Michael Gondry and Charlie Kaufman
No screenwriter has gotten more attention and acclaim in the last five years than Charlie Kaufman. His debut script Being John Malkovich garnered worldwide renown for its original and moving story. Kaufman was nominated for an Academy Award for Malkovich. His second feature film Human Nature directed by Michel Gondry didnt make much of a box office splash but again had very favorable reviews and there are many that champion Human Nature as Kaufmans best work yet. After Human Nature Kaufman tackled two adaptations, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean and Chuck Barris memoir Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. The adaptation of The Orchid Thief took on a life of its own, becoming the subject of the movie, with Kaufman himself as played by Nicolas Cage, its main character. Once again, Kaufman was nominated for an Academy Award for the film that would be called Adaptation. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind would be received in a similar manner to Human Nature with fantastic reviews but not a box office success. Kaufman once again teamed up with Human Nature helmer Gondry for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.
Gondry and Kaufman sat down with IFQs Brendan MacDevette to discuss their latest project and the philosophy behind their distinctive brand of filmmaking.
IFQ: What interested you about the idea of erasing someone from your memory and what made you think it would make a good movie?
Michel Gondry: This idea opened a lot of possibilities for me, like if you could travel in time. The idea presented so many options with what could happen and what kind of story you could tell. I remember Charlie and I started talking about the story and Charlie got really excited about Joel interfering and altering his memories to trying to stop the process. Also, the idea of taking a person from one memory and bringing them to another memory, changing your past in a way was one of the things that got him excited.
Charlie Kaufman: I read an Ian Frazier story, where these two people are at a marriage counselor and the man is going on and on about their problems together and the woman is sitting there very quietly. Then, the counselor turns to the woman and asks her what her feelings are on the situation and she says, I have no idea who this man is. I love that story.
MG: So, its a story about a guy who had a fantasy about being married to this girl?
CK: No, apparently he just pulled her in off the street.
MG: Thats great, that could be another movie.
IFQ: If this technology was available, would you consider using it?
MG: I think Id remove very small things that sometimes bug me. For instance, the other day, I met this actor and I called him by the wrong name and he didnt correct me. When I got home, I realized it and I was like Ah! I want to erase this. But I wouldnt erase a relationship, what about you? (to Charlie)
CK: I wouldnt do it.
IFQ: How did the actors bring the script to life?
MG: The character is always the middle ground between the script and the actor. If the actor does exactly as the script describes, I think the scene is less lively than it could be but it also can be gimmicky. There are a lot of different opinions on the subject. People often are fascinated by performance with a lot to it. To me, I think performances should be a little more oblivious. Obviously, if the character is just the actor, its not very good because then you dont get engaged with the story. When we found out that Jim Carrey was going to be in the movie, we didnt change the character. Im speaking for you (Charlie), but I dont think you changed the character at all, right?
CK: No, the only time I thought of Jim was when the movie was done and we were re-writing voice over, but there was no rewriting done for Jim. I do want to agree with you that I think it is important and they all inevitably do bring something that makes the character alive, thats what they do.
IFQ: What was the casting process like on the film?
CK: I can speak to the writing part and I never have actors in mind when Im writing, with the exception of John Malkovich, because it was him. I dont write actors parts but after the script was done Jim got interested, which was fortuitous.
MG: A lot of people were interested in the part of Clementine because she is complex and colorful and apparently they say that there are very few parts like this for women to play. We wanted someone who gives this energy and I think Kate came very early in our mind. I remember her performance in Holy Smoke, where she was driving this guy crazy and I find that she can be very comedic yet very human. With actors, you have to control the performance more with comedy because they have a tendency to go a little too broad. With females you can push them to be bigger and they still remain natural. We liked Kate because she doesnt look like a star, although obviously she can, she is very beautiful.
IFQ: Was the scene in which Jim Carrey bathes in the sink taken from real life?
CK: I still bathe in the sink, just kidding. I definitely do remember bathing in the sink, I think it was easier for my mother, she didnt have to bend down.
MG: I remember this conversation Jim and I had about how everything seems bigger in your mind from your childhood then when you actually go back there.
IFQ: Was it difficult to get funding for the film?
CK: We sold this move to Focus Features as a pitch and got the go-ahead to develop it. But Human Nature was different.
MG: We had Patricia (Arquette) interested and that got things rolling. We were lucky to have a good relationship with (producer) Steve Golin. Especially, when the company that bought the script got bought by a different company and we didnt have to deal with that, there was no compromise or interference from the studio.
IFQ: Due to the autobiographical nature of many of your scripts, what is your reaction to seeing these personal stories on screen?
CK: The first time I saw Nicolas Cage masturbating in Adaptation with my name attached to his body, it was embarrassing, but I got over it really quickly, you have to separate yourself from it. But I have no choice other than to use my head to write my work, so that is the job Ive chosen to do and I do it willingly instead of unhappily.
MG: I wrote a short film and sometimes you hear the dialogue and feel really self-conscious. Does that happen to you (Charlie)?
CK: Yeah, if a line doesnt work then it doesnt feel good, but if its ok, its ok.
IFQ: There is a scene in which Dr. Howard (Tom Wilkinson) kisses Mary (Kirsten Dunst) and the Dr.s wife shows up outside where Stan (Mark Ruffalo) is standing and she can see the kiss happen inside, can you talk about the writing of that scene and the plausibility of all these elements coming together?
CK: We talked about that scene a lot. The conversations were is this too coincidental? That she (the wife) is coming at that moment and I know that you (Michel) did something.
MG: Yeah, to me it was too coincidental that they (Mark Ruffalo and the wife) would see Kirsten (Dunst) and Tom inside because they were right in front of the window. So I thought it would be interesting to involve Stan and have him honk the horn to attract their attention inside and stop the kiss.
CK: We had an argument about this, as a matter of fact because I didnt want Stan to do that.
MG: But, dont you think I was right?
CK: Well, the scene could have been like 100 times better if you didnt do that but it certainly works now.
MG: Now, you see what I have to deal with all the time.
CK: No, but Im serious, because theres no way to know. I like it, its fine. But I didnt understand it completely at the time. But I get it now.
MG: For me with the geography (of the location) I didnt know how possibly they (Dunst and Wilkinson) could see her (the wife). If they could see her (the wife) when they were kissing, then it would be ok.
CK: Oh, ok, well what I like about the honking now, is that it makes Stan have a complicated reaction, that he wants to protect this woman whos basically two-timing on him with his boss. And that woman, Deirdre OConnell, the wife, she was great.
MG: When I read the script, I feel that certain things work and other things dont work and there are things we need to do to help the scene become real. Because if you write, you see somebody through a window, you dont imagine that there would be twenty yards of grass, it happened to be like that and you cant always have the perfect location to match exactly what you had in mind. And when the confrontation happens after the kiss and the wife is driving the car away and he is trying to stop her, I think I suggested that to make the scene a little more emotional, it had to give the feel of a love triangle with the wife and the lover together and the scene would play stronger. I think it was amazing, the acting of Deirdre and Kirsten. The way Kirsten acted was very simple, many actors have to have the emotion coming deeply from inside but Kirsten is just there and she does what she needs to do. All the ways we cut the scene were great because her performance was so simple and natural.
IFQ: Do you think Stan knew about the past relationship between Mary (Dunst) and Dr. Howard (Wilkinson), is he telling Mary the truth when he says he didnt know?
CK: We like Stan and I dont think we ever thought about that. I think hes an honest, straightforward guy but its interesting to hear different interpretations on the characters. I always viewed him as someone with ethics opposed to Patrick (Elijah Wood), who clearly doesnt have any.
IFQ: What is the collaboration like between you two and why do you choose to work together?
MG: Its like an old friend from school, you dont really choose them and they could be your best friend for life. No, I think we have good discussions and a lot stuff in common as well as big differences. We dont compromise often.
CK: We have good fights because of that.
MG: But I beat him up, because hes tiny
CK: What?
MG: Because youre tiny.
CK: I think I could take you Michel and I cant say that about too many people, but I think I could take you.
MG: Im very weak, physically. But its good to be weak because then you find out your differences and use logic. In the past, physical strength was a condition of survivors but I think physical strength is not helping for survival in modern society. If you are weak then you find a better way to survive. I try to explain that to my son, but he likes to fight.
IFQ: How did you achieve the gritty look of the film?
MG: I came to the realization doing the location scouting with a little video camera that everything always looks great on the scout but it never looks as good in the movie. I started to try to understand why I prefer how life looks than how movies look. I think in life we have a way of unconsciously organizing light to please us. If you can just capture that, its going to be better than trying to recreate it. Take this room, you have some yellow, pink and blue walls, but its organized in a nice way. If you bring a DP (Director of Photography) in, hes going to decide to make all the walls one color and shoot conventionally. I dont like that and I interviewed a lot of DPs who work in that way. When I met Ellen Kuras, she had exactly this approach. I would ask her, how would you light this scene? She would say I basically would leave it the way it is because it looks great. My first DP didnt accept that life could be more interesting than film. He said life is boring you have to change it. But I didnt want to go for that. For this movie I really wanted to film it as real as possible, especially because we are dealing with memories. When you want to recreate a memory, making it feel real is very important.
IFQ: How did the writing of this compare to the other scripts?
CK: This was a hard one to write. There were a lot of technical issues. We pitched it as sort of a skeleton idea and then I had to go figure out a lot of the logic problems of like, How would the erasing work? and how the character of Joel (Carrey) could be in a memory but also be outside of a memory in a scene?, so you wouldnt just have this video replay of his memories of her but also have him commenting or interacting with the memories. That was stuff that had to be figured out. Also, the reversal of cause and effect, I did not know how that was going to work and I wasnt sure if it was going to work at all and its not even certain once youre done with the script because its easier to understand that reversal on paper than it would be on film because you can always read back what you just wrote and say, oh ok, I get that, but film is constantly moving. Then, on top of that I need to create what was to me, a believable relationship between these two people which I really wanted to be the anchor of the movie and the other stuff is kind of a conceit and I didnt want it to be about that. Neither of us wanted it to be a science fiction movie. So, to figure out who these two people were and why they would be with each other was important. It took a long time for writing, plus I was also doing a lot of other things at the time. I had just gotten a job to adapt The Orchid Thief, a week before this pitch sold, so I had to do that first. Michel and I did Human Nature in the interim. So, there were a lot of distractions.
MG: This paradox Charlie had to solve of being inside a memory and outside a memory was very hard on us. We had a lot of conversation, like should we have two Joels, one watching the memories and one inside the memory or should they be the same and then switch. After reading the first draft I thinking this movie will be good because he found a very simple way of doing that using the present tense and the past tense alternatively. This allowed me to work in a poetic way because the changes in time were very immediate and natural.
IFQ: Can you synthesize what the poem Eloisa to Abelard, from which the title comes, means to you and why it became the title?
CK: Well its based on the character of Mary searching through Bartletts Quotations looking for quotes to impress Howard with and I came upon it and I liked it and thought it sort of spoke to the plight of the characters in the movie. I have an affection for Eloisa to Abelard. I thought it was very serendipitous and decided to use it and I liked that it was long and hard to remember. I thought that was counter-intuitive for a title to a movie, so I went for it. by Brendan MacDevette