Charlie Kaufman took control of the cameras to bring his latest creation to light. Making his directorial debut with Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman presents another dream-like mind trip. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a struggling playwright whose life grows looser and more abstract. By the end, he is directing a play in which actors play everyone from his life, including himself, and enact scenes while they are occurring for the first time. In a roundtable interview, Kaufman explained as much as he cared to, leaving the rest open to interpretation.
Is talking about the movie antithetical to the process of making it?
Charlie Kaufman: "I'm just trying to have conversations with people. They can like the movie or not or see it or not. I don't really care. I can't care about it because it's out of my control. I feel like a lot of people put a lot of themselves into this thing and people will respond as they respond. If you create something that is asking for people to respond as they're going to respond, you have to allow them to respond as they're going to respond. Some of the people are going to be uninterested and some people are going to be mad for some reason, which is their business. That's just the way the world is."
How do you communicate your ideas to actors, and is it important that they "get" it?
Charlie Kaufman: "We talk about. I mean, the relationships in this movie are very real relationships. That's the actors' business is to understand those and understand what the moments are between the characters in the scenes that they're in. Talking philosophically with them is not necessarily even helpful."
Do you want to continue directing?
Charlie Kaufman: "I want to do it again. I feel compelled to do it again. It was hard in a lot of places. It was a very strenuous schedule for a lot of reasons, but I like the idea of it and I like the work and I like working with actors a lot, so I would like to do it again."
Do you see life as theater?
Charlie Kaufman: "I don't know. There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater. I mean, it's not like I'm presenting my thesis as there's theater in life or life is theater. It's just this is where the story takes place and these things seemed interesting to me and an interesting way to explore this idea of these people who are involved in the story. I don't feel like I'm making any grand statement like life is a play."
Each of your films has such an interesting hook and this is another.
Charlie Kaufman: "I intentionally tried to go hookless this time, which I think is maybe one of the reasons that people are having trouble knowing what they think of it because I'm not telling them what to think of it. I wanted to do that intentionally. I wanted to not give people the easy out that I feel like sometimes they can have when they go, 'Oh, the memory's being erased,' or 'They're inside John Malkovich.' I think people were waiting for that in this movie and no, it's a man's life. There are no answers and he dies. That seemed like kind of an honest thing to me, so that's what I tried to do."
Do you approach writing as a series of moments?
Charlie Kaufman: "No, when I was writing it, I was exploring the ideas that I was interested in which are I think evident in the movie. In no way was I trying to make this thing an episodic kind of thing. Once things would open up to me, I would try to incorporate them into the story and adjust the structure so that they were organic to each other."
What about things like Hope Davis' shoes cutting off circulation?
Charlie Kaufman: "Well, there are a lot of sort of dreamlike images in the movie and I guess that was one that remained. Originally there was another scene that was never in the production draft of the movie, but you see Hope's character going into a shoe store. The saleswoman comes and asks her if she needs any help and she looks at the saleswoman's shoes and says, 'Oh, do you another pair like that?' And the saleswoman hesitates and says, 'Yes, I'll go back and get them.' The saleswoman comes out clearly now in a different pair of shoes and she buys them even though they don't fit her. That's where those shoes came from, but then we just ended up with the shoes. We spent a great deal of time on Hope's foot. Hope's foot has a lot of prosthetics on it. I don't know how much you can see. It's got blisters that are bleeding. She couldn't even walk. She had to be carried by the key grip into the room, who was more than happy to do it. They're like details in a dream to me and that's why I guess I was interested in them."
How do you reconcile the dreamlike qualities with relatability?
Charlie Kaufman: "I think if something resonates, even if it's surreal, it's because it is relatable and I think that that's a core issue for me. I need to know what emotionally is going on with a character. It's not like I just go, 'Oh, that's weird. I'll put that in.' It doesn't work that way so I don't write that way and I'm not interested in that. So that I think keeps things grounded and like you were saying before with the actors. It's like everything that goes on, no matter how crazy the situation is, has to have some kind of resonance emotionally in a dynamic between people or between a person and him or herself. So that's in service, it always feels like it's in service of something that needs to be expressed as a truth, as opposed to in service of being weird."
