NEWSLETTER

CHARLIE KAUFMAN

INTERVIEW BY EDDY MORETTI

Michelle Williams and Charlie Kaufman on the set of Synecdoche, New York. Photo taken by Abbot Gensler, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics, All Rights Reserved.

So I did my MA in film at NYU and I know you did too. What year did you graduate?

I graduated in ’80.

OK. I graduated in ’98 and a lot of old theory got stirred up in my brain watching your film, like the idea of horizontal action and vertical action, or synchrony and diachrony. Your film is not very diachronic. Even though it goes through someone’s entire life, it has all these amazing vertical moments that lift out. I never really sat through a film with so many extended vertical moments, where it’s constantly being lifted out of this inevitable trudge toward death that this character is on.

That’s interesting. I like that. Somebody in an early screening where we handed out papers for the audience to make notes said something like, “I was very impatient with the movie. I kept wanting it to be over. I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, another scene.’ But then I was so glad with each of those scenes that it wasn’t over yet.” I liked that note. You know, Todd Haynes was at the Sarajevo Film Festival and I was very nervous about him seeing it because I like him a lot. Afterward he was talking about the screening and he said he kept watching the audience get reengaged. That’s kind of cool, if it happened the way he described it. The idea that you can go away and come back and go away and come back. It’s a very different thing than what you do in movies generally—certainly in more commercial movies.

Did you choose the name of the movie after you wrote it?

I thought of the name early on. I think that’s why I set it in Schenectady, so that I could do that play on words. But I didn’t settle on it as the title. It was an option for the title. I don’t settle on a title until I’m done because I never really know what it’s going to be until I’m done. It’s like putting the cart before the horse. But when it was done it was on the list of titles and it was the one that I felt strongest about.

My impression is that you didn’t create this movie to oppose convention or to be willfully different. I think that’s the difference between something that ends up being pretentious and something that follows a real creative impulse. I think that’s art—when it goes out on a limb and challenges us, but without being provocative or countercultural just for the sake of shock.

You know, I really hate stuff that does that and I think some of those movies have been compared to things that I did with Spike or Michel Gondry. People started calling me a hipster and it’s like, I’m so not. I’m not. I’m really a sincere person.

I don’t even know what “hipster” means at this point. Lots of people throw it around angrily in the New York media now, and I guess they just mean people in their 20s who... Yeah, I don’t know what it means.

Well, I’m not hip and I don’t want to be hip and I don’t know how to be hip. I’m way too old to give a shit about that. I want to try to do something that feels real to me. That’s my goal. I’m very disdainful of this other attitude that’s been attributed to me. It’s not true.

I wondered: Are women reacting differently to Synecdoche than men?

I don’t know if I can figure out a general rule, but there are certainly women who like this movie. It seems to me from what’s happened with the advance screenings that we’ve had with magazine editors is that there are a lot of women who are not responding—female editors of magazines. I wouldn’t say it’s across the board. There are women who have responded, and I wouldn’t say it is exclusively women who are not responding.

Catherine Keener’s character, Adele, seems to be the keeper of the secret of art and life and meaning. Some women might think, “Oh, you’re just mythologizing her as this symbol and not the flesh and blood he loves.”

But we do that a lot with people. I was reading this thing online, this thing that came up the other day, about this certain kind of woman who pops up in movies—I forget what they called her—but I think it was in the Onion. They had an article about certain movies that have this character, which is like the free-spirited, kooky woman who only exists in order to teach the man how to live. I was reading this thing and I saw some comments that said, “Well, what about Clementine from Eternal Sunshine?” Then people started arguing about that.

So was the character of Clementine just a type?

The whole thing with Clementine was to take the fact that guys are attracted to this type and say that it is a real thing. And the fact that it becomes problematic is a real thing too. I was not unaware of this when I decided to make her. And also it’s completely interpretive inside Joel’s brain. The whole movie is his memory of her.

I do try really hard to create actual female characters, as well as I can, but the fact that men can feel the need to be sort of raised by a woman is a real thing too. You can’t get mad at people for depicting that because it’s true. And not only that, a lot of women fucking play with it—they do that because they want to do it. You can’t have it both ways in the world. You can’t pretend this type of female doesn’t exist—there are a lot. She’s more than that, and she may be that way for a reason because she’s trying to fit in or she’s trying to get men to like her or whatever. But there are a lot of people who do that.

And also you’re not saying that’s the only kind of woman out there and that it’s the only type of relationship a man can have with a woman.

But it does exist. In Synecdoche I feel like Adele is... I don’t know. I feel like she’s given her due as a character. And bringing Catherine in to play her was also an intentional thing. It’s multilayered.

I try really hard to embody the female characters. When I’m writing the female characters, I am them. I try very hard to be inside of every character I write. Otherwise there’s a danger of making people into caricatures.

One woman that I know thought there was a misogynist quality to the film.

I am the opposite of a misogynist. My friends are all women. I don’t even talk to men.

You’re not a guy’s guy.

I’m not a guy’s guy and, you know, it’s weird—I have to be so careful how I phrase this because I know some people, women, if I say this wrong will say, “Well, there you go, he’s romanticizing now.” But the thing is, romanticizing people is not a terrible thing. It’s part of being a human and it’s part of how you connect to people. You need to open yourself up to people, but part of being a heterosexual man is to love women. I mean, what the fuck?

It’s an expression of your experience. If you were a gay guy, you would have written a bunch of different male characters in the vein of Adele or Clementine…

Probably, because they would be important to my life and their reaction to me would have an effect on me. It’s like the idea of the whole male-gaze thing—the whole history of that—I think there’s something incorrect about it. I recognize that there’s the history of men taking women in this way, but that’s because men love women. And yes, it’s an idealized thing, but it’s the only place where you can really have an idealized thing. It’s an expression of something so profoundly primal to being a heterosexual male, and it’s something beautiful in a way.

But it is complicated, too, that kind of idealizing of a loved one.

I think it can be confusing to the person who’s the recipient of it. But it’s confusing to be a person...

It’s confusing to be a person, period.

And it’s confusing to be so in debt to this thing that’s built into your brain chemistry. But it’s still the truth. You look at some of these paintings that people get mad about through history and, my God, they are so beautiful to me. I can’t be mad at a painter for painting a certain way. I think it would be a waste of the human spirit.


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