The Dallas Morning News
April 16 2002
PARK CITY, Utah – Charlie Kaufman doesn't like to talk about himself, and he doesn't like to be photographed. So it's a good thing his scripts are so vivid, and that they offer so much to discuss.
A simple question like "Where are you from?" was enough to get him backpedaling at the Sundance Film Festival, where his new film, Human Nature, premiered in January.
"I'm from New York," he says quickly. "I don't know what road we're going down now. I try not to talk about my background or my personal life. I've lived in a lot of places, but I grew up in New York."
Intense but quite friendly and insightful when it comes to his work, Mr. Kaufman fits the bill of the press-shy writer. He has frizzy hair, a slight build and an intellect always on the go. There's just one problem: He's set to blow up big in the next year or so, and his privacy should shrink as his profile grows. In a business where the director gets most of the credit, Mr. Kaufman is on his way to auteur status without stepping behind the camera.
He already has an Oscar nomination under his belt, for 1999's Being John Malkovich. Human Nature, directed by music video whiz Michel Gondry, opened Friday. Adaptation, directed by Malkovich helmer Spike Jonze and starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep, has already been shot. Also in the works are Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, directed by and starring George Clooney and based on Gong Show host Chuck Barris's whacked-out memoir; and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey and directed by Mr. Gondry.
Perhaps he's fortunate to have the low-visibility tag of "screenwriter" to hide behind. But there's one problem there, too: He badly wants to direct, which means more and more people will want to do a Malkovich and get inside his head.
"As much as I have enjoyed working with the people I've worked with, you want to see what it would look like if you did it yourself," he says. "It never looks like what you imagined. Writing Adaptation was an intense struggle. I was literally losing my mind. There's nothing that I own more than that, right? Then I see it referred to as 'Spike Jonze's Adaptation.' "
Mr. Kaufman has nothing against Mr. Jonze: "Spike is a really decent guy, and he always gives credit where credit is due." But his point is valid. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more distinctive screenwriting voice than Mr. Kaufman's, and it's only natural that he wants to step out of the shadows – even as he relishes their relative anonymity.
Despite its title, there's nothing natural about Human Nature. The female lead, played by Patricia Arquette, is covered head to toe with body hair, a condition that leads her character to grow up in the woods.
The male lead, played by Tim Robbins, is an uptight research scientist who teaches table manners to mice. The wild card, played by Rhys Ifans, is a feral man raised as a chimp but now making a go at the modern world.
Some have read Human Nature as a satiric critique. But Mr. Kaufman sees it as a jab at the back-to-nature movement. In any case, no one gets away clean.
"I was sort of making fun of those kinds of movies about wild people who are so pure," he says. "One of my initial interests was to debunk that romanticized notion. There was a sort of rash of those movies for a while, where civilization is corrupt and nature is pure. But it's very complicated. We're very complicated creatures, and it's much more interesting that way."
Mr. Kaufman's upcoming projects are no less bizarre. Adaptation is actually about Mr. Kaufman's painful efforts to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief. Both Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Orlean are characters in the film, whose script leapfrogs chronology in chunks of, oh, a few billion years. And The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – "I hope they keep the title, but it's a little tough" – is best left to the author's description.
"It's about a guy who finds out that his girlfriend has erased him by using some kind of special process in the future," Mr. Kaufman explains. "So he decides to go through the same procedure with her. Most of the movie takes place in his brain as she's being erased. It goes backward chronologically. The horrible end of the relationship sort of gets fogged out, so he's trying to save her from inside his head."
In other words, just another Hollywood love story.
Mr. Kaufman's work has some common themes – the plight of the outcast, the uncertainties of the human body, the merging of jarringly disparate people and places – but few definite patterns. As Malkovich fans have gleefully observed, anything can happen at any time in a Kaufman story; the ground shifts beneath the viewer's feet at every turn. And that's just the way America's most creative screenwriter likes it.
"Maybe the rule for myself is that I don't want to feel safe," he says. "I don't want to feel like I'm doing something that I've seen or that feels comfortable. I'm trying to explore something instead of rehash something. I'm trying to give something of myself."
(Source)