'Synecdoche, New York' is another piece of Charlie Kaufman's soul
THE DIRECTOR'S CRAFT
That's why every critical word stings him. 'I feel very vulnerable,' he says.
Charlie Kaufman, a diminutive 50-year-old screenwriter with a thatch of uneven curly hair, is all but swathed in existential terror. He's in the midst of barnstorming the world, promoting his long-awaited directorial debut, "Synecdoche, New York," a rite of passage somewhat akin to a root canal for the famously shy auteur.
You'd think given the originality of his films, such as "Being John Malkovich" (about a puppeteer who discovers a portal into John Malkovich's brain) or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (about a love affair complicated by a memory-erasing machine), that Kaufman wouldn't care what anybody thinks. But he does. Since playing at the Cannes Film Festival six months ago, "Synecdoche" has polarized critics. There's been much praise for what A.O. Scott of the New York Times termed "its seamless alternate reality," yet there's also been sniping about the film's opacity and air of gloom. The film's lack of universal acclaim and the fact that it took so long to find its distributor (Sony Pictures Classics) have left Kaufman jangled and upset.
"I feel very vulnerable," he says, as he waits for lunch in a French bistro in Los Feliz. So vulnerable that he's actually talking about quitting screenwriting.
This film, which opened Friday, "is really personal," he says. "I feel embarrassed for even doing this in the world. I put this thing, that is like me, my soul, in the world, and I just feel like it's trampled. It makes me feel like I don't want to do this anymore. I certainly don't want to try to sell them, but I don't want to make them anymore either."
He insists he's not kidding. "It's not a threat," he says. "It's just me trying to figure out what I'm going to do next. I need a job. I need to figure out what I'm going to do to pay my mortgage."
It's slightly depressing to hear a dreamer like Kaufman speak so prosaically. His name is practically an adjective in Hollywood, synonymous with a comically depressed inversion of reality, where people's interior lives are externalized for all to see. He won an Oscar for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and was nominated twice more. He is one of the few first-time directors to get final cut. Yet even Charlie Kaufman has to eat. He's spent the last five years on "Synecdoche." Even with a cast of actors' actors led by Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Synecdoche," which cost more than $20 million, may or may not make money for its investors.
