The Screengrab : being john malkovich

Charlie Kaufman Would You Like to Know That He Really Does Care About @#$%ing Structure!

Phil Nugent — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Synecdoche, NY has just opened in England, and Laura Barton stopped by Charlie Kaufman's hotel room to help him measure himself for a coffin. "Does he read the reviews? 'Uh. I've stopped,' he says, not remotely convincingly, and immediately contradicts himself: 'I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It's a very bad idea, and there's a lot of angry people in the world. And it's weird to absorb all that weirdness.' He speaks like a hen pecking the dust. 'Were you at the screening [in London] last night?' He directs the question to the carpet. 'I was, like, what in the world would motivate someone to shout, "Rubbish"? I speculated it might be the same guy who asked later on, "I've noticed that your movies don't have any structure, and I'm wondering if you are comfortable with your movies not having any structure, or whether you'd rather they had structure..." He said "structure" three times.'"

Kaufman doesn't exactly agree with the contention that he his intricately built scripts have no, ahem, structure. "There's this inherent screenplay structure that everyone seems to be stuck on," he points out, "this three-act thing. It doesn't really interest me. To me, it's kind of like saying, 'Well, when you do a painting, you always need to have sky here, the person here and the ground here.' Well, you don't. In other art forms or other mediums, they accept that it's just something available for you to work with. I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it." At the same time, he is by nature what might be called an improvisational writer. "In the case of Being John Malkovich, which is the first screenplay I wrote by myself, I was trying to take two separate ideas and combine them. So I would see if I could surprise myself, if I could force myself into directions that were unanticipated. It was a conscious decision to try and duplicate that process of writing with someone else, but doing it by myself. But one of the reasons it's nice to have a collaborator is that when things get bad, you can have fun with it, you can make jokes about it."

Of course, a tendency for making jokes about things getting very bad may be part of what has made Kaufman such a controversial figure. On Synecdoche, "I was trying to present a life, with its moments of nothing. There is something that happens to people when they get old, which is that they get sidelined. There isn't a big, dramatic crescendo and then their life is over. They're forced out of their work, the people in their lives die, they lose their place in the world, people don't take them seriously, and then they just continue to live. And what is that? What does that feel like? I wanted to try to be truthful about that and express something about what I think is a really sad human condition." Kaufman was nonplussed by some of the praise he got, from people who had been hostile to his earlier work (and, with Synecdoche< went right back to being hostile to it), for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because they "said it was the first time that I had expressed any human emotion, or heart, or something like that."

Some of us find Kaufman's work so emotionally affecting that the only way we can account for the accusation that it's too cold is that it's a rationalization formed by people who are made angry by his work because it gets to them in soft, sensitive places where they'd prefer to remain untouched. Kaufman himself doesn't say this, but some of the things he does say make you wonder if he could maybe relate to that. On Synecdoche, he was trying to address his own awareness of death: "I think death is a hard thing to look at, but I can't really not." As for the idea that one needs time and distance to gain the perspective necessary to write about painful experiences, "It's not only that I don't like [that concept], it's that I think there's a dishonesty to it. I've come to that sort of conclusion that it doesn't exist, that distance, ever. It's not real. We tell stories about the world, and our lives in the world, and relationships. It's just a way that the human brain organizes things. You never actually live there. The thing that you're putting in perspective is always over, you know? And the truth is that it's very hard to live where we really are, but that's the only place we get to live. So I'm kind of interested in that, in exploring that."

Related Stories: Screengrab Review: Synecdoche, NY

In Other Blogs: Synecdoche-Mania

Sundance Preview: Ten Must-See Narrative Features (Part One)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we looked at five documentaries I deemed “must-sees” based on their descriptions in the Sundance guide, their trailers (if available) and my own whims and biases. As I mentioned, I will not actually be attending the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, but why should that minor detail prevent me from having an opinion? With any luck I’ll get to see these movies sooner or later anyway, either at other festivals, in regular theatrical release or on DVD. With that in mind, let’s move on to the narrative features:

ADVENTURELAND

Admittedly, there’s not much need to waste a valuable Sundance timeslot seeing Adventureland, since it’s due in theaters on March 27th. On the other hand, it’s always nice to be ahead of the curve and in the know, so here’s your opportunity to spread either buzz or backlash. Superbad director Greg Mottola takes us back to the glorious year of 1987, when recent college grad Jesse Eisenberg is forced to take a job at an amusement park full of “belligerent dads, stuffed pandas, and screaming kids high on cotton candy.” On the plus side, it also has Twilight cutie Kristen Stewart and a supporting cast of actual funny people like Martin Starr, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig.

BIG FAN

I’m not entirely sold on the cinematic credentials of former Onion writer Robert Siegel. Granted, I haven’t seen The Onion Movie, but his bizarrely acclaimed script for The Wrestler struck me as a humdrum cliché-fest. Still, Big Fan sounds promising if only for the presence of the reliably hilarious Patton Oswalt in the leading role. It’s also timely, given the recent well-publicized troubles of New York Giants star Plaxico Burress: “Paul Aufiero, a 35-year-old parking-garage attendant from working-class Staten Island, is the self-described “world's biggest New York Giants fan.” One night Paul and his best friend, Sal, spot star Giants linebacker Quantrell Bishop at a gas station in Staten Island. They impulsively follow his SUV into Manhattan to a strip club, where they finally muster up the courage to talk to their hero. What starts out as a dream come true turns into a nightmare as a misunderstanding ignites a violent confrontation, and Paul is sent down a path that will test his devotion to the extreme.”

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

The Sundance guide sums it up nicely: “John Krasinski, best known for playing the charming everyman, Jim Halpert, on The Office, may seem an unlikely candidate to adapt and direct the late David Foster Wallace's caustic exploration of the hideous nature of men.” I agree that it doesn’t immediately sound like a match made in heaven, but what do I know about whatever demons the seeming nice guy Krasinski may harbor? Julianne Nicholson stars as the grad student conducting those brief interviews, which range from “the bizarre to the banal, but they are always infused with biting humor and extraordinary details.”

THE CLONE RETURNS HOME

This Japanese feature is described as being “in the tradition of Solaris and other deeply philosophical science-fiction works.” It concerns an astronaut who “agrees to participate in an experimental cloning program that will ‘regenerate’ his body and memory should he die. So when he’s killed during a space mission, scientists are able to regenerate his clone. But problems occur with its memory, which regresses to Kohei’s youth and the accidental death of his twin brother. Distressed, the clone flees the lab in search of his childhood home. Along the way, he finds his own lifeless body in a space suit. Mistaking it for his brother, he continues his journey carrying the body on his back.” There’s a fine line between dreamlike and ponderous and this one could go either way, but I’m feeling generous enough to give it the benefit of the doubt.

COLD SOULS

This “metaphysical tragicomedy” sounds more than a little Charlie Kaufmanesque. Paul Giamatti stars as himself, “agonizing over his interpretation of Uncle Vanya. Paralyzed with anxiety, he stumbles upon a solution via a New Yorker article about a high-tech company promising to alleviate suffering by deep-freezing souls. Giamatti enlists their services, intending to reinstate his soul once he survives the performance. But complications ensue when a mysterious, soul-trafficking ‘mule,’ transporting product to and from Russia, ‘borrows’ Giamatti's stored soul for an ambitious, but unfortunately talentless, soap-opera actress.” Is the debut feature from Sophie Barthes a ripoff of Being John Malkovich or “strikingly original” as the Sundance guide claims?

Part Two

Trailer Review: The Great Buck Howard

Paul Clark — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

For an actor who projects such a reptilian intelligence, it’s sort of amazing how wonderful John Malkovich is at playing oblivious boobs. The Great Buck Howard, which premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, doesn’t look like much of a movie, but Malkovich looks pretty delightful. Combining the puffed-up self-promotion of his Colour Me Kubrick performance with the addled mien of his later scenes in Being John Malkovich, Malkovich comes off quite well in this otherwise mediocre trailer, managing to soar above even a silly double-entendre at the end. Hopefully, there will be more to Buck Howard than a series of celebrity encounters (I’m guessing there will be), but no matter how it turns out, Malkovich should be a hoot. Also, Emily Blunt’s in it (something you wouldn’t know from the trailer), so her presence will help.

Trailer Review: JCVD

Paul Clark — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

When it was announced that a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie was going to be playing at Toronto this year, it came as something of a surprise. Yet the reviews for JCVD were mostly positive, and I must say that this trailer is kind of a hoot. I suppose it was inevitable that the Muscles From Brussels would eventually make a movie that kids his image (what, doesn’t Double Team count?), but for something Van Damme would make this one looks pretty clever, a kind of Dog Day Afternoon meets Being John Malkovich, except, you know, with Van Damme. I suppose it helps that I watched all of JCVD’s “Classics” with my dad back in the day, so I’m pretty much the ideal audience member for this. But still, I’m actually looking forward to a Van Damme movie, for the first time in, well, ever.

Charlie Kaufman Gets Wired

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

With his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York due next month, the notoriously press shy Charlie Kaufman has reluctantly decided that a little publicity is in order, especially given the movie’s pre-release rep as, shall we say, an esoteric experience. Kaufman agreed to sit down with a writer from geek culture magazine Wired for a profile in an upcoming issue. Ah, but what form should this profile take? It can’t be just a run-of-the-mill celebrity puff piece, because this is the guy behind such mind-twisters as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It has to be meta in some way. And so a blog was born.

Storyboard is described as “a profile of a profile of Charlie Kaufman.” The idea is to provide “an almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature….This is a one-time experiment, tied solely to the Charlie Kaufman profile scheduled to run in our November 08 issue.” The blog consists of internal emails, surveillance video from the Wired offices, and as of yesterday, the rough draft of writer Jason Tanz’s Kaufman profile.

It’s an interesting peek behind the curtain, but I’m not sure that Storyboard is really equivalent to what Kaufman does in his work. It’s more like a collection of DVD extras, but it’s still well worth checking out. For instance, there’s this September 5th entry collecting emails concerning Kaufman’s refusal to sit for a photo shoot. “I thought this was part of the negotiation, that he had never sat for an interview/shoot.,” writes creative director Scott Dadich. “This gives me serious reservations about doing the piece…. can we do a silhouette? something not showing his face?” Stay tuned for the resolution to this development, as well as promised full audio from the three-hour interview.

Related:
Charlie Kaufman Does Not Save His Urine in Jars
The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Where the Wild Things Aren't

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

It seemed like a match made in heaven. The classic Maurice Sendak children’s book Where the Wild Things Are and the one-time video wunderkind who brought a sure-handed touch to offbeat Charlie Kaufman material in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Throw in a screenplay by lit-hipster Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and what could go wrong? But Spike Jonze’s $80 million adaptation of Wild Things appears to have gone off the rails.

According to Patrick Goldstein at the L.A. Times, the movie “was originally slated for release this October but got pushed back to the fall of 2009. Last week it disappeared entirely from the Warner Bros. release schedule, a sign of continuing troubles. The script got good early reviews. But for months the Web has been pulsing with rumors and in-depth accounts that when Jonze had a research screening last December, kids in the audience were crying and fleeing the theater--not exactly the reaction the studio had hoped for.”

Apparently one big problem is that the young boy at the center of the story is “almost entirely unlikable, coming off as more mean-spirited and bratty than mischievous.” Then there’s the matter of the wild things themselves, originally a mix of actors in furry suits and animatronic puppets. No one was happy with these critters, who are now being replaced by (of course) CGI wild things.

This is not the first time an adaptation of Where the Wild Things has run into trouble. Disney attempted a version in the ’80s, with none other than Pixar maven John Lasseter at the helm. Check out Goldstein’s story for a clip of test footage from that never-made cartoon.

Related:

"Toy Story" Trilogy in 3-D

Charlie Kaufman Does Not Save His Urine in Jars

Cannes Rundown, Days 10 and 11- I'd be the screenwriter who speaks Chinese and plays the oboe. That would be cool.

Paul Clark — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:01:00 GMT

As the Cannes Film Festival enters its final days before the announcement of awards on Sunday, here’s one final roundup of reviews. We begin with Charlie Kaufman’s highly-anticipated (by me, anyway) directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Would Kaufman’s inexperience behind the camera cause him to become timid and soften his edge? If reviews are any indication, don’t bet on it.

AO Scott in the New York Times- “Mr. Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.”

But not all were so impressed. J. Hoberman in the Village Voice- “Collapsing in sodden self-reflexivity after a promising 40 minutes, Kaufman’s arch, interminable phantasmagoria—with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Job-like theater director—retroactively improved all but the most miserablist movies I saw at Cannes.”

Other competition titles:

Jeff Wells on Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo- “I knew I was seeing something intensely audacious and stylistically exciting, but the political arena it depicts is so dry and complex and wholly-unto-itself that gradually the film makes you feel as if you're lying in an isolation tank.”

Laurent Cantet’s The Class/Entre Les Meurs, according to Time Out’s Geoff Andrew- “Everything rings absolutely true in this film, and everything is utterly engrossing from start to finish, despite the apparent lack of a straightforward narrative during the first hour… There are no easy answers proffered to the various questions raised about education, schools and society, but the film makes for admirably lucid, subtle and thought-provoking drama throughout. And the kids are terrific.”

Cinematical’s James Rocchi tears into Wim Wenders’ latest, The Palermo Shooting- “After Palermo Shooting ended (with a title card offering the film as a tribute "To Ingmar (Bergman) and Michelangelo (Antonioni)," which made me imagine Bergman and Antonioni saying Uh, thanks, but. ... from the next world), the Cannes press audience booed and laughed and stumbled out into the streets for detailed digressions and discussions on how, exactly, Wenders had, as our British friends say, lost the plot. Palermo Shooting goes fairly off the mark, or fires blanks, or has a damp fuse; I'm not sure about which firearm metaphor applies here, and if Wenders can't be bothered to have any cohesion to his signs and symbols, why should I?... It's still a little sad to see a major filmmaker make such a series of major mistakes in the name of a fairly minor film.”

While I certainly admire Cannes’ devotion to Wenders, perhaps the competition would be better served if, instead of reserving spots for ex-Palme winners past their prime, the selectors would give some love to gifted up-and-comers who deserve a higher profile People like, say, Kelly Reichardt, whose Wendy and Lucy played in Un Certain Regard. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Mike Goodridge- “Reichardt's films are quiet and detailed, and in Wendy And Lucy , she provides an all too believable picture of how fine is the line between getting by and becoming homeless and destitute… Unlike Old Joy, which was a two-hander, Wendy And Lucy is told entirely from the point of view of one character - and her dog, of course. The beauty of the film is not only in telling a story with so few words but in showing the wordless tenderness that exists between woman and dog in a society which has cast her onto its fringes. “

Also of note was the Un Certain Regard prizewinner, Tulpan. Here’s ScreenDaily’s Jonathan Romney on the film- “Shy courtship, stark landscapes and a spirited supporting cast of livestock make Tulpan a vivid, intensely enjoyable debut feature from former documentarian Sergei Dvortsevoi. The Kazakhstan-set film hardly breaks new ground, in both setting and mood pitching its tent very close to The Story Of The Weeping Camel. But it similarly blends intimate, gentle fiction with a strong dose of ethnographic observation, to immensely charming effect.”

Justin Chang in Variety on Albert Serra’s Birdsong- “Patience was no doubt required of the Three Wise Men as they made their way toward Bethlehem, and the same will be required of auds who seek out "Birdsong," Albert Serra's minimalist reinterpretation of the Magi's journey. Hushed, contemplative but often quite droll experiment offers beautifully sculpted images on a black-and-white canvas across its sometimes hypnotic, sometimes tedious runtime.”

Wendy Ide praises Eldorado in the London Times- “This off-beat tragicomic road movie from Belgium is one of the sleeper hits of the festival. Screening in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, it’s a far cry from the dour, grey perception of Belgian cinema fostered by the work of people like the Dardenne brothers…The landscapes and soundtrack choices evoke American road movies of a bygone era; the sensibility is definitely European.”

Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, according to Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times- “Abel Ferrara's new film, "Chelsea on the Rocks," represents a kind of homecoming for the Bronx-born director and longtime chronicler of the New York City underbelly. Ferrara, best known for urban tales of damnation such as "Bad Lieutenant" and "King of New York," moved to Italy several years ago, fleeing a city transformed by the Rudolph W. Giuliani regime and the Sept. 11 attacks, not to mention a cultural and economic climate that had grown more hostile to maverick filmmakers.”

Finally, here’s a link to Karina Longworth’s live-blogging of Quentin Tarantino’s Film Lecture at Cannes. I’ve seen how fast that dude talks, and my fingers are hurting just thinking about it. Bang-up job, Karina.