Associated Press
17 December, 1999
Being John Malkovich began with being Charlie Kaufman.
The screenwriter responsible for one of the year's most inventive films - featuring a portal to Malkovich's head - displays no clear path for anyone to get inside his own head, though.
A shy guy, he even blocks the road to taking his photo. He looks like he isn't comfortable inside his own head and skin. And if you ask him, he readily admits, "No. No, I'm not."
Without hesitating, he adds: "I have my own problems... at some level you write about what you're thinking about... I'm not a particularly well-adjusted person."
As to why he picked Malkovich instead of "Being (Just About Anyone Else)," he obliquely answers: "I don't know. Like everything else in the script, I wanted to keep it at that level: if this is funny to me, or if this is interesting to me, or if this is scary to me, then I want to put it in the script. And that's what I did. And if there was going to be a portal into someone's brain, it seemed right that it would be Malkovich to me."
Kaufman had written for several TV shows including The Dana Carvey Show, Get A Life and Ned and Stacey, and hoped the Being John Malkovich script would get him some screenwriting work. Beyond that: "I wasn't trying to please anybody."
He began writing it five years ago as a story about three lonely, desperate people. Then Kaufman came up with the idea of a portal into Malkovich's skull, where after a 15-minute visit people are dumped bodily onto the New Jersey Turnpike.
"When I wrote it, I didn't expect John Malkovich ever to see this thing," the screenwriter said during a recent interview. "When I found out that he read it and liked it, I was really thrilled. That was enough of a thrill for me. I wasn't a working screenwriter at the time, you know. I was just sitting in my room writing. So I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted."
Said John Cusack, who stars in the film: "Only a person who never thought a movie could get made would write... like that."
Cusack plays street puppeteer Craig Schwartz, a man so frustrated by his starving-artist aspirations that he finally takes an office job.
The first inklings that things are going to get weird for him are the location and shape of his new workplace - it's on the 7th floor and has ceilings so low that everyone has to walk stooped over. "Low overhead, m' boy," his new boss explains.
"A lot of the sets were kind of this strange Charlie Kaufman fun house," said Cusack, who joked that chiropractors were on the set and you could hear the snap-crackle-pop of backs being adjusted.
Craig quickly becomes smitten with a co-worker, the icy Maxine (indie queen Catherine Keener), who tells the puppeteer: "You're not someone I can get interested in. You play with dolls."
Once he finds the portal behind a filing cabinet, however, she gets interested in him, but only as a business partner. She wants to sell time inside Malkovich's head.
And once he introduces Maxine to his wife (an amazingly dowdy, brunette Cameron Diaz), the two women become enamored of each other and devise a way to use Malkovich to consummate their desires.
Kaufman's script manages to blend such issues as mortality, reincarnation, emotional manipulativeness, love triangles and transsexuality, while making great sport of Malkovich's public persona: self-serious, scary, unapproachable, accomplished and admired for playing sometimes damaged or demented characters.
At one point in the movie someone challenges the opinion that Malkovich is a great actor: "Oh, yeah, what's he been in?" The tentative response: "Lots of things."
Malkovich - a two-time Academy Award nominee (for In the Line of Fire and Places in the Heart) - even does a rather silly, self-mocking Dance of Despair and Disillusionment. And when he takes the portal to his own mind, we get to see a hilarious though creepy All-Malkovich-All-The-Time World.
"I like to be mocked," Malkovich said during interviews to promote the movie.
Still, he initially was leery about making the movie. He first heard about the script from Francis Ford Coppola. The Godfather director asked Malkovich to meet with Spike Jonze, the noted video/commercial director who's engaged to Coppola's daughter Sofia, because Jonze wanted to direct Kaufman's screenplay.
Within a couple days, Malkovich and Jonze met in Paris.
Malkovich was concerned that it "crossed the line" - the line being invasion of privacy - but decided to go ahead anyway.
He liked how the movie made fun of him, adding: "If I would have said no, A.) it would run the risk of being for the wrong reasons, really, and B.) it would have meant this really original, kind of inventive thing not being done."
Now that Kaufman's seen one of his screenplays produced, he has three others in development.
Even though he's not particularly comfortable in his own skin, Kaufman warns against reading any great moral into the tale - such as, people should like "Being Themselves."
"People have their problems and their problems are their problems, and they're real," he said. "It's very important to me that I don't try to teach people things with my work. I don't feel like I have the authority to do that; I don't feel like I have anything to say in that regard, about how to live a better life or be happier."
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