i'm here

Spike Jonez



(http://www.imheremovie.com/)

Charlie Kaufman

MovieMaker Interview by David Fear | Published March 19, 2004

MM: You have a knack for putting absurdism into the mixes of your narratives, but it never feels like wackiness for the sake of wackiness. There's always a strong and rather surprisingly moving emotional undercurrent that seems to blend in with it. How do you maintain that balance?

CK: I don't know if I maintain it in a conscious way. My theory about creative work is that 99 percent of it is intention. When you go in with the intention of exploring something real, then that's what you'll get no matter what's around it. It may not even be successful-people may not like it and it may make no money-but that is what you'll have. And if you go into something with the intention of showing off and just being absurd for absurdity's sake, then hey, that's what you'll get. I'm interested in trying to find a real moment between people, and hopefully that's what people get out of my work.

I took an acting class when I was in college and our first exercise was to go across the room and pick up a pen. And no one could do it. Everybody was just acting like they were picking up a pen! It was a very difficult thing to do, because you have this idea of being a character and what acting is and all this shit, when your intention is really just pick up that pen. Just do that! Let all that other stuff go. It was a very basic sort of truth that's stuck with me in what I do creatively.

[...]

MM: Since you've been a playwright and a TV writer, do you feel like you were sufficiently schooled in the fundamentals that you can get away with writing more complex, puzzle-like narratives?

CK: I honestly don't think I ever really knew the rules enough to break them. I feel like I knew how to write a TV script because I'd watched a lot of TV as a kid, and because I had a natural affinity for understanding how comedy works-joke, set-up, punchline, that sort of thing. When I started screenwriting, I never really knew what I was doing, but I instinctively understood how to do it. (laughs)

MM: Well, sure, but it has to take a solid foundation to write off the beaten track and still make it understandable, right? Okay, take Picasso, for example: Look at his early work, you'll see he was more than capable of doing straight, realistic portraiture painting.

CK: .when he was 12! And the stuff he did even when he was 12 was amazing!

MM: Exactly! He was perfectly capable of doing the "classical" form of the art, which allowed him to break away from it. And considering that playwriting and TV writing emphasize a traditional three-act structure, and are very "Point A to Point B" when it comes to conveying information, I'd think that having to write in that discipline gave you the basis to practice.

CK: .Cubist screenwriting! (laughs) Yeah, I see what you mean. Most screenwriting is very formulaic writing, and the reason my stuff breaks away from that is that I'm just not interested in the formula. But maybe it's in there in my head, and on some other level I do understand how I'm breaking away from it. I've never really thought about it that way... Sometimes I do things as a reaction to the conservativeness of the medium. But more often, it's just that I feel I have the freedom to do whatever I want in my writing.

I was doing this Q & A session at a college a few weeks back and this kid came up to me afterwards and said "I'm trying to write a movie where the resolution comes first. Can I do that? Is that possible?" I wasn't sure what to tell him other than, well, yeah, if you can do it, then it is possible!

[...]

But that was the challenge to me. Not just for abstract reasons, but because it served the story I wanted to tell and I wanted to figure out if it would, in fact, work. That was what I was interested in doing, and if there's any sort of disoriented quality to how I tell a story, it's because I allow it in there. It's more that I'm interested in doing something that's distinctly mine. And really, audiences are a lot more sophisticated than most people think.

automatic writing

William Kentridge