Charlie Kaufman

American filmmaker and novelist

Charles Stuart Kaufman ('/k//ɔː//f//m//ə//n/; born November 19, 1958) is an American screenwriter, film director, and novelist. He wrote the films Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). He both wrote and directed the films Synecdoche, New York (2008), Anomalisa (2015), and I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020). In 2020, Kaufman released his first novel, Antkind. One of the most celebrated screenwriters of his era, Kaufman has received an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Independent Spirit Awards, and a Writers Guild of America Award. Film critic Roger Ebert called Synecdoche, New York "the best movie of the decade" in 2009. Three of Kaufman's scripts appear in the Writers Guild of America's list of the 101 greatest movie screenplays ever written.

Kaufman was born in New York City to a Jewish family on November 19, 1958, the son of Helen and Myron Kaufman. He grew up in Massapequa, New York, before moving to West Hartford, Connecticut, where he graduated from high school. Unreliable source: date=April 2020 In high school, Kaufman was in the drama club, performing in numerous productions before landing the lead role in a production of Play It Again, Sam during his senior year. Kaufman and Proch tried to get their screenplays produced, sending them to many people in the film industry. The only response the two ever received was a supportive letter from Alan Arkin about their screenplay Purely Coincidental. In hope of finding a talent agent, he wrote a portfolio of spec scripts based on television series such as Married with Children, Newhart, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Simpsons. While pursuing his writing career, he began working odd jobs in customer service to support himself and his wife, Denise. During the late 1980s, Kaufman lived and worked in Minneapolis, answering calls about missing newspapers at the Star Tribune. After the success of Being John Malkovich, another of Kaufman's screenplays was produced: Human Nature, which was directed by Michel Gondry and produced by Kaufman and Jonze. Kaufman and Jonze reunited yet again as the screenwriter and director of Adaptation, which earned him another Academy Award nomination and his second BAFTA. Adaptation featured a fictionalized version of Kaufman and his fictional brother, Donald, who is credited as writer of the film along with Kaufman. The idea came to Kaufman while attempting to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into film. Struggling with writer's block, Kaufman turned the script into an exaggerated account of his struggles with adapting the screenplay. Kaufman wrote the screenplay for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a biopic based on the "unauthorized autobiography" of Chuck Barris, the creator of such popular game shows as The Dating Game and host of The Gong Show. The film focuses on Barris's claim to have been a CIA hit man. It was George Clooney's directorial debut. Kaufman criticized Clooney for making drastic alterations to the script without consulting him (instead, Clooney consulted Barris). Kaufman said in an interview with William Arnold: "The usual thing for a writer is to deliver a script and then disappear. That's not for me. I want to be involved from beginning to end. And these directors [Gondry and Jonze] know that, and respect it." Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released in 2004, was Kaufman's second pairing with director Michel Gondry. Kaufman won his first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and third BAFTA for the film together with Gondry and French artist Pierre Bismuth. The trio also received the prestigious PEN American Center 2005 prize for screenplay for the film. David Edelstein described the film in Slate as "The Awful Truth turned inside out by Philip K. Dick, with nods to Samuel Beckett, Chris Marker, John Guare—the greatest dramatists of our modern fractured consciousness. But the weave is pure Kaufman."

After agreeing to participate in Carter Burwell's Theater of the New Ear, a double bill "sound play", Kaufman wrote and directed the audio play Hope Leaves the Theater, while the other play in the production, Sawbones, was written and directed by the Coen Brothers. Hope Leaves the Theater follows a middle aged woman, dissatisfied with her life and relationships, watching a play within the play, and featured performances by Hope Davis, Peter Dinklage and Meryl Streep. Theater of the New Ear debuted in April 2005 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York. Due to scheduling conflicts, later productions of Theater of the New Ear did not feature the Coens' play, replacing it with Anomalisa, which Kaufman wrote under the pseudonym "'Francis Fregoli". Anomalisa centers on a man (David Thewlis) who perceives everyone in the world to be the same person (Tom Noonan) until he meets an exception (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Kaufman made his directorial film debut with the postmodern film Synecdoche, New York, starring an ensemble cast led by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. The idea for the film came when Kaufman and Spike Jonze were approached to direct a horror film. Rather than make a conventional horror film, the two agreed to have the film deal with things they found frightening, such as mortality and life's brevity. Kaufman decided to direct the film after Jonze left the project to direct Where the Wild Things Are instead. The film premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it split critics, with some calling it the best film of the year and others finding it pretentious. In the years since its release, it has appeared on multiple lists ranking the best films of the 21st century. The film's poor box office resulted in Kaufman finding it difficult to gain funding for scripts to which he has attached himself as director. Kaufman was slated to write and direct a film with the working title Frank or Francis. Few details have been confirmed about the plot, except that it is a musical comedy about internet anger culture and was set to star Jack Black, Nicolas Cage, Steve Carell, Kevin Kline, Catherine Keener, Paul Reubens, Jacki Weaver and Elizabeth Banks. In July 2012, Black said that funding for the project had fallen through, as the studio was unsure about its chances for success after the financial failure of Synecdoche, New York. Although the future of the project is not certain, Kaufman says "It could still happen. It would have to be reinvented, though. We had a whole cast and we were headed into pre production. So, I'd have to get people back and who knows if they would be interested anymore. But at this point, we don't have any money, so that's a secondary concern." While struggling to get his directorial work made, Kaufman continued to work as a writer for hire, writing numerous unproduced screenplays. These included a satire set on a planet inhabited by everyone who ever lived, to be directed by Spike Jonze; an adaptation of George Saunders's book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, to be directed by Ben Stiller; and an adaptation of Arthur Herzog's novel IQ 83, starring Steve Carell. He later attempted to develop his IQ 83 screenplay into a limited series for HBO, to no avail. He also did uncredited rewrites on films such as Kung Fu Panda 2 and Ad Astra.

Dino Stamatopoulos, a former colleague of Kaufman's from The Dana Carvey Show, became interested in adapting Kaufman's Anomalisa play script into a stop motion animated film. With Kaufman's permission, Stamatopoulos turned to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to fund the film. The Kickstarter page was set up in August 2012 and by the time funding had ended $406,237 was pledged. The rest of the $8 million budget was funded by the film's production company, Starburns Industries. Kaufman co directed the film with Duke Johnson, who had previous experience in stop motion filmmaking, and the original cast of the play production returned to reprise their roles. It had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2015, receiving universal acclaim from critics. The film went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but like Synecdoche, it did poorly at the box office. Kaufman's debut novel, Antkind, was released in July 2020. Kaufman said in 2016 that the novel was being written so as to be unfilmable, and is itself about "an impossible movie". In Antkind, film critic B. Rosenberg attempts to recall a three month long stop motion animation film that perished in a fire. Believing the film to be his last chance at achieving the respect and admiration of his peers, B. embarks on an absurdist journey that explores comedy, film theory, philosophy, and social commentary across Antkind's 706 pages. In January 2018, it was announced that Kaufman was working on writing and directing an adaptation of Iain Reid's 2016 novel I'm Thinking of Ending Things. In December 2018, it was announced that Brie Larson and Jesse Plemons were signed to co star as the leads; the film was described as "the story of a woman's trip to a family farm that leads to an unexpected detour leaving her stranded, [and] a twisted mix of palpable tension, psychological frailty and sheer terror ensues." The project began filming in March 2019, with Jessie Buckley having replaced Larson, and Toni Collette and David Thewlis joining the cast, and was released on Netflix in September 2020 to positive reviews. In 2023, Kaufman directed his first short film, Jackals & Fireflies. Based on a poem by Eva H. D., who also portrays the lead character, the film was shot entirely on a Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone by cinematographer Chayse Irvin. Kaufman has written a script about dreams for Ryan Gosling's production company that Gosling may star in and an adaptation of the novel The Memory Police that Reed Morano is slated to direct.

Kaufman's works explore such universal themes as identity crisis, mortality, and the meaning of life through a metaphysical or parapsychological framework. While his work resists labels, it is sometimes described as surrealist. He uses metafiction as a literary device, and sometimes includes fictionalized "facts" about his life in his work, notably Adaptation., Hope Leaves the Theater, and Antkind. Gender identity is also a recurrent theme in his work. Apes recur in Kaufman's early work: in Being John Malkovich, Lotte has a pet chimp named Elijah; in Human Nature, Puff was raised as an ape; in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Penny dreams about an ape; and in Adaptation, the original deus ex machina was a swamp ape. Some writers and directors Kaufman has named as favorites of his, or as influences, are Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Stanisław Lem, Flannery O'Connor, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and the Coen brothers. He has also mentioned Tom Noonan's What Happened Was as a favorite of his.

as of 2020, Kaufman lives in Manhattan, having lived in Pasadena, California, since 1998. He is married to Denise Monaghan, with whom he has a daughter, Anna.