“The screenwriting rules of Charlie Kaufman”
The title of this “Time Out London” article is misleading, at least if you are hoping to find some sort of distillation of the craft from Charlie Kaufman. But it does offer some insight into how he approaches his writing:
On studio filmmaking…
‘In a lot of movies, especially big studio ones, they’re not constructed in any other way than to get people to like them and then tell their friends. It’s a product. It’s like building a Buick. I don’t think the studios would even argue with that. It’s a very big business, a very risky business, and they want some sort of certainty that they’re going to succeed. They push certain buttons. But those movies aren’t interesting to me.’
On being seen as a ‘mathematical’ screenwriter…
‘I’ve heard people say that, and I don’t approach things that way. It often does come down to imagining different permutations of events. But I’m certainly not mathematical by training. I have a personality that tends to be somewhat compulsive, and I do tend to think in a circular way. I dwell on the same things over and over and I try to figure out different ways of looking at the same issue.’
On screenwriting as therapy…
‘I think if I’ve worked anything through with screenwriting it’s that I’m not going to be able to work anything through. It’s an ongoing crisis. You deal with who you are in different circumstances. I don’t think screenwriting is therapeutic. It’s actually really, really hard for me. It’s not an enjoyable process. Sometimes I like it when a script is out in the world and people are talking about it. I’ve been asked this before, and it invariably leads to the question: is there something else I’d rather be doing that’s more therapeutic? When I was young I used to act, and I would say that that was something I could definitely see as therapeutic. I really loved it. With this, it doesn’t feel like I’m solving anything or that I feel any happier by doing it.’
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On his forthcoming project, ‘Frank or Francis’…
‘If I look at some of the things in the script that I’m about to embark on, I’d have to say I don’t really have any idea how we’re going to do it. I’ve been pretty good at keeping logistics away from the writing process. It’s important when you’re writing to not bridle yourself with pragmatic concerns. The movie I’m about to do has got a lot of scenes and a lot of characters. And the scope of it and the world it inhabits is very, very large. In the broadest possible sense, it’s about online film criticism, but as usual, the world that I’m writing about is not necessarily the world that I’m writing about. It’s just a place to set it. There’s a lot in there about the internet and anger: cultural, societal and individual anger. And isolation in this particular age we live in. And competition: it’s about the idea of people in this world wanting to be seen. I hate to use the word “about”, as it implies that what I’m doing is an analogy and that I’m trying to say something. I’m not. That’s for the audience to do.’
These last comments caught my eye. I’m currently teaching a course on screenwriting and theme, and one of the principles we are working with in it is that theme is not simply the point of a story, or the moral of the story, or its premise, that stories don’t have just one theme, but multiple themes wrapped around a central theme. Kaufman’s description of Frank or Francis seems to suggest the same thing at least insofar as this project is concerned.
For more of the article, go here.
HT to @UnkScreenwriter for the link.
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