As his most commercial film, 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is re-released, the critically acclaimed director says he can’t get a movie off the ground now – but will never give in to the ‘Hollywood machine’
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harlie 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.
