Scenario
Sometime 2000
A most auspicious debut screenwriting effort, Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze, won the Grand Prix and the Critics Jury prize at the 1999 Deauville Festival of American Cinema, and the best first film award from the New York Critics Circle. The film was selected for the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 1999 New York Film Festival, and has received glowing reviews. Kaufman won the best screenplay award from the National Society of Film Critics and from critics groups in Los Angeles, Boston, San Diego, and Chicago. The Village Voice acknowledged the film as the best of 1999, along with best screenplay and best first film. Kaufman has been nominated for a Golden Globe, an IFP Independent Spirit, a Writers Guild and an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
Kaufman studied film at New York University and has written for various television shows. He has several scripts currently in development, including an adaptation of The Gong Show’s Chuck Barris’ memoir Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a script which was named one of the “best unproduced screenplays” by Entertainment Weekly. Kaufman was also cited by Variety as one of 1999’s ten “screenwriters to watch.”
There’s an axiom in life that you can’t ever get inside someone else’s brain or be in someone else’s skin. You decided to explore that as a possibility?
Yes, but they never really get into Malkovich’s brain. There’s a moment when they go through his subconscious, but until that point, no one knows what he’s feeling. They see through his eyes and they use his body, but he’s still a mystery. I don’t think anyone in the movie is particularly interested in Malkovich.
Because there’s a difference between having an object of desire and having a vehicle for your desire?
Malkovich ends up being a vehicle. Lotte wants to be in him because she wants to be a man, and then ultimately she wants to be with Maxine and that’s the way that she can do it. Craig [Lotte’s husband] has the same idea. Once he finds out that’s what Lotte’s getting out of it, he goes in pretending to be Lotte, to have sex with Maxine. Erroll and the other people who go inside, they’re just not happy with themselves, and it’s odd because they don’t really have a much different experience once they’re in Malkovich from what they presumably would in their regular lives.
So when Craig is describing puppetry to Maxine, and he says it’s “being inside another skin,” that actually is not what happens when you’re in Malkovich?
Well, you are inside someone else’s skin, but Craig doesn’t have the experience of being Malkovich, he has the experience of using Malkovich. He uses him to be with Maxine, and then he uses Malkovich’s notoriety to get his own career going.
So it’s “Using John Malkovich.”
Yeah, I’d say it’s “Using John Malkovich.” [laughs]
It’s a very complex idea. Did you start with a simple idea that became more complex?
I started with germs of ideas. I didn’t even start this script thinking there was going to be a portal, it just ended up happening. I had a bunch of different thoughts I started putting together. The 7 1/2 floor was a separate idea I threw into the mix, because I do that a lot in my work. If I put disparate things together, then I have to figure out what to do with them, so it puts me in a position of challenging myself and having to surprise myself. I’d like to clarify something. I’ve discussed my writing process before as working without a map, and people seem to misunderstand what I meant. I do explore without a plan, but that isn’t what ends up on the screen, although it’s completely a result of that process. I took six months to write the first draft of Malkovich. I threw out much more than I kept. I reworked, refined and restructured what I did keep. I think one of the reasons I talked about my process at all is because I’ve been so angered by these courses in screenwriting and Hollywood’s endorsement of them, treating a piece of writing as a product as opposed to an exploration. I just wanted to put some ideas out there that might be freeing to people who are attempting to write.
Which makes it an interesting team-up with the director, Spike Jonze, because he’s known for liking non sequiturs or incongruities. The script is quite delicate and could have been ruined by too aggressive an approach.
Yeah, I think so. I think everybody who read it said, well, this is really funny, but how can it be made into a movie? I was very surprised. I saw it as a movie from the beginning. It’s weird when people shy away from things they like because there is a challenge to it. The whole purpose of doing this stuff is to take something that you haven’t seen and try to make it work.
Whenever there’s an absurd idea in the script, it’s met with nonchalance. Was that a way to make absurdity acceptable?
I think it’s a combination of my instinct and Spike’s instinct. I think throwing ideas away, not dwelling on them, is generally a funnier choice. Rather than “Look at the idea! Look at the idea!” It forces you to move on. It’s like, okay, I got that idea, now what’s the next one? A lot of movies seem to have one idea in them, and that’s all the movie is. “Look, we came up with this idea, aren’t we great? We’ll pound you over the head with it for 90 minutes.” And anyway, people get that something is funny on their own without telling them it’s funny. That’s respectful to the audience, and it makes people engaged, because they’re not being condescended to.
The 7 1/2 floor is absurd but easy to relate to because everyone that’s worked in a office feels demeaned at some point. The minute you see people stooping over in a workplace, you don’t have to explain it, you just get it.
I’ve heard from other people that it’s the perfect representation of the workplace, but I’m not sure I was consciously thinking that. The idea appealed to me visually. I’ve worked in offices and had filing jobs, so there’s just something disturbing and funny about it. But ultimately, looking at the movie once it was made and thinking about it, I realized there’s a movement to more and more confined spaces. There’s their awful apartment, then there’s the 7 1/2 floor, then there’s a portal, and then you are actually inside somebody else’s body. In the end, Craig is trapped forever. [laughs] It sounds like it was intentional, but I’m not sure that it was.
Is there a moral there somewhere?
No, there’s not. There was one reviewer who wrote, “Why is Craig chosen as the villain when all these other people did reprehensible things, too? Why is Craig punished?” Well, I’m not a moralist.
I am not interested in that. It’s just the way the story turned out. This same reviewer proceeded to say we were casting Craig as the villain because we needed a villain and Craig was convenient. In other words, using a very cut-and-dried Hollywood mainstream thing. It pissed me off. The other thing he said was that it was a mistake to take the story away from the idea of celebrity—which is what he was interested in—and put it into this triangle. Which was really a quadrangle. He said that was a Hollywood cliché. I defy you to find one movie in all of film history where there’s a triangle with three people utilizing the body of a fourth person. [laughs] I mean, it isn’t a cliché.
You seemed more interested in the cult of personality, as it applies to narcissism or existential questions. But some reviewers fixated on the celebrity issue, which I didn’t feel you were that interested in.
I guess I’m interested in the sense that I chose an actor to be the person they enter. Again, I don’t know why I did that. It seemed funny to me, and interesting, and it made some sense to have someone who people would sort of recognize as the person you got to be.
Did you toy with it being just a regular Joe?
No, never, because I never wrote this thing with any kind of intention. I just started writing and as soon as I decided there was a portal to somebody, I thought it was a portal to John Malkovich. It never was anybody else, he just seemed right to me. I was never concerned with, well, is this going to happen, is Malkovich going to do this? Because I didn’t expect anyone to ever even read this.
He does seem perfect, and I don’t know why.
One thing I like about him is that he’s not a joke, and yet he’s funny. It’s funny as an idea, but it’s not a joke idea. It’s not like, what if you get to be Sherman Hemsley, George Jefferson from The Jeffersons, some kind of jokey sitcom person? Malkovich is a serious actor, he’s respected, he’s a theater actor, and yet there’s something odd and completely unknowable about him. You never really know what’s going on behind his eyes, so it becomes fascinating, and I think that works for this story.
Who else would have worked? What about an “alien dropped from another planet” kind of sensibility, someone like a younger David Bowie, before he was famous?
David Bowie never occurred to me. You don’t know much about Malkovich’s personal life, he’s not a celebrity in that sense, there’s no gossip about him that I knew about. David Bowie is a persona. When we didn’t know who was going to do it, Christopher Walken was on the list. But he’s in everything, so he’s not as mysterious as he might have been when he did Annie Hall, and you could say, who is this guy? For some reason, Malkovich has been able to perpetuate that. [laughs] He’s an enigma.
How was the process with him? He read the script, liked it?
He read it early on, when I first wrote it. It had been given to him by his business partner, who somehow had gotten hold of it.
I heard that he thought it was really funny, which pleased me immensely. Then I met with his partner. It was a weird meeting at first, because I think part of it was to feel out who I was and why I wrote this.
Like maybe you were a stalker?
Exactly. In fact, I remember the conversation went, “And what’s your relationship to John?” [laughs] It was such a weirdly worded question, so I just tried to dance around it. I said, well, I’ve always been a big fan of his, and I think he’s a great actor. And he goes, “Uh-huh. And why the 7 1/2 fioor?” Now, I had no idea what that meant, so I said, well, you know, I thought it was funny and interesting visually to picture this half-fioor between two fioors. And he said, “Did you know that John’s apartment number in New York is 7 1/2?” At that point, I felt a chill running up my spine, and I thought, there’s no way they’re ever going to believe anything I say. It was just an enormous coincidence. I mean, who has an apartment number 7 1/2? I thought about that for weeks, it’s like, what does that even mean? I understand how people have half-addresses, but why would you have a half-apartment number, especially if you’re John Malkovich?
Did you meet with him?
Well, then Spike got involved and it looked like the movie was going to be made if we could get Malkovich. Spike went to meet him in Paris, and they had a good meeting, so he asked to meet me. Spike and I came to New York and we had brunch with him. I was so nervous, because I get nervous meeting people, and I get nervous meeting famous people.
(Source)