Here are some noteworthy segments from the Synecdoche press kit, including insight into the project's history and developnment. We've already heard stuff similar to some of this, but other stuff is fairly new. I'll upload the whole thing eventually.
 

• "When I named ETERNAL SUNSHINE… everybody said nobody would ever remember it," [Charlie] recalls. "But what's cool is that the title is really easy to remember now. Everybody who knows that movie knows the title. And if this movie gets the proper amount of response, then people will be able to pronounce it and everyone will be able to know the word 'synecdoche'—which is a good word to know." Still, the movie itself never mentions the word, and Kaufman doesn't want to spell it out for people. "One of the things I think is really exciting and joyful about the experience of being an audience member is figuring things out," he says. "When you make a connection, it's yours, and there's a thrill to that. So people can look up "synecdoche," if they want. And if they do, maybe they'll think about some things it might correspond to in the movie, and if it opens up another understanding of the film for them, that would be great."

• "I think the movie is fun," says Kaufman. "It has a lot of serious emotional stuff in it, but it's funny in a weird way. You don't have to worry, 'What does the burning house mean?' Who cares. It's a burning house that someone lives in—it's funny. You can get more than that if you want to. Hopefully the movie will work on a lot of levels and people can read different things from it depending on who they are."
• "I'm interested in dreams and how we tell stories to ourselves in dreams," he says. "Let me make it very clear that this film is not a dream, but it does have a dreamlike logic. You can start to fly in a dream and in the dream it's just, 'Oh yeah, I can fly'—it's not like what your reaction would be in the real world. So everything that happens in this movie is to be taken at face value, it's what's happening. It's okay that it doesn't happen in real life—it's a movie."
• The original impetus of the film was for Kaufman to write a horror film screenplay for Jonze to direct. Of course, there was never any possibility that a Charlie Kaufman "horror film" would become anything like a conventional scary movie. "Towards the beginning, I was talking to Charlie about some anxiety dreams I was having," says Jonze, "and Charlie said that it would be amazing to be able to make a movie that captured those kinds of feelings." So Kaufman opened his imagination to things that were truly terrifying to him. "My process is to start by thinking about something and see what comes," says Kaufman. "I'm not very interested in things like writing towards an end." "Charlie would call and say I want to put this idea in the film and that idea in the film," says Jonze. "And suddenly there were dozens and dozens of ideas. Charlie has a real desire to put everything he's thinking and feeling into the thing he's working on at the time." It took two years for Kaufman to fully realize the script, and over that time it evolved to a place that had very little to do with the original concept. During this process, Jonze was writing his own screenplay for WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, and by the time Kaufman's script was ready, Jonze was already in pre-production on the other film. Not wanting to wait, and having long planned to move into directing (he has an acting and theater background and studied at NYU Film School), Kaufman asked Jonze if he could direct it, and he readily agreed.
• Script supervisor Mary Cybulski (who deserves to be in the Continuity Hall of Fame for doing this and ETERNAL SUNSHINE… created a chart to clarify the Russian Nesting Doll-style proliferation of the story. "There are scene numbers that take place in the real warehouse," she explains. "And then there's an exterior warehouse set that they built inside the warehouse, and then the scenes that take place on the street set that's inside the warehouse set, but outside the warehouse set number two. It goes on like that." Production Designer Mark Friedberg was tasked with finding the requisite plywood and coherence to realize Kaufman's intricate vision: "There was always an underlying structure that was not arbitrary," says Friedberg. "As confusing as it could be, there was security for all of us in knowing that we could always turn to Charlie or Mary to clarify."
• Even extremely experienced filmmakers might find SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK a formidable challenge, but first-time director Kaufman was philosophical. "What's the worst thing that can happen?" he asks. "I take big risks in my writing, and I choose to do that because that's what I think makes stuff interesting. The worst thing that can happen is that I'll be embarrassed and they won't hire me to direct movies again. If that's the worst thing that can happen, that's not so bad."
• Knowing his story so well, Kaufman had the ability to create scenes when needed at the spur of the moment. Spike Jonze relates a story: "One scene I was surprised by in dailies was something I hadn't read, the scene of the Pastor's sermon at the end. It's a page-long monologue about life and death, an amazing piece of writing, and Charlie wrote it the night before." An actor who had been considered, but not cast for another role (Christopher Evan Welch) was quickly contacted and told to report for work following day. "Charlie faxed him this huge piece of text and the guy learned it that night and came in and did an amazing job," says Jonze.
• The film is jam-packed with jokes and references—like Caden's glimpse of Sammy following him in a cartoon, when Caden hasn't been introduced to Sammy yet—that won't pay off for most people on the first go-round. "It's intentional," says Kaufman. "I want the film to be different the next time you see it, and not a repeat." Kaufman explains that he is trying to capture the dynamism that he feel theater has and movies lack: "Every time you see a play it's alive—the interactions between the actors is going to be different, and the energy of the audience changes the actors' performances," he says. But a movie is dead and unchanging—so what can you do in a movie that can make it more alive? My approach is to make films that allow you to discover new things upon multiple viewings. And it's my goal to make you feel like it's a living thing as opposed to a dead thing."
• Kaufman is especially delighted when he hears people express interpretations he didn't intend. "I get no bigger thrill than that," he says, "because that means it's alive." He is also adamant that he has no intention to make it hard for the audience. "I'm not trying to daunt people," he says. "I want the things I do to be things that I'd want to see, and if I went into this movie it would be cool for me."
• Producer Anthony Bregman remembers giving the SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK screenplay to casting director Jeannie McCarthy: "She called me up and said she was halfway through it and she felt she didn't know what was going on. And I said that she should just finish it. About an hour and a half later, she called me back and said, 'Well, I finished the script. I'm still confused, but when I closed it, I wept for forty minutes." Bregman will never forget his own first reading. "It requires a lot and I got in a trancelike state just reading it," he says. "There was so much that's complicated and bizarre, and yet at the same time very personal. And towards the end of the script I felt like it was talking about events in my own life."