Eternal invention of a creative mind

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut started life as a horror film — and ended up giving him nightmares.

“It has been an enormously frustrating experience for me,'' he says. “It has made me feel a bit hopeless about the future of films.''

The story began five years ago. “Sony Pictures approached me and Spike [Jonze, who was originally on board as director] to make a horror film,'' says Kaufman, the small, wiry-haired New Yorker whose brilliant brain gave the world Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

“So we were trying to think of things that really scared us: mortality and illness, regret, loneliness, guilt; not conventional horror stuff but the truly scary things about being alive.

"Over the couple of years I took to write the screenplay, the plot gradually evolved ... and turned into something else.''

That “something else'' is Synecdoche, New York, an astoundingly original, brain-busting film as complex as anything Kaufman has written.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a sickly theatre director working in provincial America who fears death and dreams of great things.

After his wife (Catherine Keener) leaves him and moves to Berlin with their daughter, Cotard is awarded a prestigious “genius grant'' to stage the most audacious theatrical project of his career.

The production, an attempt to put real life on stage, requires the creation of a full-scale replica of Manhattan, a cast of hundreds and a rehearsal schedule that stretches out for years.

“When I write, I feel myself moving a little away from what I thought I was going to do,'' Kaufman says.

“And I keep having to ask myself, ‘Is this OK?' But, you know, I like being daring in my writing because I don't think I am particularly daring in any other aspect of my life. And besides,'' he adds, “it is not as if Sony was expecting me to deliver a slasher film.''

He pauses, takes a glug of coffee and laughs a short, nervy laugh which suggests that a slightly troubling thought has just occurred to him. “At least, if they were, they kept it to themselves.''

Artistically, Kaufman's risk-taking pays off — Synecdoche, New York is a breathtaking achievement; so far removed from anything else you will see in the cinema this year as to feel like an entirely different species of entertainment.

He also, and this is no mean feat for a first-time director, coaxes some beautiful performances from a heavyweight ensemble cast (which also includes Samantha Morton, Hope Davis and Michelle Williams).

But the film was never ever going to be a commercial sure-thing.

Sony was so perplexed by the original screenplay — as Kaufman puts it, “they really liked it but they also didn't know how to make this film'' — that they put it up for sale.

It soon found a buyer and a production budget in excess of $20 million. The film, which came out in the United States last autumn, has so far generated meagre box-office returns and peculiarly polarised reviews.

“What surprised me and hurt me the most is that the negative stuff I have read — and I have read a lot of it — seems very personal,'' Kaufman says.

“People make the assumption that everything I do is about me. But, then, I don't really understand the notion that I should write about things that I don't think about. Why would you ask that of a writer? How could you ask that of anyone?''

Born Charles Stuart Kaufman in New York in November 1958, he started life, he says, as “a very shy kid'' until, at the age of 8, he was encouraged by his teacher to take a role as a rooster in the school play — and brought the house down.

“I got laughs,'' he says, “and I was hooked. That moment defined my childhood. All I wanted to do after that was be in plays.''

He shifted his allegiance to film after getting his own Super 8 camera and catching his first glimpses of Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino burning up the screen at his local picture house.

“Maybe part of the appeal was the feeling that they weren't conventional film stars,'' he says. “I had a kind of attraction to the notion that they, like me, were little ethnic guys and yet they could star in films.''

The heist film Dog Day Afternoon, in particular, captured his imagination, and would eventually inspire the enormous sets of his latest film.

“When that film came out, there was this story that the bank in it was purpose-built for the film but then real people started coming in to open accounts,'' he says, beaming.

“I can't tell you how much I love that. I just love the idea that this fake thing can look real to people.''

After attending film school in New York, it took Kaufman ten years to land his first writing job, a decade he spent answering telephones for a living.

“I worked at the Metropolitan Opera in New York selling tickets. I worked at the Star Tribune newspaper in Minneapolis doing customer service, which meant answering calls from angry people whose papers had arrived wet or missing a section.''

He also read Kafka, which he felt “was speaking out to me as some sort of put-upon human being''.

When he turned 30, Kaufman resolved to have one final crack at the film business. He borrowed $3,000 from his father-in-law and left Minnesota to spend a few months in Los Angeles touting himself around as a writer.

At the end of the hiring season, he was about to head back empty-handed to the Midwest, where he had the offer of a job “writing for a cable show'', when a bigwig from a Los Angeles studio told him not to leave the city.

“He didn't hire me but he said ‘don't go','' Kaufman says. “And I thought there can't be a person so terrible that they would tell me not to take another job and then not hire me.

"And now I know there could be — Hollywood is filled with people like that! But I trusted this guy and he was honest. He gave me a job, writing for a TV show called Get a Life.''

Kaufman hasn't looked back since. Until now. “I feel sure that a writer is still needed for a film to be good,'' he says.

“But I don't think a writer is needed for a film to be successful any more. If you have got good special effects and you can throw $150 million into a film you are almost guaranteed a blockbuster. But people don't go to see films for the writing.''

Nevertheless, he is already ploughing on with his next screenplay for Sony, and hoping it doesn't swallow as much of his life as Synecdoche, New York did.

“I don't understand how Joel and Ethan Coen make, like, 20 films a year,'' he says, baffled. “It is mind-boggling. But I want to try to see if I can become like that.'' He grins and pumps his fist unconvincingly. “A go-getter!''

He is reluctant to say too much about his next project but lets on that it “will have something to do with the anger culture. People seem to be so angry these days. “And,'' he adds, “it is a comedy.''

He pauses, then frowns. “At least I hope it is a comedy, because Sony is expecting a comedy ... “