How They Write A Script: Charlie Kaufman
So we’ve had Shane Black’s shoe box, David Lynch’s sugar rushes, and Paul Schrader’s charts. All interesting approaches to writing a script. But perhaps none as personal and iconoclastic as Charlie Kaufman
Here are excerpts from three interviews available online. The first is from Indie Wire in 1999 regarding the release of the movie Being John Malkovich:
Q: How much research do you do, for example into characters, before jumping into the actual script?
Kaufman: I think about things for a long time. I think about things a lot. I write notes to myself, I take long walks and write things down on a little pad in my pocket, which is there now. And then I get frustrated and I think about it, and then I start writing. Then maybe I’ll outline and I’ll get bored with it and it’ll be lifeless. It’s like without a safety net, it makes it more interesting, because you can fail. I have to say that my situation might not be typical and I don’t know, because it’s only my situation. But because I have a reputation now because my stuff is weird and people like it, that maybe they’re giving me more freedom than other people might get.
Here we see an organic approach to writing, but with an interesting twist — instead of running away from the fear of failure, Kaufman seems to welcome the ‘threat’ of failure as a means of inspiring creativity and the freedom to do what he wants. This freedom came into play with the screenplay for Adaptation, where Kaufman made a radical choice, as he acknowledges in this interview, while enmeshed in trying to adapt the book “The Orchid Thief” by author Susan Orlean:
“I thought it was interesting because that’s what I was thinking about. I find I write best when I write what I’m thinking about. What I was thinking about was that I was completely unable to write this script. When I started to think about what that meant, and put myself in there, I started seeing connections between what my story might be and what Orlean’s story was, and the idea of adaptation and evolution. It seemed correct even though it was still scary. I remember sitting down one day and thinking, “What I’m I thinking? Where’s my energy?” And my energy was on my complete blockage.
Talk about a writer following his characters into a story — Kaufman followed himself into another whole approach, not an adaptation of the novel, but a tale about Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter, desperately trying to write the adaptation. In other words, Kaufman became the subject of the movie — but it wasn’t like Kaufman had much confidence in his choice:
“I honestly did not think this movie would ever see the light of day. I didn’t think this movie was going to get made. Putting myself in the (script) was a really hard thing to do. I wouldn’t have done it if I had some distance from it. I wouldn’t have set out to do it. And I don’t think I would have been able to do it if I thought this movie was going to get made.
But Kaufman’s ‘rationality’ was wrong and his instincts were right as Adaptation was produced, going on to become a signature film in Kaufman’s career.
The final interview excerpts come from a 2004 interview in Movie Maker magazine
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.
Interesting to see Kaufman’s reaction to the idea of “Cubist screenwriting.” For as much as is written about Kaufman’s freestyle approach, he himself is aware that some of what he is doing is reacting to a system, a “formula,” just like Picasso did in his evolution as an artist.
What’s a takeaway message on Charlie Kaufman’s approach for aspiring screenwriters? One thing immediately comes to mind: it’s okay to bend the accepted ‘rules’ of conventional wisdom re screenwriting, but if you want to avoid being ‘formulaic,’ it necessitates you understand the formula in the first place, have a clear knowledge of the foundations of screenplay theory in order to know what ‘rules’ you want to break.
UPDATE: For all you fervent Charlie Kaufman fans, it turns out he even has a fansite.
[Originally posted 6/20/2008]
