New interviews are below; older interviews are behind the cut. Organised, ain't we?

Hey, Charlie! How about giving us an inspirational quote for the aspiring screenwriters who visit BCK?

"I feel embarrassed for even doing this in the world. I put this thing, that is like me, my soul, in the world, and I just feel like it's trampled. It makes me feel like I don't want to do this anymore. I certainly don't want to try to sell them, but I don't want to make them anymore either."

... The film's commercial prospects weigh heavily on Kaufman, who doesn't want to end up like another visionary, Orson Welles, reduced to hawking wine. "Why am I trying to seduce how many millions of people for this thing to be worthwhile to the people who invested?" he asks, despairing over how the making of cinematic art devolves into "this business crap. Hollywood Oscar watch . . . this thing that people want to rip down because it's gotten too successful. It seems heartless to me. It's not based on anything to do with anyone's heart. It has to do with anger. Everybody is really angry all the time. It makes me angry," Kaufman adds with frustration. "I don't want to be angry." (Source)

Um. Okay, then, thanks.

Meanwhile, you can find a radio interview with Charlie over here.

Charlie's interview with /film doesn't contain a whole lot we haven't heard before, but there are a few interesting bites, such as:

Peter Sciretta: Well, people do care about the name value of some directors. There's more name value in directors.

Charlie Kaufman: There is, and that's sort of been perpetuated by this auteur theory, which I find enormously bizarre considering that the word auteur means author. And, indeed, the only person who's the complete inventor of the movie is the writer. The director's interpreting material. Actors are interpreting material. Everybody's interpreting the script. And I'm not saying that the writer is more important than the director or other people, but I'm saying the writer needs to be given his or her due in the process. (Source)

There's also a semi-spoilery bit of info for those who've read earlier drafts of the script. (And for those who haven't, you'll get your chance really soon, methinks.)

This revelation from The L Magazine:

CK: I didn't see Space Chimps but I did see Kung Fu Panda. Not bad. Better than I thought. When I saw Jack Black dancing with a bunch of guys in panda suits in photographs from Cannes, I was so depressed. I was heading to Cannes the next week. I thought, I could never see this movie. Then I went to Iceland after Cannes with my family, and I was hooked up with the Icelandic distributor of this movie. And he showed us Kung Fu Panda in a special private screening before it opened. And so I saw Kung Fu Panda before anybody, when I swore I would never see it. And I kinda liked it, it made me laugh. I liked it more than Wall-E. I hate to say it, because I know that's completely wrong-headed of me. (Source)

If I were to say something like that, my miniscule indie-cred would shrink. If Charlie says it, suddenly all you young indie cats will be all "Man, that panda. I just loved that guy." Yeah, I know how these things work.

indieWIRE always has cool interviews with Charlie. Their BJM interview with him was one of the things that first sparked my interest in Kaufman. Today they finally get him to just come out and say what we know he's been thinking about George Clooney:

CK: I can tell you that George Clooney is my LEAST favorite person. He's like this really charming guy who pretends he's your best friend.(Source)

Cop that, Cloonster. Meanwhile, from the same interview, here're some thoughts on poop:

iW: "Synecdoche, New York" is marked by a high degree of scatological references.

CK: I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. This is a movie about health and about the body , so I wanted to have the body represented, and that was the way to do it. It was in keeping with the character to have this sick relationship with his bowel movement. I've had a lot of masturbation in my movies. It's not intentional, but it keeps coming up. And I thought, okay, I won't have any masturbation in this movie, but I will have feces.

You're dealing with the body, and you're dealing with bodily functions. We romanticize everything about people in movies, and I decided that one of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things. We had a lot of fun making the different artificial feces in the prop department.

The Paste article Rob mentioned yesterday is now online:

At one point, while shooting in DUMBO, the formerly industrial waterfront district in Brooklyn, Kaufman and his crew became targets of public anger. Locals were sticking up posters demanding, “Hollywood, go away!” Kaufman says. He affects a worried, high-pitched tone. “I wanted to say, ‘We're not Hollywood! We have nothing to do with Hollywood! Wait 'til you see this movie!' There were balloons floating around. There's some graffiti that was on one of the buildings in DUMBO—‘Get Off My Stoop!'” Kaufman's art director left it in the movie. (Source)

Scott Tobias penetrates Charlie's exasperated side in the second half of an interview with the A.V. Club.

AVC: Wouldn't readers consider that to be indulgent, though? In a profile or a review of something you did, why would they talk about themselves instead?

CK: No, what's indulgent about it is that they present themselves, again, as this sort of objective authority, even by keeping themselves out of the discussion. [Pauses.] I'm hesitating because I'm trying not to talk about specific people who've done this. But I've had experiences recently with people who are just completely befuddled, befuddled people. And I immediately was thinking like, "Oh God, what the hell is this going to be?" And then this sort of magic happens through spending the time trying to make yourself into something else. And they can include themselves in the article, and sometimes they do, but they're always very… I think that might have been my biggest revelation about starting to do press. Journalists are people, and why should I be surprised by that? When I come into this situation with nervous people, sweaty people, people who are playing me, people who aren't present and clearly have an agenda, or people who lie to me and will ingratiate themselves so they can get something and present it completely differently… And they aren't always like that. I've had some really lovely experiences with people, where I felt that the resulting article is really honest, and I appreciate that. So I guess that's what it is for me about reviews. When people say negative things about me—even if it's very much their opinion—I still get hurt by it.(Source)

Phwoar.

Still on the A.V. interview: like Charlie, I've noticed all of a sudden everyone wants to hear about his time on Dana Carvey's show? What up wit' dat? 

Charlie Kaufman dreams up a portrait of the artist as a control freak, from Time Out New York. It's a short one, with nothing spectacularly new, but the opening is pretty funny.

“Okay, but you have to print this exactly the way I say it,” the filmmaker declares, suddenly sitting up in his chair. Then he launches into a lightning-fast history lesson, delivered in a hilariously robotic monotone in what seems to be a single breath. “So Spike [Jonze] and I were approached to write a horror film but then we decided to do what was really scary to us, which was mortality, so we pitched it”—both Keener and Hoffman are now laughing hysterically—“and then it took me so long to write, Spike had already moved on to Where the Wild Things Are and I asked him if I could direct it, and why no, I wasn't scared because the worst thing that could happen was that I could fail and there you go.”

Hahaha. Quite some time ago, Charlie expressed exasperation that a certain webmaster of a certain website would say things like "Here's an interview with Charlie, but there's nothing particularly new in it." Seems now he's starting to see where that webmaster's coming from. Haw haw haw.

“It's something that I felt in editing,” says Kaufman of time's sly passage throughout the film. “I was really sort of excited because I didn't want to have 10 years or 15 years later in this movie, title cards. I liked the idea because that's sort of the idea that I was working with, that time passes in a very creeping way.”

He continues, “The older I get, the more it's happening. It's just, boom-boom-boom. It's my birthday every month. It really is and it's terrible.” (Source)

Well, look on the bright side: lots of cake! Can't go wrong with cake. That's from Liz Ohanesian's interview with Charlie, at LA Weekly. Thanks to Liz for the heads up.

From an interview with New York Entertainment comes this interesting comment:

When did you decide on the film's title?
As soon as I finished the script and sent it to Sony and Spike, I came up with a bunch of titles and this was the one that I liked the best. People say things online that just aren't true, and yet they say them with such authority that they become true. Everyone thinks that the movie was originally called Schenectady, New York, and then I decided to call it Synecdoche, New York because somehow there was a stolen copy of the script that was put online, and that someone took the title page off of it, since that would maybe indicate where it came from, and typed up their own title page, but mis-titled it. But why would I call something Schenectady? It's not even a title, you know? It's got nothing going for it. It was always, as soon as I submitted it for people to read, Synecdoche, New York. (Source)

GreenCine interviews Charlie. It covers some territory we've seen before, and some that we haven't, including a little about Charlie's Scanner Darkly script. Bonus points for giving us a mention!

CHUD interviews him, too: 

I don't think of myself as a celebrity, and I shake off things like that I'm a brand or anything, because that's detrimental to any work process. I don't say 'What can I do now that will remind people of the brand?'

Or 'How will I break out of the brand?'

No, although you do read this stuff and go, 'Fuck, they're saying I'm doing the same thing!' Someone wrote, 'Why doesn't he do a Western?' Out of nowhere! Well, why don't you do a Western? But then I hear that and think, 'Wait, should I do a Western? (Source)

Ahahaha. I read the same thing.

Michael Guillen interviews Charlie, and Charlie seems to really enjoy it. They get all in-depth about Synecdoche, dreams and such.

And here be a Rotten Tomatoes interview. Not a whole lot of newness, but a good time-killer.