Charlie Kaufman on Reviews, Structure and Fame

On the strength of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I’d put Charlie Kaufman in the same box as Hemingway.

Reviews:

“I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stu­pid thing online. It’s a very bad idea, and there’s a lot of angry people in the world. And it’s weird to absorb all that weirdness.”

Structure:

“There’s this inher­ent screen­play struc­ture that every­one seems to be stuck on, this three-act thing. It doesn’t really interest me. To me, it’s kind of like say­ing, ‘Well, when you do a paint­ing, you always need to have sky here, the per­son here and the ground here.’ Well, you don’t. In other art forms or other medi­ums, they accept that it’s just some­thing avail­able for you to work with. I actu­ally think I’m prob­ably more inter­ested in struc­ture than most people who write screen­plays, because I think about it.”

Fame:

He insists the Oscar means little: “I like hav­ing the trophy, but only on a very sur­facey level does it mean any­thing. It’s just kind of a… Kerouac has a line about fame being a news­pa­per. You know that line? When I read that when I was a teen­ager, I didn’t know what it meant, but now… Fame doesn’t really fill you up in any way.”

A few days ago, I heard that Robert McKee’s Story is avail­able as an audiobook. I read it as a teen­ager, think­ing I’d be learn­ing the ropes, and in a sense I did, but rather more because the points at which I dis­agreed with McKee forced me to think about what we mean by an act, or a scene. I’m still not sure.

► Laura Barton meets film dir­ector Charlie Kaufman | Film | The Guardian