Seattle Times
April 7 2002
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"There's a tiny door in my office. It's a portal, Maxine. It takes you inside John Malkovich. You see the world through John Malkovich's eyes, then, after about 15 minutes, you're spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.
— Craig (John Cusack), "Being John Malkovich"
"I try to stay in the confusion of my existence," says screenwriter Charlie Kaufman over the phone, "rather than simplify."
Is this the key to the famously reticent Kaufman, who rocketed from obscurity to art-house fame (and an Oscar nomination) with 1999's deliciously twisted dark comedy "Being John Malkovich"? Or is it a dodge, constructed to keep journalists happy while revealing very little?
Trying to get inside the head of Kaufman — without the help of a portal — is an intriguing but frustrating experience. Before the interview, I was half-expecting someone audibly weird, someone whose wandering imagination would seize hold of the interview and take it to places previously unknown . What I got was a pleasant, polite, decidedly non-weird-sounding fellow, doing his bit to promote his new film "Human Nature" (opening Friday at the Metro, Uptown and others), but clearly on guard.
Was the real Charlie Kaufman somewhere else, pulling strings for this puppet on the phone? ("Malkovich," perhaps tellingly, focused on a puppeteer — someone who pulls strings behind the scenes.) Or could the screenwriter be — most shockingly — a regular guy?
Barring evidence to the contrary, the latter seems to be true. A former television writer ("every show that I was on was canceled pretty quickly"), Kaufman was between jobs when he concocted "Malkovich" in the mid-'90s. Since that film's debut, he's been living a screenwriter's dream: His movies — he's now on his fifth post-"Malkovich" screenplay — get made, and come to the screen just as he wrote them. No script doctors, no co-screenwriters; just Kaufman's idiosyncratic voice.
"I think to the credit of both directors (Spike Jonze, "Malkovich," and Michel Gondry, "Human Nature"), they were interested in the script and not the pyrotechnics," said Kaufman. "Both were extremely respectful of me and the material. I've been lucky with directors."
Craig: "It raises all sorts of philosophical questions about the nature of self, about the existence of the soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich? Was the Buddha right, is duality an illusion? ... Do you see what a metaphysical can of worms this portal is?"
"Malkovich," Kaufman's first screenplay, floated around for several years. An early meeting with John Malkovich's business partner went nowhere, Kaufman says. "They wanted to know why I chose the seventh-and-a-half floor, because it turned out that in real life, Malkovich's apartment in New York is No. 7½, and who was I, some kind of crazy stalker?"
Eventually, though, Jonze and later Malkovich signed on. Although Kaufman says he and Jonze had a list of replacements, Malkovich was always the perfect choice. "There's a kind of mystery to him, you never really know what's behind his eyes. And his name, it's funny."
"Being John Malkovich" made a huge splash in late 1999, making many 10-best lists for the year, and the film's success paved the way for "Human Nature," a screenplay Kaufman had written shortly after writing "Malkovich." In its way, it's an even odder film: about a man raised in the wild, a woman plagued with excessive body hair and a researcher obsessed with teaching table manners to rodents. Like "Malkovich," it's a comedy populated by sad, wistful loners.
"I always write about people who are outsiders, people who feel unacceptable," says Kaufman. The scientist character was inspired by reading about the behaviorist John Watson, who conducted the famous "Baby Albert" experiments in which a baby was conditioned to fear white, fluffy objects. "Kind of a Pavlovian kind of thing, but with a human being," he says. "It was sort of horrifying. (Watson) went on to become the father of psychology in advertising."
Craig: "What happens when a man climbs through his own portal?"
Maxine (goes back to magazine): "Oh, who cares?"
After his first two original scripts, Kaufman found more conventional screenwriter work coming his way. He was hired a couple of years ago to adapt Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief," a nonfiction book about a man obsessed with cloning a famous rare orchid. In the process, Kaufman turned the script into something else: a story about a man named Charlie Kaufman who was hired to adapt "The Orchid Thief" for the screen.
Now called "Adaptation," and due to open later this year (starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep), the movie is both an on-screen depiction of "The Orchid Thief" and a tale of a writer coping with writers' block. Orlean, speaking from her New York home, is clearly thrilled that her book has fallen into Kaufman's hands.
"I don't need another version of exactly what I wrote," she says of bringing "The Orchid Thief" to the screen. "I'd rather have someone with an imagination be inspired by it and do something creative. I feel very lucky that it ended up with people who are very imaginative and passionate."
Asked what she thinks of Kaufman the person — well, the man remains elusive. "We only met once," she says, in "a two-second interaction" on her one day of visiting the "Adaptation" set. "He kind of disappeared." Nonetheless, she says of Kaufman, "His work sort of circles around and says who he is more than he wishes to say directly."
So, to know Charlie Kaufman, look at "Being John Malkovich," "Human Nature," "Adaptation," an upcoming adaptation of Chuck Barris' "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," and his latest project, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," an original script about a man whose girlfriend has a surgical procedure that erased him from her memory. (Jim Carrey is attached to star.) All feature confusion, carefully layered plots and that Kaufman mixture of comedy buried in wistfulness.
"I'm always of the mind that comedy is based on real sadness," says Kaufman. "If it isn't, it doesn't have any resonance. I don't think it's done a lot that way, and I don't gravitate toward movies that are called comedies for that reason. It's not funny if it's not rooted in anything."
Lotte: "I have to go back, Craig. Being inside did something to me. All of a sudden everything made sense. I knew who I was."
Craig: "You weren't you. You were John Malkovich."
(Source)