Charlie Kaufman is in a funk. The genius screenwriter behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York, the devastating Buñuelian comedy of mortality that he also directed, can’t get a movie off the ground. “I’m having great difficulty,” he sighs. “I’m not a person that people want to trust with their money. It’s very frustrating.”
Earlier this year, production of a film he was preparing to make – Later the War, starring Eddie Redmayne as a manufacturer of dreams who diversifies into nightmares – was shut down in Belgrade; he hopes it will resume. To make matters worse, he sorely needs some shut-eye. “Not to get into it, but I’m not a great sleeper,” 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.
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. This one features Jessie Buckley, star of Kaufman’s 2020 film I’m Thinking of Ending Things, in which she shuffled through an entire Rolodex of different identities as she was driven through a blizzard to meet her new boyfriend’s 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 Goes to Greece.
The short is poignant and oddly consoling. “I like what the ghosts come to feel and see about their lives and their deaths,” says 66-year-old Kaufman. “I think it’s 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.” I ask whether he can see beauty, too. “I can,” he says after a long pause. “I have a lot of anxiety. And I think that gets in the way of the experience of being alive.”
Later this month, Kaufman will bring How to Shoot a Ghost to Bristol’s Encounters 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…
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