Charlie Kaufman?

Started by Xeditor, January 22, 2003, 07:30:39 PM

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Xeditor

Everyone has Adaptation in their top 10 list, but he is still not on the board?
The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

RegularKarate

Quote from: XeditorEveryone has Adaptation in their top 10 list, but he is still not on the board?

ummm... he's not a director.

sphinx

spike jonze is the director, charlie kaufman is the writer.  so far, jonze has made two films

Duck Sauce

Well, its a good thing you made this post. Anybody know anything about Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless mind? I mean anything? Also, has anybody seen Human Nature and can reccomend it?

MacGuffin

Quote from: Duck SauceAnybody know anything about Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless mind? I mean anything?

PURISTS BEWARE: *SPOILERS*

Premise: This is the story of a guy, Joel (Jim Carrey), who discovers that his long-time girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has undergone a psychiatrist's (Tom Wilkinson) experimental procedure in which all of her memory of Joel is removed, after the couple has tried for years to get their relationship working fluidly. Frustrated by the idea of still being in love with a woman who doesn't remember their time together, Joel agrees to undergo the procedure as well, to erase his memories of Clementine. The film, which takes place mostly within Joel's mind, follows his memories of Clementine backwards in time as each recent memory is replaced, and the procedure then goes on to the previous one, which is likewise seen, and then erased. Once the process starts, however, Joel realizes he doesn't really want to forget Clementine, so he starts smuggling her away into parts of his memory where she doesn't belong... which alters other things about his memories as well. (Kirsten Dunst plays the psychiatrist's receptionist; Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood play his lab technicians).


After taking a break to return to broad comedy form for one movie (Bruce Almighty), Jim Carrey returns to more serious stuff with the latest lead role to spring forth from the pen of screenwriter wunderkind Charlie Kaufman. Like Being John Malkovich this new story takes within a man's mind, but even more so (most of the film). It also joins the recent mini-trend of movies (11:14, Irreversible) that (at least partially) use reverse chronology that started with Memento just two years ago. As the respect and clout of Kaufman's originality and writing skill grows, his films continue to be able to attract A-list talent, even for supporting roles (Dunst, Wood). This project also reunites with Michel Gondry, director of Human Nature, which is admittedly probably the "lesser" of the four produced Kaufman films; but few films today could stand up to comparison to Adaptation and Being John Malkovich; it's all relative.

Release Date: Fall, 2003 (platform release starting in LA/NY, then expanding wider).

Title Note: The title is quoted from the poem "Eloisa to Abelard" by Alexander Pope (1688-1744).

Click here for Photo Gallery: where you can see the punkish look that Kate Winslet is sporting for the movie; in addition to bright orange in one half, we should also be seeing her sport blue hair in the other half of the movie...111 images!
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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RegularKarate

Thanks Mac...had heard the title, but didn't know much about it, sounds great... I really like the idea.

Jon

Human Nature was very uneven. Althoguh there were some great ideas about how sad life is, the way we live it, etc.

rustinglass

There is also philip kaufman the director. Unbearable lightness of being is very good.
"In Serbia a lot of people hate me because they want to westernise, not understanding that the western world is bipolar, with very good things and very bad things. Since they don't have experience of the west, they even believe that western shit is pie."
-Emir Kusturica

life_boy

I liked Quills.  I thought Geoffrey Rush was great.

MacGuffin



Given the furiously comic nature of Charlie Kaufman's screenwriting, it's easy to imagine him as the intensely sarcastic, spontaneously witty type. Instead, he seems to exercise that aspect of his personality on the page. In fact, the real Charlie Kaufman looks so unremarkable that, walking into a recent interview, I hardly recognized the shy, bearded man waiting across the room (though that has more to do with the fact that the reclusive writer never allows his photograph to be taken).

This is the guy behind Being John Malkovich? This is the guy portrayed by Nicholas Cage as a fat, balding and intensely neurotic screenwriter in Spike Jonze's new film, Adaptation? Adaptation is the second of three ambitious Kaufman scripts to be produced this year, along with the bizarro love-triangle comedy Human Nature and George Clooney's directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, about "Gong Show" host and part-time secret agent Chuck Barris (or so the movie suggests).

It takes some getting used to, the notion that movies as wildly imaginative as these might come from someone as mildly mannered as this. When posed with questions, Kaufman doesn't stammer like Woody Allen or blurt with Hunter S. Thompson's gusto. He takes his time and thoughtfully crafts his responses, hesitantly deflecting his gaze as he speaks. He's shy, not sheepish, and his answers reveal something of his true personality. We wanted to know what Kaufman looks for in movies, what inspires him, so we asked him to recommend five films of personal significance. Here's what he picked.

What Happened Was...
(1994, dir: Tom Noonan, starring: Karen Sillas, Tom Noonan)
It's a two-character movie that takes place in one apartment. It's about a first date. I've seen the movie maybe 10 times, and I always find something new in the dynamic between these two people. I was asked to present a movie that I really liked at UCLA last year, and it's the first time I saw it with an audience. It was amazing the kind of stuff people were laughing at. There were things that I found really moving and horrifying that people were laughing at, and I didn't mind it. I thought it was kind of great. That's the thing I love about good movies, that people can have different reactions to the same moment. There's a lot of stuff I don't understand about what's going on -- sometimes I find the movie very funny, sometimes it's just tragic and sometimes it's both -- but it's really fascinating to me. I just think it's true, and I think that if you can have two characters in a room for two hours, you've done an amazing thing.

Naked
(1993, dir: Mike Leigh, starring: David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp)
It's sort of similar, the way that Mike Leigh and Tom Noonan work. They workshop these things, and I think that's where they get the richness and the density in the performances and the script, the precision. There seems to be this truth found in moments that you don't see in movies that are really heavy scripted. Mike Leigh will work for six months developing these characters with the actors, not knowing where the story's going to go. It's about a drifter who comes to London to see this old girlfriend of his. It follows him on this odyssey through London, meeting all these different characters. Every single person he meets is so funny and sad and rich. David Thewlis, who plays the lead, gives one of the best film performances I've ever seen. He's such an awful character on paper, yet you find yourself having such sympathy for him. I have sort a theater background, and I really like good actors, so if I were to direct a movie, it's certainly a way that I would consider doing it.

Safe
(1995, dir: Todd Haynes, starring: Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley)
I first saw Julianne Moore in Vanya on 42nd Street, where her character was the polar opposite of the one she plays in this movie. Here she's a stereotypical sort of upper-middle-class suburban housewife who develops one of these allergies to the world, and it takes over her life. I think she's great. She gives this almost blank, sad performance that's completely in tune with the style of the movie. It has this balance between surreality and the real world that's very impressive to me. It's one of those movies where it's also funny maybe, but you're not really sure. It doesn't tell you what to think about anything that it shows you, which is something that I always aspire to in stuff that I'm writing. All these movies are comedies in a way. In Human Nature, we wanted to strike a balance. We didn't want to make fun of Patricia Arquette's character, which was delicate because the idea of a hairy woman is so freaky to people. We had great affection for that character, and we didn't want people to see her on the screen and laugh. We didn't want it to feel like it was a Farrelly brothers presentation of a person.

Barton Fink
(1991, dir: Joel Coen, starring: John Turturro, John Goodman)
I think it's the Coen brothers' weirdest movie. It's just great, with really good performances by everybody: John Goodman and John Turturro, all the supporting people. It's full of really, really funny moments, and it's so strange and creepy. It's about this sort of Clifford Odets writer in the '30s. He's this socially conscious New York playwright who gets hired by the studios to be a screenwriter, so he moves out to Los Angeles to write this wrestling movie. It's about his struggle to write this script, but it's just very odd and demented. I think anybody who writes screenplays identifies with not knowing how. Adaptation is a very conceptual movie, but it has the same basis. The structure of the movie turns in on itself and transforms as you're watching it. It's got two stories that it follows: One is the story of the guy writing the screenplay, and the other is the story of the woman writing the book that he is basing the screenplay on. They take place in two different times three years apart. They kind of inform each other and interact in a way that things that are separated by time can, and then they come together in the present at the end of the movie in a hopefully surprising way. I was hired to write an adaptation of this book [The Orchid Thief], and I didn't know how to do it, so I decided to write what I was thinking about. I didn't tell the studio because I didn't think that they would let me do it, and I didn't have any other ideas, so I figured I would just take my chance and do it.

Ladybird Ladybird
(1994, dir: Ken Loach, starring: Crissy Rock, Vladimir Vega)
It's based on a true story, and it's about a woman in England who's considered an unfit mother. She's got a bunch of children that are being taken away from her, and she's trying to deal with that as well as a new relationship that she's starting with this really nice man. Again, it's the acting that gets me. Crissy Rock plays the mother. I think she was a standup comic or something, and this is the first part she ever had in a movie. It's one of the most real, heartbreaking performances that I've ever seen in a movie. This is not a comedy by any stretch of the imagination. It's a really hard movie to watch, but it's just so real and so compelling because of that. You feel like you are seeing an actual live person on the screen.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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aclockworkjj

Quote from: rustinglassThere is also philip kaufman the director. Unbearable lightness of being is very good.
Henry and June....

I like that movie.

Quote from: godardianSafe? Naked? Ken Loach?

I have a newfound respect for this guy.
To tell you the truth...i found that surprising too.  Good deal Chuck!

godardian

Safe? Naked? Ken Loach?

I have a newfound respect for this guy.
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

Pedro

Quote from: godardianSafe? Naked? Ken Loach?

I have a newfound respect for this guy.
You didn't before?

MacGuffin

Kaufman Out For Clooney's Blood
Source: Empire Online
 
Empire Online reports that in an interview in the May issue of Arena magazine, "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine..." scribe Charlie Kaufman revealed he's quite pissed off with George Clooney over the way 2002's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" went down (Kaufman scripted, Clooney directed).

Kaufman says "I was upset by the fact that he took the movie from me and then cut me out after that. Im unhappy with the end result. And Im unhappy with George Clooney. I had a movie that I wrote and that isnt it...I've always been involved in the process with Spike (Jonze) and Michel (Gondry). If there's any rewriting to do, I do it. But with Clooney it was differenteven the end of the movie is different. I mean, Clooney went on forever about how my Confessionsscreenplay was one of the greatest scripts hed read. But if someone truthfully felt that way they'd want the person who wrote it to be onboard offering their thoughts and criticisms. But Clooney didn't, and I think its a silly way to be a director".

Kaufman in the meantime is continuing work on other projects - "Spike and I recently pitched this idea for a scary movie to Sony pictures. I don't have a title for it yet and Im not even sure what the plots going to be. But that's the way I write: without knowing where something is going".
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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Jeremy Blackman

I no longer feel guilty for thinking that movie is mediocre.