Articles

Malkovich Scribe Gags on Spoon-Fed Movies

iFilm.com
by Jean Oppenheimer

Unlike most Hollywood habitués, Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter of the wildly original new film Being John Malkovich, hates to talk about himself.

Kaufman and director Spike Jonze each made their feature debuts on Malkovich, arguably one of the most deranged movies to hit the big screen in years (think Alice in Wonderland on acid). It stars John Cusack as Craig, a street puppeteer-turned-file clerk who, while working on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a Manhattan office building, discovers a secret tunnel behind a wall. Cautiously entering the passageway, he is suddenly sucked through a kind of portal which deposits him inside the mind of the titular actor. For 15 minutes Craig experiences what it is like to be Malkovich, then, just as abruptly, he finds himself unceremoniously dumped by the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Cameron Diaz as Lotte

Craig and Maxine (Catherine Keener), the acerbic coworker he lusts after, start an after-hours business, charging admission to enter the Malkovich portal. Things get even more curious when Craig, his bedraggled wife Lotte (an unrecognizable Cameron Diaz) and Maxine begin using Malkovich's body to conduct an unconventional sexual tryst.

Love Your Script--Now Go Away

Kaufman wrote the script five years ago, while working as a writer on a number of short-lived television series. It got lots of attention around Hollywood, but everyone thought the story too bizarre to actually make into a movie. Enter Jonze, wonder boy of the music video and commercial world, who decided to make the project his feature directorial debut.

So, why John Malkovich? "I don't know," confesses Kaufman, speaking by telephone from his home in Los Angeles. "The question is asked enough that at this point I suppose I ought to formulate an answer but I don't have one. It just seemed like a good idea at the time and I never wavered. I approach everything on a kind of gut level and it just seemed right."

Kaufman doesn't like to talk about where he gets his ideas or what they mean to him, claiming it simply isn't relevant. "What's important is what the movie is about to the person watching it, not some stupid thing I would say."

The screenwriter proves equally reticent to answer questions about his age, where he was born--even his taste in literature. "Before the movie was finished, Spike and I were invited to show it at a producing seminar at Sundance," he explains. "I was asked what writers I like and I made the mistake of answering, mentioning Kafka. Afterwards there was a wine reception and everyone is going, 'Yeah, I can see Kafka in your movie.' I don't feel like I have been influenced. In fact, I go out of my way to not feel like I am imitating other people in my work."

Another of his personal commandments concerns not manipulating or pandering to the audience, something he feels is rampant in mainstream Hollywood pictures. "It's a popular idea in Hollywood to say, 'This is where we want people to cry or this is where we want people to realize that this story is about loving yourself.' Crap like that. I just hate that. I have no interest in watching it or being involved in [making] it. I have more respect for a work that tries to explore something, even if it ultimately fails, than I do for something that feels slick and feels like it is produced by General Motors, which many movies do."

Kaufman will divulge that he came to Los Angeles after a stint in Minnesota, although he won't say what he was doing in the Midwest. He had been writing on and off for years but didn't know how to break into the entertainment business. He wrote a spec script for television and gave it to an acquaintance who passed it on to an agent.

Love Your Script--Though I Haven't Read It Yet

Every week for a year Kaufman phoned the agent, asking if he had read the script. Finally the agent did and, although he wouldn't take Kaufman on as a client, he agreed to shop the script around. That's all the encouragement Kaufman needed. He took out a loan, packed his bags and moved to Los Angeles. "I gave myself a window of time," Kaufman says. "If I didn't find a job, I couldn't stay."

The portal into Malkovich

But Kaufman did land a job--as a writer on the television series "Get a Life." "I got lucky," he says soberly. When it is pointed out that talent just might have had something to do with it, he replies, "I know a lot of people with talent who don't [make it]. I just was lucky."

Kaufman has spent the last few months trying to catch a trailer of the film. He has seen it on tape, of course, but never in an actual theater, up on the big screen. "I kept hearing it was playing in front of this movie or that movie. I was going to movies I would never normally go to. I still haven't seen it at a theater."

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