A movie mystery man's labor of love
Globe-nominated screenwriter Charlie Kaufman digs deep
By Todd Leopold
CNN
(CNN) -- Somehow, Charlie Kaufman has picked up this reputation as the Thomas Pynchon of screenwriters: a reclusive man who spins loopy, cerebral tales of fame, love and identity, such as "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation" and last spring's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
Never mind that, though he considers himself a private person, he's willing to do press to promote his films. Never mind that he's been photographed occasionally -- and recently, too, so there's no need to rely on an old high school yearbook photo or something.
And never mind that most people would have a hard time picking any screenwriter out of a lineup. Kaufman, whether it's because of his erudite scripts, soft-spoken demeanor or reticence to explain his work, has an image of a movie mystery man.
After all, a guy who comes up with the idea of a tunnel into John Malkovich's head or writes himself and a twin alter ego into a screenplay allegedly based on a book about flower smugglers, must be some kind of eccentric, right?
Uh, no.
"I'm kind of selective [about doing interviews], and it's not my favorite thing to do, but whenever movies come out, I promote them. So I don't know," he says. "Maybe people need an angle or something."
Interest in 'real relationships'
Kaufman's own angle is to look at a subject in ways that most people have never pondered -- in movies, at least.
In the case of "Eternal Sunshine" -- recently nominated for four Golden Globes, including a nod for Kaufman's screenplay -- he wanted to write a movie about relationships that was neither a clichéd romance nor a gritty descent into hell.
"My intent was to address thornier questions," he says in a phone interview from New York. "I was only interested in doing it if it was about real relationships" -- the kind with good times and bad times, and a lot of time in which the relationship just is.
In the movie, a sad sack named Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) wants to have the memories of his last relationship, with the artsy Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), removed from his brain, as she has already done. He goes to a Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), creator of a process to eradicate unpleasant remembrances (Joel: "Is there any risk of brain damage?" Dr. Mierzwiak: "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage"), and begins the procedure.
 Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play an up-and-down couple in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." |  |
But things are not so simple as that, either in the plot or the telling. The film doubles back on itself, showing scenes from different perspectives and through different degrees of Joel's forgetfulness. Characters literally lose their faces; places where Joel and Clementine once met, such as a bookstore, evaporate into nothingness as they're removed from Joel's consciousness.
And then Joel decides that, maybe, he doesn't want to forget Clementine after all, which leads to even more complications and comedy.
Kaufman did "a fair amount" of research on memory to write the script, he says, and seized upon the link between memory and emotion.
"I wanted to approximate the images of memory," he says. "And one of the things that struck me was that the things that made memories memorable, and vital, are the emotion attached to them. And so that's the way the memory-erasing technique works -- [draining the emotions] is what they prey upon, and how the memories fade."
'It's a struggle'
Though "Eternal Sunshine," now out on DVD, did only mild business at the box office, it's obviously struck a nerve with viewers: It currently ranks in the all-time top 50 on the Internet Movie Database. Kaufman shrugs off the ranking -- "movies that came out recently always rank very high" -- but he's pleased with the response.
"It's really kind of great to hear what people say," he says. "We weren't trying for that [reaction]. We were just trying to make a movie about relationships. ...
|  In "Being John Malkovich," a number of people -- including Malkovich himself -- find a path into Malkovich's consciousness. |
"There are such false ideas in Hollywood movies. They have nothing to do with reality," he adds. Relationships in most movies, he observes, tend to show a couple overcoming an obstacle or two and then living happily ever after. "In this movie, you see a relationship over time. You're seeing what happens to everybody in a relationship -- it's a struggle."
And struggle, the 46-year-old Kaufman suggests, doesn't always result in happiness.
Take his own life: He wanted to be a writer for years but worked other jobs, including one as a ticket seller for the Metropolitan Opera and another at a stock photo agency.
"I really didn't want to go to Los Angeles. And I gave up and I moved to the Midwest, and I was going to go back to school and then I didn't go back to school," he says. "But then I turned 30, and I thought, 'I have to do something now.' I didn't want to be answering phones for the rest of my life. ... [I had to give it] one last shot."
He managed to land a job writing for the Chris Elliott sitcom "Get a Life" -- which has led, eventually, to his current position -- but he hasn't forgotten what might have been. Even "Being John Malkovich," which made his name, was on the verge of not happening, he says.
"I had a long, long struggle to get into the business at all. And it certainly looked like it was never going to happen," he says. "And people ask me, 'Tell me the story of your struggle.' And there's some kind of relief at the end of the story for the listener because ... it worked out and all that trouble was worth it. But when you're going through it, it can just as easily not work out. It could have just as easily not worked out, and for all kinds of reasons."
