself?
A: I got myself an agent and moved out to L.A. during hiring season [when cast and crew are assembled for TV series.] I got nothing. Not even interviews. Then all of a sudden I got one phone interview from a guy who was doing a show in Minneapolis with Fred Willard [the Comedy Central series "Access America," which featured clips from community-access TV shows around the country]. He hired me over the phone.
I was really disappointed because coming out to L.A. was my last-ditch effort to get into show business. But I thought, "OK, I've got a writing job that's better than anything I've had before. I'm going to move back to Minneapolis. I'm going to make that my home." My wife, Denise, was still out there waiting to see what would happen. And I was packing up to head home in my 1980 Jetta, which had no air conditioning, was falling apart and all rusted out from Minneapolis.
Then I got a call from David Mirkin [the creator of "Get a Life," who presided over the surreal final seasons of "Newhart" and served a stint on "The Simpsons"]. He liked my script. I told him I was heading home and he said, "Don't." He didn't hire me but I trusted him. I had to give up the Minneapolis job in order to wait around. I called up Bo and I told him I wasn't going to take it, and then I got hired on "Get a Life." I almost didn't live out here [in L.A.]. I do think everything that happened since is a result of that because I wouldn't have tried again.
Q: You were lucky to be working on that show, because it had a surreal slant, well suited to your point of view.
A: It was my favorite TV job, definitely. I didn't have good jobs after that for the most part. Because there was nothing else like that, with the exception of "The Simpsons," which didn't ever hire me.
Q: Meanwhile, the "Malkovich" script was your calling card?
A: Yes. I wrote it just to get assignment work. I never thought anyone was going to make it. Then Malkovich read it and liked it, which I was very happy about, and I thought that was as far as it was going to go. And it was, for a couple of years. Then it kind of came together.
Q: In "Human Nature" Patricia Arquette sings two songs in praise of her excess body hair. Were those fun to write?
A: I was pleased with "diabolical" and "follicle." I felt like I had done my work after that and I could relax.
Q: Do you worry that people are going to say, "Well, this has got the Kaufman signature. It's got the little people in it and the depressive husband and the maritally disgruntled wife who's mad for monkeys, and all those touches. He's repeating himself."
A: People have pointed out the monkey thing and I -- it's the kind of thing where you have certain tendencies and you find -- "Malkovich" and "Human Nature" were written around the same time quite a while ago, so there's no monkey -- actually, there is a monkey in "Adaptation!" [He laughs.] But I'm staying away from monkeys from now on. I learned my lesson.
Q: You've got a second adaptation coming up, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," the autobiography of "Gong Show" host Chuck Barris in which he claims to have been a CIA killer. You drastically distorted the material in "The Orchid Thief." How about the Chuck Barris story?
A: Chuck Barris distorted that material. He did that work for me. I just kind of went with it. He treats the idea that he was an assassin very straight-faced.
And I don't know that it was an exaggeration. I suspect it might be but I don't know. It did give me a certain freedom to fix things or alter things to help the story. If I were doing a straightforward autobiography, I wouldn't have felt comfortable. It's a weird thing to put yourself inside the head of an actual person and pretend that you have any authority to do that. One of the things I did with Susan Orlean's book is pointing to the fact that I'm doing that. That there is artifice here.
Q: In "Adaptation" you present yourself as the main character in wildly fictionalized form: fat, bald, pretentious and a writer of negligible imagination.
A: It's not necessarily as wildly fictionalized as you might think.
Q: Was there a point where "Adaptation" was a more straight adaptation and then you trashed your work and started over again?
A: Yes. The story of the movie is pretty much what happened. I was hired to write an adaptation of her book and I kind of struggled with it. I really loved the book and I really wanted to do something that was not just weird. I get a lot of weird offers. I liked this book, and it was about something, so I took it and thought I would work in my usual way and find a way to do it as I went along. But I was under a time limitation and I started to get blocked so I decided I would write about that. It seemed to tie into the notion of adaptation in the evolutionary sense, which is part of what the book's about.
I didn't tell the studio people because I was afraid that if they said no I would be stuck. I was panicked the whole time -- I was afraid I was really going to ruin my career. So I turned it in and they didn't know what the hell they were getting. And they liked it.
Q: Sometimes there's no better springboard than fear.
A: I find that often.
(Source)