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Canwest News Service
Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) wonders if there’s a place for his smart, smaller movies as the marketplace loses the distributors who made those movies their business.
“I think it’s a disaster out there,” says Kaufman, who established his own style of story in such films as Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and his directing debut, last year’s Synecdoche, New York.
Kaufman heads to Vancouver early next month to speak at the Vancouver International Film Festival’s industry-themed Film and Television Forum.
“I don’t think the mid-range movie is going to exist anymore,” he says in a phone interview from his California home. “Movies are going to be blockbusters or really, really tiny budgets. And the tiny-budget movies have a very, very hard time getting distributed. All the places that distribute those movies have closed down. . . . There were avenues of exploration and experimentation that existed prior. I don’t know what that means for me.
“I think we’re going to be left with just more and more versions of Batman. It is a function of the cost of these things and it is a function of a lot of fear. People don’t think of (movie-making) as a form of expression, but as a form of business.”
Kaufman is a rarity in the movie business, a screenwriter who has enjoyed an equal collaboration with directors since his big-screen debut with 1999’s Being John Malkovich. He’s made two movies each with directors Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.
And his idiosyncratic scripts have attracted such players as Meryl Streep, Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
His movies have won two Oscars — include his own win for Eternal Sunshine’s screenplay, and been nominated for seven more.
“I made a movie this past year that didn’t do very much business,” he says. “The movies I’d done before, none of them were financial blockbusters, but people made their money back, a little profit, and there was some award prestige attached to them. All that stuff that keeps interest in financing them. But I think all that’s going away.
“I’m not creating a product. I’m not making a car or a can of beans, I’m trying to express something. . . In a way, trying to do something that’s a bit of an antidote to what this popular art form has become. The fact that I’m not making superhero movies or spy thrillers doesn’t seem to me like a flaw. . . . this business has been reduced to one story over and over again.”
Kaufman studied film at New York University, and got his writing start in the early 1980s, writing parodies for National Lampoon magazine. He wrote for various American TV sitcoms before his work with director Jonze on Being John Malkovich launched his movie career.
Kaufman is working on another screenplay, but he wonders about the future.
“I have been thinking of writing other things or doing theatre,” says Kaufman. In 2005 he wrote and directed the audio play Hope Leaves the Theatre in Brooklyn, starring Streep, Hope Davis and Peter Dinklage.
“I’d like to continue to do it,” he says of the theatre. “But I’m pressing on, I’m writing another screenplay and I’m hoping that when it’s done someone will want to make it, and that I can direct it. See what happens.”
Kaufman appears for a moderated question and answer session at 1:15 p.m. Saturday Oct. 3 at the Vancouver International Film Centre. That’s the forum’s New Filmmakers Day. Registration, schedule and ticket information is available at www.viff.org.
For the full Q&A with Charlie Kaufman, go to http://communities.canada.com/theprovince/blogs/reelman/archive/2009 /09/16/charlie-kaufman-talks-film.aspx
gschaefer@theprovince.com
