Recent General News

BCKster u/pavingmomentum caught Charlie and Eva's appearance at Mostra de São Paulo, Brazil a week or so ago, and came back with a great wrap-up of what was said.

You can head here for the full write-up, but some highlights:

• Kaufman is writing a new novel, and part of it is about an actor writing a book about acting
• His AI film for Bennett Miller is no longer happening. Trying to write about AI was the one thing he couldn’t make sense of, so he dropped the project, which was the first time he’d ever done such a thing for a project he was legally attached to. Every day a new article in the paper, every day a new advance in AI - it was something he couldn’t wrap his head around.
• Charlie and Spike have talked recently about doing something together, but have no concrete plans--it was basically Charlie and Spike agreeing that they'd like to do something again together some day. More on that in a separate post.
• He approached Orion and the Dark like his other projects - he didn’t think of an audience, therefore he didn’t think about fitting the story into a kids’ animation genre. Which is why Orion was a movie buff who adored Lars von Trier. At the end of the day, though, the studio picked up the script and did whatever they wanted with it - which is why he’d forgotten about it until the person in the audience asked him about it. (Source)

Great write-up at the link! Big thanks to u/pavingmomentum.

Charlie's back from Venice after premiering How To Shoot A Ghost, and this week the Guardian had a chat with him about his career trajectory, filmmaking problems and the state of the world. You know, CHEERY STUFF. Snippets:

I ask whether he can see beauty, too. “I can,” he says after a long pause. “I have a lot of anxiety. And I think that gets in the way of the experience of being alive.”

[...] Kaufman and Gondry spent several days in 1998 driving around Hollywood, pitching the idea for Eternal Sunshine to studio executives. “I had an infected tooth,” Kaufman grimaces. “I’d never been in such pain. But I didn’t have time to go the dentist because we were doing this.” Positive responses offset his agony. “Everybody was, like, ‘It’s a new way to tell a love story’. They knew how to sell it and that was exciting to them.”

[...] “Though the people who own the rights report back to me regularly that it’s still in the red,” he says dubiously. “‘Hollywood accounting’ is what it’s called.” (Source)

We've heard before that the rleease of Memento took the wind out of Charlie's sails for a bit, thinking the reverse-chronology gimmick was too similar to Eternal, but I'd forgotten about another movie from that period:

John Woo’s 2003 science-fiction thriller Paycheck, released before Eternal Sunshine but now fittingly forgotten, also gave Kaufman a fright. “The trailer showed Ben Affleck with this memory-erasing machine on his head,” Kaufman recalls. “Michel and I were, like, ‘Holy shit!’ We called one of our producers and said, ‘We can’t put the movie out now.’”

On the state of movie-making today:

Would it be intolerable for him to take on a movie he didn’t believe in just to get the clout for his own projects? “I think the world is in a terrible, terrible situation right now,” he says, his tone suddenly grave. “I don’t think that Hollywood has nothing to do with it. I could argue that Hollywood has everything to do with it. And I have a responsibility, as I see it, not to put garbage in the world. I’m not going to do that. If you start trying to figure out what it is that people want, you are doing what AI does. The idea of AI precedes AI itself because that’s the Hollywood machine. It’s why they remake the same five movies every 10 years. It’s why they have a formula for what a movie is.”

[...] “The most valuable thing to me in terms of my mental health is to read a poem or see a painting or listen to music which speaks to me, which breaks me open for a moment, and where I feel an experience honestly and delicately portrayed. That’s another reason AI can never create anything artistically. It can trick us into thinking it has, but it doesn’t have the experience of being alive. It doesn’t know loss and joy and love and what it feels like to face mortality. I’m very worried about the future in so many ways, and if we don’t allow ourselves to connect with other humans who have the experiences that we have, then I think we’re lost.”

We're 1/4 through this century(!!) so everyone's doing lists, and the latest comes via The Ringer with The 101 Best Movie Performances of the 21st Century. Two performances come by way of Charlie's films.

81 Jim Carrey as Joel Barish, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Ace Ventura has never gotten his Oscar, alas; he has settled instead for being Two-Time Golden Globe Winner Jim Carrey. Did he deserve one for playing Andy Kaufman? Maybe. Did he deserve one for playing Truman Burbank? Probably. But Lord Jim did his best-ever work in Michel Gondry’s bleak, whimsical, chaotic, and heartrending 2004 tragi-romantic fantasia, precisely because the funniest (arguably) and hardest-working (inarguably) comedy superstar of his era doesn’t try to match either the whimsy or the bleakness.

Carrey doesn’t overact, and he doesn’t overact by underacting the way most prestige-hunting comedians do. Instead, as Joel—the soft-spoken introvert, the nice guy, the red-flag-waving “nice guy,” the heartbreaker, the heartbroken—our man plays everything masterfully straight, affable, and potentially lethal, with his most devastating (and romantic!) lines delivered as casual asides. “I remember that speech really well,” he whispers; “OK!” he concludes, with a shattering, tossed-off charm that wins over both Kate Winslet and several subsequent generations of hopeless (and devastated!) romantics. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s high concept and higher melodrama would’ve swallowed up both lesser and harder actors; Jim Carrey, here and maybe only here, delivers an absolute masterpiece of perfect balance and total control. Against your better judgment (and possibly his), you will fall for him again, every time. —Harvilla

35 Nicolas Cage as Charlie and Donald Kaufman, Adaptation (2002)

One of the weirdest, most ambitious movies of the past 25 years requires not one, but two of its weirdest, most ambitious performances. Adaptation begins, literally, with the creation of all life. It culminates in Cage playing the legendary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman—in a film written by Kaufman—and his fictional twin brother, Donald, who are less foils than the two ends of a snake eating its own tail. To call the whole thing self-reflexive doesn’t even begin to cover it. Cage observed and interviewed Kaufman extensively to play the part, after which Kaufman would watch a nervous Cage perform him. Round and round they went, until all of that layering self-consciousness rendered one of the most prolific actors of his generation unrecognizable. 

Cage’s Charlie is more neurosis than man. Cage’s Donald, by contrast, is either too dumb or too smart to get in his own way. Together, the two performances uncork one of the best movies ever made about the creative process, in all its high-flying self-importance and low-hanging hackery. Watching it feels like a miracle. Adaptation shouldn’t work, and in the hands of just about any other actor, it couldn’t work. Yet Cage manages to double sell a movie about failing to write a movie, stepping over every potential pitfall to show how the truth makes it through to the other side. It’s beautiful. It’s unwieldy. It’s Cage. —Mahoney

#1 goes to Naomi Watts as Betty Elms/Diane Selwyn, Mulholland Drive (2001).

Thanks to Tim!

It's so weird to think Adaptation is 23 years old and came out a few months after I launched BCK.

News today via Variety that a Charlie-directed short film, How To Shoot A Ghost, will premiere out of competition at the  Venice Film Festival.

The listing over here looks like so:

How to Shoot a Ghost
Address: Charlie Kaufman
Cast: Jessie Buckley, Josef Akiki
USA, Greece / 27th.

Composer Ella van der Woude has the film listed as a credit on her site.

So this appears to have been shot recently in Greece. No idea what it's about, also no idea if Charlie is the writer of the film.

New York Times polled readers and filmmakers for their top films of the 21st Century so far, and Charlie pops up on both lists, hooray!

In the Filmmakers' list, Charlie appears twice: Adaptation at #27 (between The Dark Knight at #28--hoo boy, I'll bet it's a thrill for Charlie to sit beside Nolan's work, HA!-- and Anatomy of a Fall at #26), meanwhile Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came in at #7 (between Get Out at #8 and No Country For Old Men at #6).

In the Readers' poll, Eternal Sunshine came in 9th (between Spirited Away at #8 and The Social Network at #10). Synecdoche, New York popped up at #101, Adaptation at #135, I'm Thinking of Ending Things at #494. I'm surprised Synecdoche was higher than Adaptation!

Here's the Filmmakers' Top 20: (via No Film School)

 1. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)
2. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson)
4. In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai)
5. Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
6. No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen)
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
8. Get Out (Jordan Peele)
9. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)
10. The Social Network (David Fincher)
11. Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)
12. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)
13. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)
14. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino)
15. City of God (Fernando Meirelles)
16. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee)
17. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
18. Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron)
19. Zodiac (David Fincher)
20. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

Readers' Top 20: (via No Film School)

1. Parasite
2. Mulholland Drive
3. No Country for Old Men
4. There Will Be Blood
5. Interstellar
6. The Dark Knight
7. Mad Max: Fury Road
8. Spirited Away
9. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
10. The Social Network
11. Inglourious Basterds
12. In the Mood for Love
13. Everything Everywhere All at Once
14. The LotR: The Fellowship of the Ring
15. The LotR: The Return of the King
16. La La Land
17. Get Out
18. Moonlight
19. Whiplash
20. Arrival

Duke Johnson's new film, The Actor, is an adaptation of Donald Westlake's novel Memory. (The novel was written in 1963, and published posthumously in 2010.) I'm a big fan of Westlake--he's a legendary crime writer, though Memory is more of an introspective thing for him. Charlie Kaufman is on board with The Actor as an executive producer, though I suspect he's been largely hands-off.

Reviews so far are not terrible.

In an interview with The Playlist, Duke talks a little about what he has learnt from CK:

Alright, so how does this one come together, how does the book fall in your lap and what strikes a chord?
I read the book while making “Anomalisa” with Charlie Kaufman; he recommended the book to me, and I loved it. We optioned it and my writing partner and I did a draft of the screenplay very quickly, but it was just the book in screenplay format.

[...]

Charlie Kaufman is another executive producer on the film, he urged you to read the book cause he knows you like Kafka and it has that feeling, I’m curious about what you learned from him and what it was like working with him?
Yeah, Charlie and I directed “Anomalisa” together, and he’s a hero of mine. And he’s really just a dear friend and mentor. He’s just somebody that I look up to greatly and call when I need advice, or I’m in trouble, and he’s very generous with his time. He’ll read my script, and he’ll just help me achieve my goals by offering and giving sage advice when needed.

I’ve learned so much from Charlie, and he’s told me so many wonderful things. Like, “Don’t let anybody tell you that you have to direct a movie in a certain way. You should feel empowered to direct a movie in any way that you think a movie should be directed,” which is great conceptually, but very hard to actually do. Because when you’re making a movie, you’re like, “So I want to do this,” And people are very often, to me, especially because I came from animation or whatever, they’re like, “Well, we don’t do that. That’s not how we do things in live action,” or, “You can’t do that,” or you’re met with a ton of resistance when you have any outside of the box ideas.

Charlie, as an artist in general, is extremely brave, and he takes chances, and that’s scary because you make something and then you expose it to the world to be judged. Art is an intuitive, creative process, and especially as a sensitive person, not everybody’s going to love what you do. Some people are going to hate it, and it’s scary.

So, it’s easy to fall into fear and try to pander. It’s hard to stay the course and say, “For better or worse, I have to I have to stick to this. Whatever this feeling is that’s propelling me forward and what I’m trying to do, I have to stay true to it, and I’m going to live and die by the results.” (Source)

Charlie was heavily referenced in a recent episode of Only Murders in the Building, Hulu's mystery/comedy/drama starring Steve Martin and Martin Short.

Season 4, episode 5 is called "Adaptation." Says BCK's pal Tim:

The opening of this episode features an Asian-American screenwriter talking about his craft. As the scene unfolds, the camera moves in on a picture of Charlie Kaufman, nestled into the corner of a mirror on the screenwriter’s dressing stand. Not once, not twice, but at least three times. And not just a far-away, obscure shot, but directly focused on it.

Ta-da:

Thanks to Tim and u/giga!

On the publicity trail for Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola again found an opportunity to shout-out Charlie Kaufman. Asked about his own self doubt, Coppola told Josh Horowitz:

"I've started to realise that my life is actually something written by Charlie Kaufman, because the only way I can make sense of it is going through his amazing brain."

Skip to 7:48 if it's not there already:

Thanks to u/pavingmomentum!

Monocle on Culture recently dedicated an episode to Kafka, what with this year marking the centenary of his death, and they invited Charlie to speak a little about Kafka's influence on his own work, and about Charlie's short story "This Fact Can Even Be Proved..." in the new book A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories. 

Click on through for a listen! (I can't find a way to embed it here.)

Charlie comes in at about the 15 minute mark, and it's a great listen--he sounds relaxed and engaged as he talks with host Robert Bound.

Just a quick heads up! A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories (affiliate link!) is out now in the UK, and it'll be hitting US shelves (and e-readers) June 4. It contains a new short story by our guy, called "This Fact Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing," and I reviewed it here. The TL;DR: if you liked Antkind, you'll probably like this, and if you haven't read Antkind, "This Fact..." gives you a short taste of the same kinda thing. Highly recommended for CK fans. Of course the book contains 9 other Kafkaesque tales, all from writers of  literary fiction. Well worth checking out!

May 30th sees the release of A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories, (affiliate link!) in which we’ll find a new short story by Charlie, called ‘This Fact Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing." HOORAY! I have an early copy of the book—big thanks to Charlie’s UK editor Anna Kelly!—so here comes a relatively spoiler-free review of Kaufman’s latest foray into prose fiction, his first since Antkind back in 2020.

If you want to go in blind as to the story’s general plot but want to know basically what you’re in for, I can tell you that readers of Antkind will find the voice here familiar—Charlie’s style is consistent with Antkind, and we have another self-reflective character obsessing over every little thing, including his own thoughts. Again the story is essentially stream-of-consciousness as our character deals with a Kafkaesque conundrum. So if you liked Antkind, you’ll like this; if you thought Antkind would’ve been better if it were less bloated, give this a try; and if you haven’t tried Antkind, you might want to start with “This Fact Can Be Proved,” because it’s a brief but satisfying taste of what Kaufman in book form is about.

The plot, such as it is—and you might want to skip this paragraph, though what I’m about to say will crop up in the first couple of pages anyway—concerns a writer known only as “I.,” who has reached the Q&A portion of a public reading from his newest book. His interviewer asks about a particular quote from the book… and it’s a quote “I.” doesn’t recognise, one he can’t remember having written, one whose presence in his book he cannot understand. Things gradually spiral out from there as we’re taken along with I. and his obsessive thoughts.

I have a feeling this one was inspired by a nightmare of CK’s, or by a fear of his. Come on, the character is named “I.”

The whole thing is pretty funny and odd, fitting of a Kafka tribute, and it sits comfortably within Charlie’s oeuvre as a whole, especially his most recent stuff. (Well, not Orion.) We know that CK is a Kafka fan, and while he’s loath to talk influences, we can see here where his own work and Kafka’s would meet on a Venn diagram.

Worth noting: Charlie’s bio in the back of this book is sort of hilarious, when you put it alongside the bios of other authors in the collection. I got a good chuckle out of it.

Aside from Charlie’s story, you’re in for 9 other literary takes on Kafka-esque tales, and an intro by Becca Rothfield—an essayist, critic, philosopher and author whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and Washington Post. Plus her dog is named Kafka apparently. FULLY QUALIFIED FOR THE JOB.

I’ve said a few times, if Charlie ever ditches film for a full-time switch to prose fiction, I’m on board, and his new story doesn’t change my mind.

New York's Roxy Cinema is screening the films of Patricia Rozema this weekend. Rozema will attend for a moderated Q&A after each film, and on Sunday after Mouthpiece (2018), Charlie will moderate that particular discussion.

That's Sunday April 7, 5:15pm, $17 per person, at the Roxy Cinema in New York. More info and tickets here.

May 30 will see the release of A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories, and the last story in there was written by Charlie. Thanks to a bit of digging by regular tipster u/pavingmomentum, we can let you in on the title of CK's story.

Don't go further if you don't want to be slightly spoiled.

Okay?

Okay.

Title is...

...

... "This Fact Can Even Be Proved by Means of the Sense of Hearing."

... which comes from this Kafka quote:

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”

 What else do we know about the story? Not much. A Good Reads reviewer says:

"Both Charlie Kaufman and Keith Ridgway write from the perspective of men who are unstable in their identities [...] and they felt knowingly Kafkaesque". (Source)

Looking forward to it, aw yeah!

May 2024 will see the publication of A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories "to commemorate 100 years since Kafka's death," and one of those stories is written by our pal Charlie!

I wonder if the Kafkaesque story will be Kaufmanesque?!

Via The Bookseller:

“What happens when one of the most idiosyncratic and visionary imaginations of the 20th century meets some of the greatest literary minds writing in English today?” the publisher teased. “From a future society who ask their AI servants to construct a giant tower to reach God; to a flat hunt that descends into a comically absurd bureaucratic nightmare; to a population experiencing a wave of unbearable, contagious panic attacks, these 10 specially commissioned stories are by turns mind-bending, funny, unsettling and haunting.” (Source)

Other authors included: Ali Smith, Joshua Cohen, Elif Batuman, Naomi Alderman, Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Keith Ridgway, Yiyun Li, Leone Ross.

Can't wait!

Thanks to the ever reliable u/pavingmomentum.

This'll be quick, because I'm on mobile. Zoom workshop with Charlie K and Boots Riley this Monday! Info here!