Human Nature Newmarket script book
February 10, 2002
Writer Dave Franklin met with Charlie Kaufman on February 10, 2002, for the following interview.
Q: Why write Human Nature after Being John Malkovich? Is it a response to the first film?
My goal, after Malkovich, was to get right back to work. I didn’t want to wait around thinking about it, worrying about what was expected of me. I mean, Being John Malkovich was a big motherfucker to write. And it was received critically in a big motherfucking way, so I just felt I had to get in there and do something else, rather than be paralyzed by the notoriety. So I thought, shit, I’ll write a small movie and it’ll be about love, because I was falling in love at the time [with actress Mercedes Ruehl], and I wanted to celebrate that and at the same time look at relationships realistically. I wanted to do all this without the shackles of portals or head invasions or any of the surreal trappings of Malkovich. Because that was a cop-out, maybe.
Q: Head invasions were a cop-out?
Well, maybe not really. But it does change the landscape when you don’t allow yourself those indulgences. I don’t want to come out of the gate every time being the guy who does movies about portals or John Malkoviches or anything else, for that matter. I want each movie experience to be fresh and exciting. For me, and then for the audience.
Q: Was there a first idea or image that got you started with Human Nature?
Absolutely. It’s the moment when Lila buys that wetsuit. It was ultimately cut from the script, but that was the impetus for the whole project. I remember thinking about a woman, at the time she was called Aggie, going into a dressing room to try on a wetsuit. It was such a metaphorically ripe image for me. It was overripe, really, practically dripping with associations. And I saw the saleslady speaking to her through the dark burgundy curtain, saying, “Does it fit?,” which, I mean, I love that line: “Does it fit?” Now it’s not in the movie. I guess I’m going to use it in something else. The whole scene. Maybe I’ll resurrect the name Aggie, too, since I didn’t use it this time around either. Who knows?
Q: What about the title of the movie? How did that come about?
It was the second thing I thought of, after Aggie in the wetsuit. I don’t know. Human Nature. I guess I liked it because it was so motherfucking huge a concept. I mean, what is Human Nature? It’s every goddamn thing in the world. And I liked that. That spoke to me.
Q: You’ve been referred to as “a weirdo from weirdtown.” What does that mean?
[Laughs.] People have to label, y’know? I don’t know what the fuck it means. I do my work. I live a quiet life [with Ruehl and kids Topper and Lena], and I write. That’s it. If my imagination is particularly rich, that’s a positive thing. Maybe people just need to shoot down things that threaten them. I should do a movie about that. Personally, I don’t think of my work as weird. It seems true to me. This is how I see the world. So fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke, right? [Laughs.]
Q: What was it that attracted you to the idea of humans as animals in captivity?
I grew up on Salinger. I just loved him. I really related to his characters. And he had this book called Franny and Zooey. I was thinking about that at the time, not so much the book, but the title. The word Zooey really interested me mostly. I related to that name. I’d never known anyone with that name. I’d known a couple of Zoe’s. But no Zooey, who it turns out, if I remember correctly, was a guy. So I thought, guys in zoos. People in zoos. Then it occurred to me that we all really live in a zoo, if you want to think of human society as a zoo. And I guess it just snowballed from there, really. I thought maybe I had really come up with something. It was a heady time.
Q: For all its dark undercurrents, Being John Malkovich was a kick of a movie, very pleasure-filled. Why go so far into despair and darkness this time?
I was taken there by the subject matter. Y’know, these are very dark and despairing issues. Without going into too much personal detail, I was immersed the last few years in lots of sadness, some of it involving an actual feral person. And there’s nothing funny about it. I wasn’t going to mock it or diminish it by playing it for laughs. Sorry, but the audience is going to have to accept that. Or not. It’s complicated.
Q: Human Nature is packed with fascinating characters. Could we go through and talk about them one by one? Let’s start with Lila Jute.
I know and have known many women like that. Warm, troubled women, with body image problems. Struggling women who have that quirky cadence: begging for love with every utterance. Y’know? They break my heart and I love them dearly. I want to protect them. And as a cineast, it gave me a chance to flex those movie muscles that give voice to the eternal feminine in its uncorrupted form. This is no small feat in a business and culture that systematically devalues the feminine.
Q: Nathan Bronfman?
Long story short, I had been turned onto a cassette of two guys talking, saying things like, “We need to teach table manners to mice.” It turns out they were actually quoting a guy named R. Ronald Agnew, a sort of gonzo behavorial scientist who was actually doing this kind of research. Basically trying to destroy nature by controlling it.
And at the same time I was interested in the work of Scott Marcus, the animal trainer from Nashua, New Hampshire. Marcus was training elk to do fucking amazing things. Nobody could believe it: they were doing this tap dancing shit. But he was torturing them, y’know? And I thought, that’s so fucked. Anyway, he has these speech patterns and demeanor just like these guys I went to high school with. So I was just there immediately, y’know, just fascinated.
And around this same time I got a chance to go to the set of Arlington Road, and met Tim Robbins. You know. You never consider Tim Robbins for one of your movies the way you never consider becoming president of the United States. It just isn’t in the cards. But then Tim called me and I thought, oh, God, I really want to use this opportunity. It was such a fucking amazing opportunity and I went and ran with it, trying to create a role for Tim that would impress the shit out of him.
Is there a way Nathan is related to Craig in Being John Malkovich?
Probably so, in the sense of his being an outsider like Craig. And that both guys are trying to be puppeteers, in a way. Nathan with mice and also with Puff. Craig with puppets, which is, I guess, more of a literal way of being a puppeteer, but I see a correlation. In, like, controlling people. Or animals. It’s fucking brutal.
What about Puff? You mentioned him just now, so we maybe should go to him next.
I’ve always loved Spielberg’s portrayal of children. Only Salinger had been able to find that complexity. And when I saw Anna Pacquin in The Piano, I realized a kid could be so deep and fascinating. It was, like, a revelation, because normally you think of kids as just there, just things that play and cry. I wanted to investigate this new world.
Add to that all the pressure I felt with Malkovich coming out and all these people watching me and all my goddamn hours on the shrink’s couch being psychoanalyzed, and I’m thinking, God, I’m way too much of a kid myself to have this kind of pressure, to have to be in this position. But at the same time I wanted it so badly.
On top of that, I had recently met Mercedes, and she had told me this story about when she was a younger actress, just starting out, and she had to learn how to walk in some period costume, like a hoop skirt. She had never had any training in that and she had to, like, go through a “culture” boot camp, but after work, she just wanted to hang out in the woods. She was, like, motherfucking split in two directions. Here she was, this kid, this innocent, but she also knew she had to learn these things to be sophisticated, to be a great acrtress. And that’s what I ended up going for with Puff, that sense of a little kid, forced to grow up. He even dresses as Peter Pan in one scene.
And also, because Puff was so naïve and childlike at first, it gave me an opportunity to write really direct, basic, emotionally-clean lines, like “I am Puff,” which, y’know, is about as clean a thought as a character can express.
Gabrielle?
Well, in one way, Gabrielle is my homage to Charles Boyer [the late, great French actor] and his character in Anatole Litvak’s All This and Heaven Too, but I wanted her to be harder, tougher. And I really wanted to write something for Miranda Otto. I’d loved her work, and I wanted to shackle her. By giving her an accent to work with, it was forcing Miranda to be less eloquent and exact. I knew something beautiful would come from that and I was right. And it’s funny, because although I’ve written fucked-up fake French women before, and I will again, Gabrielle is the only one of my characters I truly hate. I loathe her, so much so that I needed to vanquish her to eternal torture at the end of the movie. I couldn’t have her getting away. So even though it looks like she’s getting away, you can see in her face that she’s ruined and she will spend the rest of her life searching in vain for even a moment’s peace. “Die, fucker,” I’m saying to her, in my way. Or rather, “Die, but don’t die, because I want to torture you forever.” There’s no forgiveness for the charcter of Gabrielle.
Louise?
It’s a study of the child actress grown up to be an electrologist. It’s “How did I get here?” It’s fucking sad and also very, very fucking true. It pains me.
Nathan’s Mom?
Yeah, Mrs. Bronfman. That one’s simple. Mary Kay Place played Floris in Malkovich. And we hung out a lot and she’s great. She gets cast often in kind of kooky roles, and I wanted her to play something closer to who she really is: a decent, warm, caring mother-type, who maybe cries too much at sappy TV movies. I wanted to bring that sweetness to Mary Kay’s part and that’s why I wrote the mother as I did. That character always makes cry. I love her.
Nathan’s Dad?
This came out of a time when Bob Forster and I were working together on a movie, and I was getting really screwed by the producers. We were just goofing around with a video camera, kind of just trying to ease the tension and sadness. Bob was pretending to be a 1950s father and it was hysterical - fucking amazing. That guy can act. And I wanted to use it, to do something with that character, but take it further, y’know? To take the stereotype of the father and show the loneliness, the true horror of his existence. What was it really like to live in the fifties? I had to find out. At the same time, I wanted to have Bob Forster in an ascot. I really wanted that. It was important to me as anything else in the script. But that’s an intuitive thing. I can’t defend it, except to say, watch the movie. I think I was right.
The cops?
I truly love the cops. My affection for them is just enormous. And I worry that there may be a lack of connection by the audience, because when you first see them, they’re interrogating Lila, who the audience adores. But I had an enormous desire to write those characters as truthfully as possible, because I have known cops. I’ve known so many cops over the years, and having seen representations of cops in the cinema before, I wanted to take it to a new level, to get some subtlety and truth in there- to get something that might have previously been lost on mass audiences. Of course they fight crime. That’s a given and a non-issue. What else? Dig deeper. What makes cops happy? What do they cry out during long, sweaty sleepless nights? How have the cops’ hearts been broken? So when the cops have trouble listening, really listening to Lila’s story, I want the audience to say, yes, they are incapable of hearing her pain and I know why.
I also wrote the parts for Ken Magee, Sy Richardson, and David Warshofsky. We’ve been friends forever. I wanted to write something great and star-making for them: I wanted to be their lovers, in a movie-making way. They turned out to be my favorite performances in the film.
Do you have any designs on directing?
[Long pause] This is the part of the interview where you’ll be writing “long pause” in brackets. [Laughs] Then you’ll be writing “laughs” because I just don’t know how to answer this. I am a writer, first and foremost… But as I think about it, I have to say I am a filmmaker first and foremost. And as a filmmaker, I have to consider taking the vision from its inception to its finish. Maybe this is the way to truly fulfill the promise of my scripts. Which is not to say I don’t value the work of the directors I’ve collaborated with. I do. They are fucking awesome motherfuckers. But I need to bring the rest of myself to the world. And I will.
How did you decide to make Bonnie Raitt’s songs a character in the film?
Bonnie is so fucking cool, and I wanted everyone to know that I think so. Specifically though, it’s that line from her song “Magic Hour”: “What does it mean to be civilized and how can I never, ever find out?” So much stemmed from that for me.
Bonnie’s songs are about the nature of love and the love of nature, the nature of nature, and the love of being in love. What the fuck else is there? [Laughs] Her lyrics are both tragic and uplifting and beautiful and nasty. And I wanted that in my movie. Bonnie is the person who turned me on to thinking about the big questions: What is life? Where is life? Why can’t we love well? It was Bonnie and Mercedes who taught me how fucking hard it is to be in love and how much it’s worth it. I love them both, and I want everyone to know. That’s why.
This must be related to the scene where all the characters begin singing along with one of Bonnie Raitt’s songs.
“Please Hurt Me” is the song and the line is “Please, for the love of God, show me the way.” I can absolutely remember the moment when I wrote that scene. I was going through some of my own shit then. Personal stuff that I won’t go into here. But I sat down to write it and all this stuff was coming together in the movie, and I just started to cry, as I was writing. Usually when you’re writing a scene it’s very technical: figuring out dialogue, punchlines, arcs, but I just thought, “All the characters have to sing here.” And so, fuck it, I just wrote it that way. As a cineast I can relate to that truth: people sing when they’re in trouble. They listen to their favorite song on the radio and they sing and the cry and it’s just raw and true. And I needed that in the film at that point. I needed it in my motherfucking life, too.
Of all things, why frogs?
Oh, the frogs falling from the sky! The question of the ages! [Laughs] Well, I just liked the idea. I read about it. It really happens! So that was the initial reason; it just seemed cool, but then as I thought about it, I realized how to fit it into my story. Because it’s like, if it’s raining frogs, then there’s no sense to anything. Nothing you believed to be true holds. And I wanted to look at that and, more importantly, force the audience to sit with that thought: that there is an irrationality to all of our lives and until something so out of the norm happens, we can’t see that. I want people to see it and think about it. And frogs are green, which is the color of nature. So in a way frogs represent the natural world and I’m saying, “Look, the natural world is falling the fuck on top of you. Look up, gaddamn it, and take notice.”
What made you decide to use sequences of weird historical coincidences as a framing device for the film?
It’s a promise. A promise to my audience. I’m saying, look at these stories. They’re all weird and bizarre and maybe true or maybe not, but, hey, if you give me four hours, I will give you a story just as weird and wonderful and amazing as these stories, because this stuff does happen in the world. Y’know? The world is bigger than we think.
Is the end of the film cathartic or unresolved? Is there some hope at the end of the day? Or will the sadness just go on and on?
For me it’s totally cathartic! It’s hope and wonderful and I cry whenever I see the movie for that reason. But of course it’s sad, too. And I cry about that as well. For Mercedes and me it’s important to look at the whole spectrum of feelings that any situation creates. Love is great, but it’s also hard as shit. It’s a lot of work and sweaty and embarrassing. But the surrender to it is so beautiful. What else is there, really?
The problem with traditional movies is they usually have to have it one way or the other: happy or sad. For those people who need it, we have a happy ending, but for people who want to look deeper, the movie is saying, yes, love is real, but the road to it is complicated and you’re going to make terrible messes along the way and you need to go on anyway.
My goal in my work is to show that motherfucking paradox, because I believe that it is in this paradix that you find life. That is what my work, at least at this point, is really all about. It’s complicated, y’know? Life is fucking complicated. Too many filmmakers don’t want to deal with that. They want to dumb down their vision for mass consumption. Listen, I don’t think it’s an accident that film is an art form that utilizes a lens. Filmmakers are the eyes of a society. We see and we reflect. We need to show what is wrong and painful. But a true lens is all encompassing; it also shows all the motherfucking hope and beauty in the world.