Charlie and Eva are still promoting How To Shoot A Ghost, and The Film Stage was their latest stop. For me the most interesting nugget in this one: Charlie would be open to publishing the Frank or Francis script, since it seems the project is never going be filmed.
Charlie, you’ve had some scripts that have never been made, and I’m curious if you can look at them as their own separate work. Can an unmade script function as a piece of literature if it’s never made? Or is an unmade script not a finished work in itself? I’m thinking of this great script you wrote years ago called Frank or Francis, which I remember was widely shared on the Internet, and I feel like everyone I know read it and loved it, but it just never got made. But can you look back at these projects as literary works in a way, comparable to Eva’s medium?
CK: A film script, in my mind, is written to be made into a film. I try to write them in a way that maybe some people don’t write screenplays as sort of pieces of writing, I tried to do that. You know, I wanted it [Frank or Francis] to be made––came close to it, I mean. I cast it. It was certainly a source of great frustration to me for many years that I couldn’t get it off the ground. I mean, I’m happy that people read it. I’m happy that you read it and liked it.
EH: Maybe you should publish your unmade scripts.
CK: I sort of feel like that’s where this question was going. I’d be happy if someone wants to publish Frank or Francis.
Well, I remember reading the physical screenplay of Synecdoche, New York, and it was pretty much published as a book. And I remember there were a lot of scenes in it that weren’t in the final film. So it felt, in a way, almost like the Synecdoche screenplay that was published complemented the finished film in a way, but also just the fact that I could physically read it like a book, it made it sort of feel like it was also a piece of literature in its own way.
CK: It always comes up whenever there are screenplays that are published: do we want to conform to the finished movie, or do we want to do the script as it was? I always prefer to keep the stuff in there that didn’t make it to the movie because I like a lot of that stuff. I tend to choose that route. Yeah, it’s nice, but I don’t know what people want in a screenplay that they’re reading. I think I would like what you like: that it would define things and help you understand different colors that were in there and learn things about characters that may not have made it into the finished movie. (Source)
This is pretty interesting for me, given that I host a bunch of his scripts on the site, some of them unproduced. In the past Charlie has expressed frustration (understandably) when first drafts get reviewed online before a film comes out; when it seems like a project might be dead I usually wonder how he'd feel if/when that project's script leaks online. NOT PLEASED, I'm sure... but still it's cool that he's open to publishing unproduced work through authorised channels. AND HOPEFULLY MORE NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES.
ANYWAY. Other topics covered: Antkind and Richard Brody, How To Shoot A Ghost (duh), how Eva and Charlie met (old news if you've been here before), getting CK interested in baseball and the Bluejays, and a handful of other things.
