Q: Are there any other directors or actors you want to work with?
CK: Oh, I like a lot of people. David Fincher may be directing something I wrote which would be fun. I've met with him a couple of times about it and he seems like a smart guy. I like a lot of people. I'd also like to work David Lynch maybe someday.
Q: Fincher has a music-video background as well, correct?
CK: Yes. Actually, I don't know Fincher through Spike, but he worked with Propaganda too. They're all from the same company. Fincher read the script, and he was looking for something to do. So he was considering this thing I wrote.
Q: Did he read Confessions of a Dangerous Mind?
CK: Yes, that's the one that Fincher may do, and Mike Myers may do it too.
Q: Can you tell me anything about that?
CK: Yes, it's about Chuck Barris, the game-show producer and host. He did The Gong Show in the '70s and he created The Newlywed Game and The Dating Game, and is a major game-show producer. He wrote an autobiography called Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in which he claimed he was an assassin for the CIA during the time he was a game show producer, and he's not kidding. I mean, it's not a joke. Whether it's true or not I can't say, but he treats it as if it's true, so that's the book that I adapted.
Q: Had you adapted anything before Confessions?
CK: It was the first one I did. I actually did an adaptation since then of a book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. It's a non-fiction book about orchid collectors. That adaptation is called Adaptation and is, among other things, about the process of adaptation, or at least my process of adaptation. That's the movie Spike is going to direct next, most likely. It goes into a little bit of what adapting things is like for me.
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CK: No, I mean, I don't know. I'm not the greatest at doing publicity. I'm shy and private, so it's kind of hard, but phone interviews are fine. There was a lot of attention during the awards stuff, which I really wanted to keep in perspective. But it's a little bit distracting because there are so many of these different things that you hear about, or you get nominated for, and this is all very new for me. So that has died down which is good, and the whole prospect of having to go up and make a speech, which is something I am not good at.
Q: Have you had to compromise your writing process with all these projects happening at once?
CK: No, I kind of write when I can. It is hard sometimes. I'm not terribly organized, and I'm working on a bunch of things now, which is not my choice. It just sort of happened that way, so it's hard for me to do that, to shift gears and find new momentum. I'm not like a seven-hour-a-day person.
Q: I read a quote of yours, which said something to the effect of, "If it's not a risk, then it's probably not worthwhile." Is that a fair assessment?
CK: Yes, it sounds like something I might have said at one point. There was a quote that I had hanging up, and now I'm going to have to paraphrase. I have the book around here somewhere, I can probably find it.
[Kaufman finds the book he's referring to and flips through it, but can't find the quote he's looking for]
Oh well. It's a Harold Pinter quote: "Everything I write has to be more naked than the last." I always liked that. That sort of sounds right to me. If you're not doing that, I'm not sure exactly what you're doing. At least, I'm not sure of what I'm doing if I'm not doing that.
Q: Are you a Pinter fan?
CK: I was when I was younger. It's been awhile but I did read him and I liked it. I mean, I think you've got to take risks because it's sort of an obligation to yourself and to the world. Otherwise, you're not doing anything, I don't think.
Q: Do you point to any specific writers as influences?
CK: It's a hodgepodge. There've been a lot of people who've been inspiring to me, but I hesitate to name names because — I don't know — in the past when I've done that, people make these assumptions that I'm trying to be like this person or that person, and I'm really not.
Q: What inspires you to write, such as certain characters, situations, or dialogue that you gravitate to?
CK: I try to keep myself kind of at a distance from analyzing stuff too much. If I think something is interesting or funny, then I sort of trust that it's about something to me without having to think about why. But I like the dreamlike approach, to a certain extent. But if I were to turn it into "Well, this is what I'm interested in and these are my themes," I tend to think I'd be less interested in the work that I'm doing.
Q: One reviewer compared Malkovich to an episode of Seinfeld. Do you feel that's an appropriate comparison?
CK: I think I read that, too. No, that kind of boggled my mind. I don't get that at all, really. I think it's fine, maybe I'm missing something. I'm not saying that the person's wrong, but I certainly didn't aspire to do a Seinfeld episode with this thing.
Q: In describing the movie's premise, Malkovich may sound like a one-shot joke, when it's obviously not. How did you go about preventing the film's oddness from turning gimmicky?
CK: That's interesting, because that's the problem that we've been having with Human Nature. When people ask us what it's about, we've been cornered into talking about it. And then you read what people say it's about, and it sounds gimmicky to me too, and I really don't think it is. That's a misperception.
With Malkovich, we didn't have a lot of people interested in knowing what it was about, because it was under the radar. For me, I relate to these characters, and due to the situation they're in, they may be surreal. But the despair they feel is not. And the needs that they have are things I understand. That was the focus for me when I was writing it. That's what Spike wanted to make sure the movie did. He wanted the acting and the style to be grounded in reality so that the weirdness became just part of it and didn't overwhelm it. It's very simple, aside from the complications of the portal. It's a pretty simple story, a story of people who are looking to be in love and aren't. That's what I started out with. It was the initial idea for the script.
Q: Unlike many scripts, Being John Malkovich supercedes its screenplay format and reads like an entertaining book. Why do you think this is?
CK: I don't know. Part of it [that] for me is it's important to write something [that] people want to read. I hear a lot of stuff about, "Well, a screenplay isn't a piece of literature, just a blueprint". I don't subscribe to that. I think it's important for a number of reasons. One, it's for my pride. I want it to be something that is enjoyable. On another level, if what you're writing isn't for the general audience, it's for the people making the movie, and you want to convey it to them — as much as possible — the feeling you're trying to evoke. Part of that is making it compelling to read and being economical and all that sort of stuff.
Q: Is that the approach you'd advise beginning screenwriters to take?
CK: I don't have any advice because I think people have different goals. If your goal is to become a successful Hollywood screenwriter, I don't know what to say. I don't mean that desparagingly, I mean I don't know what to say in that I guess you'd try to look at what is successful. Look at stuff that people buy readily and emulate that. That's not my particular interest.
It took me a long time to figure it out and to know how to get people to read my stuff. If there's one thing in a very practical way that I learned, it's that it's good to have an agent, and I am not kidding. I didn't know that for a long time. I thought I could do it without an agent, but it wasn't possible. I'd just get stuff sent back unopened. That's the way it works. For some reason, I just thought, "Well, I'll just keep sending this. I'll get someone's address, some producer's address, and send them the script." I tried that for years. So, getting an agent is a good thing. But how you get one is something I don't know.
I got a TV agent with this very quirky spec TV episode. I don't feel like I betrayed myself or anything to write it. I found a show that I liked and I wrote an episode of it that I liked. [It] was weird and it got me an agent. I don't know what to say. I'm no expert.
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CK: I don't know. I think the way it works — this is my guess and I don't know — is that if something unusual makes a lot of money, then there will be people trying to do unusual things. But I think the danger there is that the people who are making the decisions don't necessarily think in terms of quality. They just think in terms of type. So unusual is not necessarily good.
Malkovich did fine, but it wasn't a blockbuster in any way. I don't know if anyone's mind is changed about what will make money and what won't by the its success. But I mean, yes, if Malkovich made $250 million, there would be a lot of Malkovich movies out there. I am pretty sure of it.
Q: Are you glad that it didn't make $250 million?
CK: You know, the thing is, I can't imagine. The thing that surprised me so much is that the movie got a lot of attention. I mean, so much more than anybody who worked on it expected, and everybody I know has seen the movie, and people write about it. Then the movie didn't make very much money. I can't imagine how The Sixth Sense made, like, $260 million or $247 million. Like, how many people had to see that movie to make that much money? I guess that's the thing that surprised me the most. How could you possibly get more attention than we got? I mean, the movie wasn't advertised, and it barely had any television commercials, and stuff like that probably doesn't help. No, it would be great if it made that kind of money. Doesn't matter to me, I don't share in any of the profits, but it would certainly make you a bigwig around town.
Q: Profit aside, would it be bothersome to see other people aping your ideas just because it was proven financially viable?
CK: Oh, I don't know. I haven't gotten that far in my scenario. There have been a couple of parodies and I saw one of them, Being Ozzy Osborne. They're short films people are making for fun. There was a Being Regis Philbin which I didn't see. The Osborne one was pretty funny. They had some good jokes in that.
(Source)