CHARLIE KAUFMAN
“I THINK THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL ABOUT MY MOVIES NOT MAKING MONEY AT THIS POINT”
A puppeteer discovers a portal into an A-list actor’s brain. A pair of exes who have each other wiped from their memories. A theatre director whose magnum opus is restaging his life in a full-scale replica of New York City. If a film concept has performed origami with your brain over the past 20 years, chances are Charlie Kaufman was behind it.
A screenwriter-turned-director with a unique knack for the philosophical high-concept, Kaufman is synonymous with a particular type of noodle-scrambler that’s not just devilishly smart, but also uncomfortably funny, tense and moving. His career began with writing Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, before he segued into directing Synecdoche, New York and stop-motion drama Anomalisa.
When Total Film speaks to him in July 2020, to discuss his new film, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, he’s holed up in a New York apartment, while the Covid-19 pandemic continues to rage outside. He speaks with a refreshing candour, and emanates the exact intelligence, honesty and neuroses you expect from his work. It’s not hard to picture him as the beleaguered protagonist of a Charlie Kaufman picture. Asked how he’s been doing during the madness of 2020, he responds in his softly spoken cadence. “Oh, you know… you know… it’s confusing and not great, I guess.”
I’m Thinking Of Ending Things feels strangely apt for a lockdown year. Adapted from Iain Reid’s novel (“I was having difficulty getting things made as a director, and I thought something contained and wouldn’t cost a lot and had a genre element to it, might be an easier thing to sell to a studio”), it features Kaufman’s trademark narrative daring and wit, but with creepy undertones, and an escalating sense of claustrophobia. It follows a man (Jesse Plemons) and his girlfriend (Jessie Buckley), as they visit his parents’ (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) farmhouse. From there it goes to some… unusual places. Good luck to anyone who finds this randomly on a late-night Netflix scroll.
As Netflix is the film’s home, audiences will be able to watch it even if they’re].”
