The Bat Segundo Show: Charlie Kaufman
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on October 25, 2008
Filed Under Bat Segundo, Film, kaufman-charlie
Charlie Kaufman recently appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #243. Kaufman is most recently the writer-director of Synecdoche, New York, now playing in limited theaters.
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Lost in the endless ebb and flow of emotional and cerebral ideas.
Guest: Charlie Kaufman
Subjects Discussed: [List forthcoming]
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: It’s safe to say that you are an idea man. So I must ask you: to what degree do you worry about an idea? Does your mind brim with more ideas — even correct ideas — than you can possibly use? Are you thinking of ideas right now? Is there a slight sense of panic with any idea? What is your idea of ideas?
Kaufman: Well, this whole question is based on the premise that I am an idea man, which I’m not sure that I agree with.
Correspondent: Oh.
Kaufman: So I’m trying to break down what you asked me. And I don’t know. How am I an idea man? To turn this around. On you, Ed.
Correspondent: Well, I would argue that this film is laced with endless ideas meshing against each other.
Kaufman: Yes, it has a lot of ideas. But the ideas came over a two-year period, as I wrote the script. It’s not that I was furiously — like you or your girlfriend — furiously writing 700 pages in two days so that you could read it two days later. I mean, it’s slow. And sometimes it doesn’t happen at all for long periods of time.
Correspondent: So it’s the impression, I suppose, of being an idea man based on the final output here.
Kaufman: It’s not like it happens in real time. It’s not like there’s a two-hour movie and I wrote it in two hours.
Correspondent: Okay, well then let’s turn that…
Kaufman: I mean, I think you thought that before.
Correspondent: Oh certainly!
Kaufman: But it’s not true.
Correspondent: Let’s talk about it.
Kaufman: Let’s turn it around.
Correspondent: Okay. What is the actual ratio of you coming up with an idea? Is it one idea every 2.2 days? What’s the deal?
Kaufman: I would say that…(to himself) you figure two years….maybe it’s an idea a week.
Correspondent: And you have to determine whether…
Kaufman: And this is terribly disappointing for you.
Correspondent: Oh no! It’s actually quite interesting! I’m wondering. Do you have a certain….? Over the course of a week, do you determine whether that idea is correct in association with another idea? Is there kind of an idea peer review process that you run across in your mind? I mean, what’s the situation here?
Kaufman: There is no correct for ideas. Ideas are ideas. And if they’re interesting to me, they’re interesting to me. You know, I don’t know what an idea is actually. I think I think more in terms of emotions than ideas, although there are conceptual things that I utilize. Conceptual things that are devices or that are interesting to me. But the meat of the work for me is the emotional aspect of it. And I don’t know if you would consider those ideas or…
Correspondent: I think an emotional idea is nevertheless an idea.
Kaufman: Okay, then I…
Correspondent: You’re assuming that an idea is based entirely on cerebral terms. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.
Kaufman: Well, it may just be more the way that you’re presenting it. It feels….when you talk about ideas, and how many ideas you come up with, blah blah blah.
Correspondent: We’re presenting it in statistical data, yeah. (laughs)
Kaufman: It feels very cerebral.
Correspondent: Okay.
Kaufman: And scientific. And so yes, I have emotional ideas.
BSS #243: Charlie Kaufman (Download MP3)
Comments
6 Responses to “The Bat Segundo Show: Charlie Kaufman”
Leave a Reply
Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Or send materials to:
315 Flatbush Avenue, #231
Brooklyn, NY 11217
- The Possibilities of Small
- Ben Macintyre: The Latest Sourpuss to Run Away From Possibilities
- Untapped Currency
- Reminder: Live Conversation with Sarah Hall on Tuesday!
- Five Three Oh
- The Bat Segundo Show: Marjorie Rosen
- When Parody Replaces Opportunity
- The Benefits of Notebooks
- Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project #8
- Slowdown
Ahhhh, may Kaufman’s funny little jokes be the death of masturbatory over-analysis.
Except, of course, when the funny little jokes are the cause of masturbatory overindulgence? Did you see Anthony Lane’s interesting take on the film? I read this long after conducting the interview, but he seemed to observe many of the same things that I brought up in this interview.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2008/11/03/081103crci_cinema_lane
repasted from the comments section of BatSegundo.com:
Ed, some (I hope constructive) criticism: it seems like there is a repetitive theme in these interviews of you asking the interview subjects very long questions regarding recurring symbols, possible references to obscure prior works, and other hidden meanings in the works under discussion, and the authors responding almost uniformly that they create their work intuitively and weren’t aware of what you are talking about, and haven’t intentionally placed these symbols in their work and thus they cannot comment on the patterns of repeating symbols which you you have found.
It just seems to me at this point that after this many replies of this sort that this line of questioning should be de-emphasized, as it is dominating the time alotted for your interviews and turning opportunities for discussion into semi- (and sometimes fully) adversarial confrontations wherein the interview subjects have to repeatedly tell you that what you believe you have observed in the subtexts and semiotics of their work was not intended, and doesn’t seem to them related to what they were intending with the work.
It seems to me that perhaps if you tried some new avenues of questioning that it might open up your interviews to more productive and illuminating themes of discussion, rather than these repetitive confrontations which seem to focus the interviews more on your own interpretations of what the authors have created than on what the authors themselves have to say. I don’t believe this is intentional, but it is getting sort of annoying, particularly in examples such as the recent Mike Leigh clusterfuck and most of this Kaufman interview, which was a frustrating listening experience, as it felt like a real missed opportunity for two intelligent fellas to find common ground, but instead turned into you attempting one failed analysis of the film after another while Kaufman exasperatedly attempted to steer you off of your serial wild goose chases.
I think you’re a skilled interviewer and intelligent guy, just wanted to speak up on this as it feels like it’s getting in the way of what your show is when it’s at its best.
What’s a limited theater? Do they not sell popcorn?
Just ribbin’ ya. Take care.
Yes, but, on the other hand, Kaufman goes on to admit to the “clock” idea, for example; saying “it’s just stuff I stuck in there”, later in the interview, is a pretty disingenuous way of referring to some interesting, and funny, ideas in a shooting script that didn’t just function as a box for random “stuff” to pile up in, in a random order.
If Kaufman isn’t an “idea man”, which screen writer is? Whether or not his rate of idea creation is “slow”, as he says, there are more *new* ideas (or subversions of old ones) per page in a Kaufman script than any Hollywood scriptwriter’s work (of the past thirty years, including the Coens) I can think of. That’s why I *still* laugh my brains out whenever I watch “Adaptation”: the acting and cinematography are fine but it’s all those fresh *ideas* that make the movie a gem.
Just because Kaufman chooses not to see himself as an Idea Man (or chooses to be difficult) doesn’t mean that it’s not a fair question. The only quibble I have with Ed’s half of this interview is his tendency to throw the interviewees into the deep end with the first question of the interview, whereas a little stealth might work a lot better. Ie, warm them up (and win them over) with genial chitchat and a few softballs first, possibly (you can edit these out later-laugh). If you spot a telltale hair on the tweed, for example, Ed, ask if they’re cat fanciers…
The first thing Kaufman says is, “This was a lot more energy than I expected” and that was probably more of a warning than a winking quip. Disagreeing with Ed’s premise was, perhaps, Kaufman’s instinctive way of putting the emergency brake on Ed’s Peterbilt.
[...] Charlie Kaufman over thinks [...]