Interview: Charlie Kaufman
With the recent release of his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, Indie Wire landed this interview with the talented screenwriter. Choice quotes:
I started out when I was a little kid thinking I wanted to be an actor. I read a lot of plays, did community theater and summer stock. I also had a Super-8 movie camera as a kid and made a lot of super-8 movies. I originally went to college to study acting, but I couldn’t do it. After my first year I transferred to film school and studied film production. I did a horror movie, I did a stop-motion animation of Boots Walking. But I was really interested in comedy.
I started writing and performing sketch comedy in high school. I think I was heavily influenced by Monty Python, and other stuff that I thought was self-referential.
I often have a theme in mind when I’m starting. I know that I want everytihing to be in a world of, say, evolution, or guilt. But also I do a lot of things intuitively. I’m not often consciously aware of what I’m doing. It’s like in a dream: There’s something going on that’s powerful but you don’t know exactly why. As I’m writing, though, I start to see connections, and themes I didn’t see, and that sparks other things. So then I go back and rewrite things or alter them. It’s a combination of intuition and a lot of finessing. It becomes a combination of the rational and the irrational. I always go in circles. I have OCD to a certain extent, so I tend to do a lot of circular thinking. I think I do have OCD a bit.
I think dreams are metaphors. Everything you do in writing is metaphorical. So it seems like the same arena to me.