Articles

(KAUFMAN sweats)

In Focus
April 2002
by Mike Russell

Charlie Kaufman’s staring down the barrel of a big year. The writer behind 1999's instant cult classic “Being John Malkovich” returns to cinemas in 2002 with three more productions forged from his aggressively offbeat scripting.

The Year of Kaufman kicks off in April with the Fine Line release of “Human Nature,” a comedy centering around three troubled characters: a feral man dubbed “Puff” (played by “Notting Hill” scene-stealer Rhys Ifans) who thinks he’s an ape; the repressed scientist (Tim Robbins) who “civilizes” him; and a self-loathing nature writer (Patricia Arquette) with extraordinary body-hair issues. Like “Malkovich,” it’s a tale filled with absurd grace notes – mice trained to use forks and knives, an ape-man testifying before Congress, a heroic pistol-wielding dwarf and the like.

Next up is Sony’s “Adaptation,” directed by “Malkovich” helmer Spike Jonze. Kaufman initially intended to craft a straightforward adaptation of New Yorker scribe Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief,” but soon found he couldn’t spin a script out of the story of a man obsessed with a particular type of flower. His solution? To write one of the most audacious pieces of narcissism this side of “Stardust Memories” – the tale of a writer named “Charlie Kaufman” (played by Nicolas Cage) who can’t spin a script out of “The Orchid Thief.” The absurd grace notes here are simultaneously more self-involved and more disturbing – with the movie’s sad, fat, sweaty, balding “Kaufman” ultimately stalking “Susan Orlean” (Meryl Streep) and losing complete control of his creative process. (The movie’s “Kaufman” even has a dopey [and, in real life, fictitious] twin brother – also played by Cage – who’s trying to write a formulaic serial-killer movie.)

Finally, Miramax will release Kaufman’s adaptation of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” Long considered one of the great unproduced Hollywood screenplays, it’s based on game-show host Chuck Barris’ memoir of the same title – in which the “Gong Show” emcee claims to have secretly moonlighted as a CIA assassin. George Clooney, who plays Barris’ mysterious CIA overseer in the film, also directs.

Although his seemingly out-of-nowhere success with “Malkovich” makes Kaufman seem like some sort of arriviste, he actually scrabbled into “the biz” the old-fashioned way – struggling to get an agent’s attention for over a year, then working in television comedy for another seven. (Among his TV-writing credits are episodes of “Ned and Stacey,” Chris Elliott’s landmark sitcom “Get A Life,” and the short-lived “Dana Carvey Show.”) His scripts for “Malkovich” and “Confessions” floated around Hollywood for years – legends of the movie development community, deemed brilliant but too “edgy” – before Jonze and Clooney, respectively, finally nudged them into the green light.

Here’s what Kaufman has to say about all that.

There are moments in your “Human Nature” screenplay that reject the value of the spoken word. One of the movie’s best scenes is the one where Puff’s saying, haltingly and with total disgust, “…Words..!”
Uh-huh.

I mean, I don’t really need to point out the irony, given your career.
[Laughs] Well, I wasn’t exactly making fun of words – I was also kind of making fun of the idea of these movies that make fun of the idea of civilization – you know, all this sort of “wild-child,” “human-nature-is-pure” stuff I was having a bit of fun with. I wouldn’t write something sincerely about that theme, because I think everything is quite a bit more complicated than that. I think that whole “if we were more like our pure selves, we’d be fine” theme is kind of silly.

Did you write the man-ape character “Puff” with Rhys Ifans in mind? He’s phenomenal in the movie.
No, not at all – in fact, the audition process was really extensive. I mean, we went through a lot of people, because Puff has to be everything – he has to go from this very primitive person to this very sophisticated person. There were different actors who were really strong in different areas, but Rhys was strong and funny all the way across the spectrum.

He’d be saying these elaborate sentences, but they’d almost seem layered over this primal veneer.
We were trying for that. He’s a tremendous actor – and a really sweet guy, too.

And apparently not afraid to walk around naked.
Nope. He was game. There are so many things that Puff had to deliver on that could have made for a disaster. Little things that you wouldn’t even think about when you’re writing a script – like the idea that this grown man has to appear in a diaper. How do you do that without it just being horrifying to look at? And you couldn’t do that with a lot of actors, just because of their sense of self, you know? And because Rhys was so comfortable with it, it just became acceptable – and not even ridiculous.

And no actor will ever find a better way to deliver the line, “Apes do not kill their presidents, gentlemen!”
[Laughs] Yeah. He’s great in the Congress scenes.

You’ve talked in other interviews about wanting to bring “respect” to all the characters you write, even the strangest ones. How do you cultivate that respect for an artificially cultured man-ape?
Well, the respect is more like, “What is their struggle – and how do you make that sincere?” You know, even if it’s a comedy, to the people who are going through what they’re going through in the movie, it’s not a comedy.

Puff is a terribly manipulated human being from the beginning – his father is insane and raises him as an ape, you know? You can’t get more manipulated than that. And then he’s manipulated throughout the movie by everybody – including Patricia’s character. So I have a lot of sympathy for Puff. He’s tortured.

And I think Nathan – Tim Robbins’ character – is, too. In a lot of people’s eyes, Nathan is the least sympathetic character – but I never felt that way about him. He’s also manipulated and tortured – by his family, and by his parents, and by his insecurities.

How do you get an actress like Patricia Arquette to do all the crazy stuff she does in this movie? She’s walking through the woods naked, covered with unsightly body hair, singing and climbing through the trees …
You know, that’s probably a question for Patricia, not for me. She really liked the project and was committed to it from the beginning – that was an enormous help in getting financing. I know that she wanted to work with [director] Michel Gondry – she’d done a Rolling Stones video with him a few years earlier.

She’s very courageous, you know? Big-name actresses just don’t do naked any more.
Courageous in a bunch of ways – because not only was she naked, she was also covered with hair in a way people might consider unflattering. Not that – I didn’t think that – I mean, we all were so amazed with the actual beauty of it when she, uh –

She’s quite stunning in that body-fur getup.
Yeah. Which was important to us – not that the hair be “beautiful,” but we didn’t want to be mocking of the character, because we don’t feel that way about her, so we didn’t want people to laugh at her. So it was kind of a makeup issue, figuring out how best to portray this.

How’d you come to settle upon “Human Nature”’s director, Michel Gondry? He’s most famous on these shores for directing Bjork [which the interviewer mispronounced “Bork”] videos.
Not “Bork.” Bee-york. Robert Bork never starred in any music videos as far as I know. I met Michel though Spike. I was really impressed with his music videos and his commercials. They’re beautiful.

I was very pleased to see some of the same obviously artificial, gorgeous, creepy “nature” effects in “Human Nature” that I’d seen in Bjork’s “Human Behaviour” music video.
Yeah, a lot of rear-screen kind of stuff. He’s ingenious that way.

How much of that artifice is a function of budget and how much is your conscious approach to the material?
“Human Nature’s” not a big-budget movie by any stretch of the imagination – but I’m not sure it would be less expensive to shoot in a real forest than it was to mount this big rear-screen stuff, which is complicated … If we shot on a soundstage and we didn’t want you to know, you wouldn’t know.

Is “Human Nature” your first producing gig?
I was an executive producer in name on “Malkovich,” but yeah – it’s my first producer gig.

As producer, did you see your main job as protecting your director’s vision or protecting your script?
Well, I wanted to be a producer because I wanted to protect my script. Which isn’t to say I had any doubts about Michel at all – it’s just that, you know, as a writer, you find out pretty quickly that you’re not the king of the hill. The director is.

But I felt at the same time it was important that Michel have the freedom to do his work, and so I didn’t get in his way. I mean, during production I was just almost not even there. I came around, but I didn’t talk.

Well, that’s one way of dealing with it.
Well, yeah – because it’s not healthy for the production for there to be two voices on the set. So if Michel and I would have any issues, I would talk to him afterwards, privately. He did what he wanted, and I was certainly happy with it.

Have you noticed an evolution in the way executives react to your material now, since “Being John Malkovich” was such a success?
Oh, sure. There’s no question that I’m in a better place. The thing is, before “Malkovich” came out, I still had a good reputation because of “Malkovich.” There was interest in me.

You were known among development people.
Yeah. Everyone had read the script. I was offered “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” before “Malkovich” was even made. But it was always kind of like, “Well, people love this script” – and I was told this a lot in television, too – “but no one will ever make it.” I’ve been told that a lot. When “Malkovich” was made and it got the critical acclaim that it got, it certainly opened people up to possibilities for that kind of work.

I was going to ask how you kept from despairing during that “This will never get made” period, but I suppose getting a nice TV-writing paycheck helped.
Yeah, I’m sure it did. And I was just thrilled that people really liked this stuff. That was sort of enough. But I didn’t have any expectations that “Malkovich” would ever get made. By the time that Single Cell produced it and Spike came along, it was sort of a surprise.

Is it possible to be typecast as a writer of quote-unquote “weird” scripts?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, people send me “quirky” ideas a lot. And that’s in quotes, because a lot of them aren’t things that I’m interested in, but they fall into that sort of “quirky” realm – “weird” ideas or “weird” people or “weird” biopics.

I don’t think it’s affected me that much because I really haven’t taken that much new work on since all this happened. So I haven’t felt typecast that way.

Still, on some level, “Adaptation” reads as kind of your response to that sort of typecasting.
Well, there is an element of that. I mean, “The Orchid Thief” – the great book that the screenplay’s based on – isn’t “quirky” in that way. I liked that the book was about flowers – and I had no idea going in how I would make that into a movie, but the challenge interested me: There’s not much of a plot in the book, but the natural-history stuff that she was writing about fascinated me, and I also liked the character that [author] Susan Orlean was following around, this John Laroche guy.

The toothless, insanely obsessed guy who moves from obsession to obsession.
Yeah, exactly. So it wasn’t necessarily a response to [typecasting], but I wanted to do it because it wasn’t like anything I’d done before and that interested me.

At some point, “Adaptation” becomes this sort of very self-devouring loop – in the sense that, at the beginning, the “Kaufman” character in the movie takes on the assignment to adapt “The Orchid Thief,” but the rings of self-reference wind closer and closer – until we have the character based on you following around the character based on Susan Orlean and we’re literally seeing the filming of this moment as the Kaufman character is writing it. There’s like three layers of self-reference there. Did you have a moment like that where adapting “The Orchid Thief” went off the rails for you personally?
Yeah. Definitely. The reason I decided to do it that way was because I couldn’t … . I mean, the movie is about failure. And frustration. That’s what I was feeling. I didn’t know how to write it – so I thought I’d write about not knowing how to write it.

And I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell the studio, because at that point I didn’t know any other way to do it, and I was certain they would say, “No – what are you talking about? This isn’t what we hired you to do.” But I had to turn something in, and it was scary. I felt like when I turned it in that I was going to be blacklisted. [Laughs] You know, “I took these people’s money and then I turned in this nonsense.” And self-indulgence! I mean, I put myself in – what was that?

You put yourself in and a fictitious twin brother. You put yourself in twice.
Maybe fictitious. Donald. My brother Donald … . And they liked it, and they wanted to make it.

What was that week like between turning in the script and finding out they liked it?
I was terrified when I turned it in and relieved when they liked it. It’s probably not as dramatic as it would seem. The terror part of it is always stronger for me than the relief, so it’s sort of what I remember of it. Once they accepted it, I wasn’t jumping up and down or anything. I don’t do that much. Fortunately.

You know, I have to ask you the question that you’re probably going to get asked a jillion times: What the hell did Susan Orlean think of all this?
She’s happy with it, as far as I know. You know, she came around and she met with the producers and the director, and she seems to be very supportive. I can’t speak for her, but I’m sure she’s happy that the movie’s getting made. She certainly hasn’t objected.

Having Meryl Streep play Orlean probably helps. And Nicolas Cage is playing you.
He’s really, really wonderful in it, and he plays two characters, which is a difficult thing, because they’re in scenes together often – he’s acting with himself, separating and delineating the characters in a very subtle way.

Did he gain weight?
He gained a little weight – probably not as much as the character needed to, but you know he has … prosthetic help.

Did he do the actor thing where he met with you and said, “I want to get inside your head”?
Uh … . He did meet with me a few times, and I know that’s what he wanted to do, but he was very respectful about it and very subtle about it. He asked me questions, and I guess he “observed” me – but not in any way that made me uncomfortable.

And he isn’t really playing “me,” because the Kaufman character isn’t even really physically like me – so that gave him some freedom and license to do his own thing. But there’s certainly mannerisms and things I see when I watch the movie that I recognize. [Laughs] So.

It’s kind of a shame that the recurring script direction in “Adaptation” – “Kaufman sweats” – won’t be in the movie. That kept cracking me up.
[Laughs] There’s a lot of that.

Does Mr. Cage, in fact, sweat a lot in “Adaptation”?
He sweats a bit. Maybe he doesn’t sweat as much as he does in the script. There’s some sweating going on.

One comes away from reading descriptions of the “Kaufman” character in the movie thinking of someone like, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Oh, yeah, yeah.

And talking to you, you don’t sound at all like this self-loathing character in the script.
Uh-huh. [Laughs] I have that element to my personality. You’re just not hearing it now. It’s all interior-monologue stuff.

The Kaufman character emerges from “Adaptation” profoundly changed. Did writing “Adaptation” change you? Did it mark an evolution point in your writing?
[Pause] I don’t know.

It almost reads like a chapter stop in your …
Well, it’s intended to feel like that. Without getting into too much detail about what happens in the movie, the script’s intended to play with that notion. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, it changes your life when you finish something because you’ve finished it and you don’t have to do it anymore. [Laughs] Other than that, I’m not sure.

What did you bring to “Human Nature” from your TV-writing days?
I don’t know. I don’t feel like TV was a training ground for me so much as it was a job and an opportunity to write. As my first professional experience, it gave me a certain confidence. I was a pretty shy person going in, and it’s a very public way of writing. You’re with a group of people in a room pitching ideas, basically.

Yeah, that’s brutal.
It’s brutal, and it’s not my personality, and I survived it. It’s very competitive, and you’re writing on really hard deadlines. And it was hard after a while.
Before I got my first job, which was on “Get A Life” – I mean, immediately before that – I was answering telephones in an art museum in Minnesota. I remember when I went on the lot at “Get A Life,” I had a parking spot with my name on it, you know? [Laughs] It was wild. And I was driving this beat-up 1980 Jetta, which I’d driven from Minnesota, that had no air-conditioning. And it was all rusted out, because all cars from Minnesota are.

It must have felt like quite a validation when “Get A Life” became this sort of cult hit and several episodes were collected on VHS.
You know, “Get A Life” is my favorite show that I worked on, and it was my first show. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I’d come out here during the hiring season, and I didn’t have any money, and I really had avoided L.A. for a long time because I was terrified of it. And I was out here for two months, and I didn’t get any interviews. I was heading back to Minnesota when I got called in for “Get A Life,” and met with David Mirkin, the executive producer. I’d gotten one other job offer, for a bloopers-type show with Fred Willard as the host, that was shooting in Minneapolis. And Mirkin told me, “Don’t go back to Minneapolis.”

Had I gone back, I don’t think I’d be doing any of this – because I wouldn’t have come out here again. I just wouldn’t have. That was it.

And you really had to hound your agent for quite some time before that, correct?
For years I’d send things to agents and not get any kind of response. And I just decided at one point that I was going to be a television writer, so I got an agent who agreed to read my stuff – and I decided I was going to be tenacious.

Every time the agent said he was going to read it in a week, he wouldn’t – but it gave me permission in my mind to call. So I’d call every time at the end of the week. And this went on for over a year.

[Laughs] Oh, my God. Fifty-two calls!
At least, yeah. Finally, I was just so frustrated, I said to the assistant, “Look – is there somebody else you recommend who might be willing to read this, so I can start this process all over again?” And the agent got on the phone – the first time I’d ever spoken to him. And he said, “Charles, I’m going to read it this weekend.” And of course he didn’t. But it gave me permission to keep calling. Two months later, he read it and he liked it.

That’s what it takes.
The only advice I’ve ever given anybody – because it’s the only advice I feel sure of, and the only advice I wouldn’t have listened to myself – is that you’ve got to be persistent. Because the hardest thing is getting anyone’s attention. Once you’ve done that, it’s much easier.

I’ve read what you have to say in “Adaptation” about people who try to give advice on formula script structure.
You know, if that’s your goal as a writer, I’m not judging it. It’s just that, for me, it doesn’t serve my purpose – which is that I’d like to do something that’s challenging or risky or that I don’t feel has been done or haven’t seen done before. I feel like I’m doing something then … . The risk of failure is important.

Well, using the horrible segue, “Speaking of failure … .” You wrote a series of TV pilots that didn’t air. What were they about?
There were a bunch of different ones. I wrote something called “Depressed Roomies,” which was about two guys who live in a tenement apartment, and…. Well, it’s kind of silly. [Laughs] They’re absurdist, I guess. It got attention and people liked it, but it was weird, and it dealt with sexuality that was questionable for television at the time. And it didn’t feel like a sitcom – it wasn’t naturalistic. It was sort of theatrical.

I also wrote something called “Rambling Pants,” which was a pilot about a poet, a traveling poet whose name is Pants.

“Rambling Pants”? That’d be a good band name.
[Laughs] Yeah. He was a very bad poet, but he doesn’t know that. He travels the country and gets into different kinds of adventures – again, pretty silly. And that one has a lot of singing in it. People break into song way too much in that one – like every fourth or fifth line.

You kind of worked out those demons a bit in “Human Nature,” as well.
I haven’t worked them out yet. It will rear its ugly head again.

So this was sort of the “Kung Fu” of troubadour-poet shows.
Sort of, yeah. That could be a model for it. He has a sidekick who was actually a newspaper reporter who kind of went astray and looks to Pants as a hero – this very naďve, sort of dumb Jimmy Olsen kind of guy.

And I wrote something for HBO which was about a relationship. I wanted to follow this relationship from its inception, but it’s sort of anti-romantic – it’s a couple in this sort of a gridlock situation, where people are together but there’s never really any clear reason why. And it was called “In Limbo.”

Was every episode going to end with them deciding to stay together for some totally depressing reason?
No, it wasn’t, because that one was more naturalistic. It was probably closer to “Adaptation” in its form.

I get really frustrated with sitcom romance and movie romance in general, because it doesn’t seem to bear any relationship to my own experiences in that realm. I was just trying to do something that seemed true to me, about struggles that couples have. I think there’s a lot of damage done to me personally by movies that don’t reflect the real world – because I tended to feel “less-than” watching movies, because my life is never like that. So I didn’t even want to be mocking of them – I have sympathy for it, so I thought it might be interesting to present that.

And you know, all of these pilots got fairly close. Some of the HBO executives liked “In Limbo” – but I don’t know if it didn’t have “the hook” or what.

You’ve been shepherded through Hollywood, to a degree, thanks to Spike Jonze taking an interest in your work. You’re able to make those assertions about screenwriting because you have a very privileged vantage point. Do you feel blessed?
I guess I’m lucky. It was a long time coming. It’s not like I just arrived here. I’ve been struggling to get into the business for many, many years, and after I did get into the business, I was working in situation comedies for a good seven years. So I did serve my time. But when I hear about other writers’ experiences, yeah, I’m happy I get to do – at least at this point – what I’m interested in doing.

What’s your relationship with Spike Jonze? You’ve now worked on three movies together. [In addition to directing “Malkovich,” Jonze co-produced “Human Nature” and directed “Adaptation.”]
He’s a great guy, and I couldn’t be more fortunate, because he was very interested in my contribution to “Malkovich” and kept me involved throughout the process, which is atypical as I understand it. I mean, I was involved in preproduction and casting and production and editing – I was a partner in it.

And he’s also interested in the things I’m interested in – the characters, and what the character’s motivations were at different points in the movie. We went through the script with a fine-tooth comb and talked about everything that happened.

Did he have a lot of dialogue or story suggestions? I know he comes at it not only as a director, but as an actor.
Well, the script for “Malkovich” changed considerably in the last third, and I knew that was going to happen going in. The original script flew off into some sort of chaos, which had been my intention, but it wasn’t interesting to anyone else. [Laughs] So we worked together on changing the end. But it’s my dialogue, and the first two-thirds of the movie are almost exactly the same as the original draft.

In terms of Spike’s background as an actor and a director, the questions that he had were always about character, and if we needed to change something, the discussion was always based on him asking, “What’s going on here?” and my defending it acceptably or not. And I would write the dialogue.

And now George Clooney has sort of become your champion, getting your adaptation of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” to the screen.
Yeah, well, George Clooney liked the script. From the beginning, he wanted to support it by playing one of the roles, helping it get made – and it went through a series of directors, stops and starts for various reasons, and he finally decided he wanted to direct it.

A friend who’s familiar with “Confessions” asked me to ask you this: You think Chuck Barris was serious about this CIA-assassin stuff, right?
He doesn’t treat it as a joke in his book, so I didn’t treat it as a joke. Again, I like to leave it open to the viewer, which was my intention – because I think it’s interesting if it’s true and it’s interesting if it’s not true. That’s why I took the job. If it’s not true, why would he come up with this fantasy? In a way, I always thought it was such a pre-adolescent fantasy. You know, if you’re not happy with what you did with your life and you want to embellish it, to say that you were an assassin for the CIA as an adult – as a 50-year-old man – seems odd. So I wanted to look at the psyche that would create that fantasy. If it was a fantasy.

Clooney’s worked with a lot of strong directors. Do you know if he’s bringing a strong vision to the material?
You know, I don’t know, really. They’re up in Canada. I hear that he’s doing a really good job; I’ve spoken to the producer a few times, and they’ve sent me some production stills, and it looks beautiful. I was told that Clooney’s extremely prepared – he’s got a complete shot list and storyboards and stuff. And they’re on schedule, and he’s got a good cast – so he’s got good taste in that regard. He’s partners with Steven Soderbergh; they have a production company together, and I know they’re good friends, and obviously Soderbergh’s a real healthy influence.

You told Salon magazine once that you don’t like “solutions,” and you don’t like movies that provide them. In fact, you called movies that provide solutions “meaningless.”
Wow. Them’s fightin’ words.

Well, I wanted to ask you – at the risk of falling into some colossally pretentious wordplay – if this means that you find “meaning” in, you know, the Buddhist sense of the word, in irresolution, in nothingness.
Uh, well … . I’m not really presumptuous enough to assume that I have any solutions for anything. And I think a lot of movies fall into that trap, or they feel that people want them to say, “OK, this is the problem, and that is the solution – this is what you need to do.” You know, “If you just love each other, or put your family over your career” – whatever the hell they’re talking about. My life is confusing, and I don’t have any solutions to my own problems. For me to get up there and present solutions to other people’s problems seems silly to me. I’m more interested in the confusion and the struggle, and I feel pretty secure that if I explore that, then I’m being truthful, as opposed to sticking on some sort of moral or resolution.

You put the conclusion-drawing on the audience.
Well, I also think movies or any other kind of fiction are more interesting if you allow people to come away with different interpretations of it. I love that about “Being John Malkovich.” We didn’t really say what the movie was about for that reason. We didn’t want to taint the experience. People would talk about it in reviews or online – what they liked, what they identified with, what they thought the movie was about – and stuff like that to me is wonderful. I love people to have conversations about the things that I’ve worked on, you know?

What’s your “way in” to a screenplay? Do you start with characters or do you start with a conceit?
I think I start with a few things. I think about it for a long time. I don’t do a lot of writing at first – I play it out in my head and figure out relationships. As I said, I was sort of inspired on “Human Nature” by those movies that suggest there’s a “pure” state for humanity that we need to try and achieve. And I’d always wanted to write about a feral man. And then I was thinking about nature. There’s a sort of mock seriousness about it – although I wanted the characters to be real and for people to have real feelings for them, I also was kind of playing with philosophical notions just for fun. I think I did that in “Malkovich,” also.

It strikes me in surveying your work that you’re structuring your stories almost like light-hearted episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Each of your screenplays takes a handful of Big Ideas and messes with them in broad, funny strokes – “Malkovich” explores mind and body and celebrity, “Human Nature” dives into language and socialization, and “Adaptation” tackles the artistic process. Do you go into these stories with that sort of mission in mind?
The answer is, “Yeah.” [Laughs]

All that and it was a yes-or-no-question.
I do like to step outside of the conventions of American movies and play with form and ideas. It’s just another layer. My idea is to pile as much stuff into it as you possibly can. The more you stuff into it, the richer the experience – and the more it gives people to play with in their own minds. And it’s fun for me, too.

But there’s also a quality of improvisation to it, also; I do leave things really open when I start writing. I don’t necessarily want to draw conclusions for myself or know where the script is going, even – because that makes it more fun and more challenging and also more of an adventure for me, and I think it does for people watching it, too, if things go well. It’s a high-wire act.

Now, your movies are funny – although there’s a huge undercurrent of sadness in “Human Nature” – but it strikes me that your movies are funny in the situational sense, not the one-liner sense.
Uh-huh.

I know that’s not an easy path to tread these days in movies, particularly when they’re so influenced by sitcoms. Do you just find one-liners tiresome?
Well, I like writing colorful dialogue – I think that both “Malkovich” and “Human Nature” have quotable lines in them – but I don’t like writing lines that have nothing to do with the characters. I can’t have people making jokes; I have to have people talking about what they’re talking about because that’s what’s interesting to me. Hopefully, I’ll do it in a funny way, or have a dynamic between the characters be funny, or even have the way that people speak be colorful – but yeah, I don’t laugh at sitcoms, generally.

You also told Salon that you try to write your scripts so they can be pleasurably read.
Yeah. I can’t imagine not doing that. I’m writing something, you know?

I know for me, one of the problems going into production is that I consider these scripts finished products – I try to write it like I’ve written a story, for a bunch of reasons. One is that I think it helps you sell the ideas that you’re trying to sell, and I also think it’s important to create a kind of mood in the reader. And it’s good for the people who are making the movie – to give them a sense of the feel of the script, what it needs to look like when it’s a movie, how it needs to play, what the rhythms of it need to be.

You told IndieWire.com that you write down ideas on a little pad in your pocket.
[Laughs] It’s weird to have this stuff out there, you know?

What’s on the little pad in your pocket at the moment?
Let’s see … .[Pause] Oh, you know what? It’s a new pad, and the only thing on it is the title of a book that I was interested in buying – and I’m not going to tell you what that is.

You’ve now moved from being a writer to being a writer and a producer. Is there a directing gig in your future, or perhaps a novel?
I think both, I’m hoping. The question is: Which first? Because both are such enormous time commitments, and I can’t decide. I feel like I need to direct. I’m really only interested in directing things that I’ve written; I’m not interested in being a director for hire.

Do you have a story in mind?
I have ideas. After the movie that I’m working on now – that Michel’s also directing – gets together, I’m free for the first time in a long time, so I think I’m going to write a spec script – so I’ll own it, and that’ll give me a better chance of getting the director job.

What’s the new movie with Michel about?
It’s called “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” It’s a movie about memory. USA is making it; hopefully it’ll be in production sooner or later this year, depending on casting issues.

It takes place in a man’s memory as part of it is being erased. He found out his girlfriend had done this – had him erased from her memory – and he doesn’t want to be alone with the memory of their relationship, so he decides to go and have the same procedure. So most of the movie takes place in his head, as the memories are being erased – and you’re watching their relationship unfold sort of backwards, from the end to the beginning, as each moment is being erased.

And at the end of it, as the relationship’s close to the beginning, he becomes more attached to her, because these are better times – so he wants to stop the erasure process. So he’s inside his head, and he’s basically trying to hide her from this procedure. So there are a lot of technical problems with how to play a story backwards, and have a man function inside his own brain, and interact with his own memories, stuff like that.

And it sold at the same time as I took on the job for “Adaptation,” and all of a sudden, out of not doing anything, I was saddled with two complicated scripts. It was a difficult time.

Sounds like you do a heck of a lot of multi-tasking.
Yeah, or avoiding. [Laughs] I had to block out certain projects to focus on others. I’m not great at writing different things at the same time, because I really do like to immerse myself. When I wrote “Malkovich” and “Human Nature,” I wasn’t working as a screenwriter – I wrote them for myself during my time off from television. So there was no pressure, and no one was expecting anything. But it didn’t work out that way this time around: Things start to pile up, and people want to shoot a movie.

And the thing I didn’t realize about writing movies that are going to get produced is that the writing doesn’t stop until post-production stops – at least for me. During production, I’m writing when we’re editing and trying to change things. So you’re living with these scripts for years. [Pause] It’s awful. [Laughs]

The nice by-product of all this, however, is that you do have three movies coming out this year.
I know. That’s so weird. It’s a fluke – they were all written at different times. You know, “Human Nature” was originally going to come out last year, and they talked about releasing “Adaptation” at the end of 2001, but it just wasn’t ready. And then Miramax decided to start “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” That movie’s been started and stopped several times over the years.

Do you feel there’s a lot riding on these three movies? Is there a lot riding on “Human Nature”’s success?
[Exhales] I don’t know. You know, I can’t think about it, because it’s not anything that I have any control over. You know, the “Malkovich” thing was kind of an extraordinary … fluke, probably. I guess if I have three movies come out and they all lose enormous amounts of money, it’ll probably change my profile. [Laughs] But what can I do? I’ll just continue as long as I can to do what it is that I want to do – and then I guess when I can’t, I’ll try to figure out another job.

Well, you’ll still have had a remarkable run, given the kind of material that you’re writing.
Yeah, but, you know, I still need to earn a living. So I’ll have to go back and do TV or something – if they’ll let me.

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