{"id":150964,"date":"2025-09-12T07:54:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T07:54:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150964\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:54:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T07:54:06","slug":"hollywood-has-everything-to-do-with-the-terrible-state-of-the-world-charlie-kaufman-on-ai-eternal-sunshine-and-toothache-charlie-kaufman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/150964\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Hollywood has everything to do with the terrible state of the world\u2019: Charlie Kaufman on AI, Eternal Sunshine \u2013 and toothache | Charlie Kaufman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlie Kaufman is in a funk. The genius screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York<\/a>, the devastating Bu\u00f1uelian comedy of mortality that he also directed, can\u2019t get a movie off the ground. \u201cI\u2019m having great difficulty,\u201d he sighs. \u201cI\u2019m not a person that people want to trust with their money. It\u2019s very frustrating.\u201d<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, production of a film he was preparing to make \u2013 Later the War, starring Eddie Redmayne as a manufacturer of dreams who diversifies into nightmares \u2013 was shut down in Belgrade; he hopes it will resume. To make matters worse, he sorely needs some shut-eye. \u201cNot to get into it, but I\u2019m not a great sleeper,\u201d he says, reaching out of frame for his coffee. The webcam is angled in such a way that his bearded, bespectacled face is shunted into the bottom half of the screen, leaving ample space above him where a big, fluffy thought-bubble might go.<\/p>\n

Kaufman, right, with Michel Gondry and Kate Winslet at the Academy Awards in 2005. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson\/Reuters<\/p>\n

He has just arrived back home in New York from the Venice film festival, where he was presenting How to Shoot a Ghost, the second of two lyrical shorts he has directed, both written by the poet Eva H.D<\/a>. This one features Jessie Buckley, star of Kaufman\u2019s 2020 film I\u2019m Thinking of Ending Things<\/a>, in which she shuffled through an entire Rolodex of different identities as she was driven through a blizzard to meet her new boyfriend\u2019s parents. Now she plays a recently deceased photographer wandering around Athens in a blue wig, armed with a Polaroid camera and accompanied by a queer translator (Josef Akiki) who is also newly dead. Together, they savour life from the afterlife. Think Wings of Desire<\/a> Goes to Greece.<\/p>\n

Josef Akiki, Eva H.D. and Charlie Kaufman at the Venice film festival this month. Photograph: Doreen Kennedy\/Alamy<\/p>\n

The short is poignant and oddly consoling. \u201cI like what the ghosts come to feel and see about their lives and their deaths,\u201d says 66-year-old Kaufman. \u201cI think it\u2019s a hopeful film. Maybe that has more to do with Eva, since she wrote it. I think she sees beauty as well as pain, and sees that they are not mutually exclusive.\u201d I ask whether he can see beauty, too. \u201cI can,\u201d he says after a long pause. \u201cI have a lot of anxiety. And I think that gets in the way of the experience of being alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Josef Akiki and Jessie Buckley in How to Shoot a Ghost.<\/p>\n

Later this month, Kaufman will bring How to Shoot a Ghost to Bristol\u2019s Encounters<\/a> film festival, where he will also appear on stage with Michel Gondry before a screening of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which Gondry directed. That 2004 gut-punch of a love story, which won Kaufman an Oscar for best original screenplay, stars Jim Carrey as a woebegone soul undergoing a cerebral deepclean to erase all memory of his ex-girlfriend (played by Kate Winslet, beating Buckley to the blue hair by two decades).<\/p>\n

Kaufman and Gondry spent several days in 1998 driving around Hollywood, pitching the idea for Eternal Sunshine to studio executives. \u201cI had an infected tooth,\u201d Kaufman grimaces. \u201cI\u2019d never been in such pain. But I didn\u2019t have time to go the dentist because we were doing this.\u201d Positive responses offset his agony. \u201cEverybody was, like, \u2018It\u2019s a new way to tell a love story\u2019. They knew how to sell it and that was exciting to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once the idea for Eternal Sunshine was sold, Kaufman had to set about writing it, which took time (\u201cIt always does\u201d). Gondry wanted to get cracking on a film, so Kaufman pulled an earlier unproduced script from the drawer for him to make in the meantime. The result, Human Nature<\/a>, starred Patricia Arquette as a hirsute writer, Tim Robbins as a repressed scientist with a \u201cminuscule penis\u201d and Rhys Ifans as his laboratory subject, who was raised as an ape. Full of unruly charm, it flopped and is hard to find these days. \u201cIs it?\u201d asks Kaufman. \u201cI haven\u2019t looked for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tim Robbins, Rhys Ifans and Patricia Arquette in Human Nature. Photograph: Cinematic\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Eternal Sunshine, though, was a breakthrough: the most sincere and effective marriage of mainstream and avant-garde ingredients since Groundhog Day<\/a>, and a hit to boot. \u201cThough the people who own the rights report back to me regularly that it\u2019s still in the red,\u201d he says dubiously. \u201c\u2018Hollywood accounting\u2019 is what it\u2019s called.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wobbles along the way were mostly to do with the coincidental resemblance of other movies to Eternal Sunshine. Kaufman has said previously that the release in 2000 of Christopher Nolan\u2019s memory-loss thriller Memento<\/a> gave him pause during the writing process. Perhaps that\u2019s why the bloviating fictional film critic B Rosenberger Rosenberg, who narrates Kaufman\u2019s 2020 novel Antkind<\/a>, has several digs at Nolan, referring to Starbucks at one point as \u201cthe smart coffee for dumb people. It\u2019s the Christopher Nolan of coffee.\u201d<\/p>\n

John Woo\u2019s 2003 science-fiction thriller Paycheck, released before Eternal Sunshine but now fittingly forgotten, also gave Kaufman a fright. \u201cThe trailer showed Ben Affleck with this memory-erasing machine on his head,\u201d Kaufman recalls. \u201cMichel and I were, like, \u2018Holy shit!\u2019 We called one of our producers and said, \u2018We can\u2019t put the movie out now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. Photograph: Maximum Film\/Alamy<\/p>\n

Perhaps the success of Eternal Sunshine was a mixed blessing for both men. When Gondry was asked in 2023<\/a> why he hadn\u2019t made more films in Hollywood, he said: \u201cIt\u2019s very hard to work after having worked with Charlie Kaufman.\u201d Other writers\u2019 scripts, he reflected, \u201call seem very dull\u201d. Maybe those first five spectacular years of being a screenwriter also skewed Kaufman\u2019s expectations of how the rest of his career would pan out. \u201cWell, I\u2019d spent much of my adult life not being successful,\u201d he says. \u201cBut, yes, there was this brief moment \u2013 beginning when Malkovich opened and ending with Synecdoche \u2013 where I was, you know \u2026\u201d He pauses, and I wonder if he is going to say \u201chot\u201d, a word I can\u2019t imagine ever crossing his lips. \u201cIn demand,\u201d he says finally. \u201cOr something.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2008 came the global financial crisis \u2013 \u201cFrom which I still don\u2019t think the film business has recovered,\u201d he says \u2013 and the release of Synecdoche, New York. The movie, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as an anxiety-riddled and insanely ambitious theatre director mounting a replica of his own life inside a vast warehouse, made no money. \u201cI don\u2019t care,\u201d says Kaufman defiantly. \u201cI\u2019m very happy with it.\u201d Yet, its box-office failure had clear consequences. \u201cMy films are well regarded and yet I\u2019m constantly up against this wall of not being able to get financing. And I\u2019m not asking for a lot.\u201d How will the situation ever change? \u201cI guess if I directed something that made a fortune,\u201d he suggests.<\/p>\n

Would it be intolerable for him to take on a movie he didn\u2019t believe in just to get the clout for his own projects? \u201cI think the world is in a terrible, terrible situation right now,\u201d he says, his tone suddenly grave. \u201cI don\u2019t think that Hollywood has nothing to do with it. I could argue that Hollywood has everything to do with it. And I have a responsibility, as I see it, not to put garbage in the world. I\u2019m not going to do that. If you start trying to figure out what it is that people want, you are doing what AI<\/a> does. The idea of AI precedes AI itself because that\u2019s the Hollywood machine. It\u2019s why they remake the same five movies every 10 years. It\u2019s why they have a formula for what a movie is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York. Photograph: AJ Pics\/Alamy<\/p>\n

The looming horror of AI is much on his mind today. \u201cThe most valuable thing to me in terms of my mental health is to read a poem or see a painting or listen to music which speaks to me, which breaks me open for a moment, and where I feel an experience honestly and delicately portrayed. That\u2019s another reason AI can never create anything artistically. It can trick us into thinking it has, but it doesn\u2019t have the experience of being alive. It doesn\u2019t know loss and joy and love and what it feels like to face mortality. I\u2019m very worried about the future in so many ways, and if we don\u2019t allow ourselves to connect with other humans who have the experiences that we have, then I think we\u2019re lost.\u201d<\/p>\n

The evidence is already around us, he argues. \u201cThat\u2019s where the greed and acquisitiveness and all of this garbage comes from. It\u2019s people who are really lost and don\u2019t have anything, so they\u2019re desperately trying to make themselves feel better by acquiring, by lording it over people, by being powerful and wealthy. They\u2019re damaged people doing so much damage.\u201d<\/p>\n

He throws up his hands. \u201cI\u2019m a damaged person too!\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019m trying, you know? I\u2019m trying to be truthful about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and How to Shoot a Ghost will screen at the Encounters film festival, Bristol on 24 and 25 September respectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charlie Kaufman is in a funk. The genius screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-150964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}