[Q&A from an interview with Charlie Kaufman, originally written for Barnes & Noble.com]
DG: A lot of people pushed you to explain the meaning of Being John Malkovich, or talk about its significance; did that get tiresome after a while, or was it just part of the fun?
Charlie Kaufman: I think we, [director] Spike [Jonze] and I, both made an effort not to say what we thought the movie meant. The reasoning behind that was that we wanted people to have their own experience, and we didn’t want to dictate what that experience would be. It was difficult because people wanted us to say things we didn’t want to say, but I think the fun of it was reading all the wildly different reviews and critiques of the movie. I loved that, and people said lots of interesting and surprising things about what it meant to them. It’s really wonderful to have people thinking about something you did and talking about it.
DG: Right. I can imagine it must have been really fascinating to actually read all the reviews Malkovich generated, because so many people had such different takes on it.
CK: Yeah. And I love the fact that there are different interpretations, even some so far afield. I thought they were all interesting. There was nobody where I thought, Oh. That’s wrong. I just thought, Oh, this is interesting, or Oh, I like that. Sometimes someone would pick out some small detail that I’d really liked too, and I felt a kinship with that person.
DG: Can you talk a little bit about the writing work you did before the Malkovich script?
CK: I worked as a sitcom writer since about ’91, and worked for a lot of shows that most people have probably never heard of. [laughs].
DG: Oh really? Were they mostly pilots? Is there any show you worked on that people would know?
CK: I never worked on a successful show. But I did work on shows that aired. My first job was on a show called Get a Life, which starred Chris Elliott. Of all the shows I wrote for, that’s the one people seem the most interested in. It’s a little bit of a cult thing.
DG: Was that during its first season?
CK: No, I worked on the second season. Not even the good season! [laughs]
DG: Did you find television writing satisfying? Or was it difficult in that it’s a very specific, even formulaic, style of writing?
CK: That was the first time in my life that I’d gotten paid to write, so, for a while, it was enormously satisfying — just for that reason. And also it was the first time in my life I ever had a job that actually paid me anything. I was working kind of menial jobs before that.
DG: Can you talk a little bit about how you wrote the film, what your screenwriting process is?
CK: I don’t know if I have a process. I think I just sort of wrote. I didn’t really have a game plan. I just started writing, and it took me where it took me.
DG: So you go where the ideas lead you? You don’t work out the whole story beforehand?
CK: No. In this case, I didn’t at all. I was just writing it, and once you decide something’s going to happen in the story you have to go back and rework things. I mean, it’s not like it’s automatic writing. But I didn’t even know there was going to be a portal when I started writing the screenplay. I just decided that one day, and it changed everything.
DG: What was the original germ of the story?
CK: It’s hard for me to know, really. I look back at my notes, and I think that the first idea I was working with was basically the Craig/Lotte/Maxine situation — where Craig [John Cusack] fell in love with someone other than his wife. At that point, I didn’t even have them working on the 7-1/2 floor or anything. That was an idea that came later, and that kind of changed the tone of everything. Then the portal came, and John Malkovich came into the picture.
DG: So would you say the ideas were driven more by situation or character?
CK: I think both. I think there’s a specificity to the characters that drives how they react in certain situations. I was interested in the desperation of these people, and once I figured out who they were, then that drove the story. Later, when I brought the portal in, I made certain decisions based on that plot element. I asked myself, Well, now that there’s this portal, what does Craig’s wife [Cameron Diaz] have to do with it? And then I thought about the possibility of her going through the portal, and how she and Craig would respond to it. And that kind of led me in the direction of her involvement with Maxine [Catherine Keener].
DG: Did it bother you at all when people made a lot of simple, shorthand comparisons to Kafka, Alice in Wonderland, Brazil, and things like that?
CK: It doesn’t bother me, but it’s not my greatest pleasure.
DG: It’s not where you were coming from when you wrote the script?
CK: No, in fact, not at all. People ask me what my influences were, who I like. Actually, before the movie came out, we screened it at Sundance, at some producer’s conference, and Spike and I went there. It was the first public screening of the film, and I had no experience with interviews or anything like that. Afterward, there was a Q&A, and somebody asked me, “What writers do you like?” I mentioned, among other people, Kafka. Later there was a reception and everyone kept coming up to me saying, “I can really see how Kafka influenced your script!” But he didn’t. I mean, his work only influenced me as much as everything else that I’ve ever read in my life, that’s floating around in my head. There are a million other things you could say were influences too. But I specifically don’t want to be like anybody else. [laughs] I always try really hard to find my own way of doing things.
DG: Getting back to your writing career, did you generate a stack of unproduced screenplays before writing Malkovich, or was this your first attempt to make the move from television to the movies?
CK: This was my first screenplay.
DG: So there was no connection between what you went through and the tortured artistic career of the Craig character?
CK: Oh, sure there was. Because I’d been trying to be a writer for a long time, and I worked a bunch of menial jobs along the way. I certainly had my share of filing jobs. Definitely.
DG: When did the idea to use John Malkovich come into the screenplay? Did you first conceive of it as a generic celebrity?
CK: It was always John Malkovich. As soon as there was a portal in the story, it was into John Malkovich’s head, and I don’t really know why. Obviously, that’s the question that I get most, and I never really have an answer. But the answer that I’ve come to lately is: I ask people if they think it works, and if and when they say that they do, then I say, “That’s why.” Because that really is the way I decided it; it just felt right to me. And generally people do say it was the right choice. Occasionally, I’ll read something online where someone says, “Who the hell wants to be John Malkovich? Why wouldn’t it be Tom Cruise?”
DG: Yeah, why not Gilbert Gottfried?
CK: [laughs] Right. They go in one of two directions — either Tom Cruise or some really jokey choice, and I didn’t want either of those.
DG: Was there any fear that Malkovich wouldn’t want to do it?
CK: Well, I had no expectations that this movie was going to get made. I was writing it pretty much as a sample to try to get assignment work. And just for fun.
DG: The casting of Charlie Sheen was particularly inspired. Did you also have him in mind early on?
CK: Actually, in the original script I had written in a different celebrity to be Malkovich’s best friend. But, when that actor was approached, he decided he didn’t want to do it. So then John Malkovich himself suggested that Charlie Sheen should be his best friend. And it turned out to be an inspired suggestion.
DG: Do you plan to direct in the future?
CK: I’d like to. I have a bunch of writing obligations that I’m trying to get through, and then I’ll write another spec script. It’ll make it a lot easier for me to get the job directing it if I own the screenplay.
DG: Is their any new project you can tell us about?
CK: Spike and I are doing another movie — a script I wrote based on a book called The Orchid Thief. It’s a nonfiction book about orchid collectors, and that movie’s going to be called Adaptation. It’s a pretty odd script.
DG: Is the book odd or just your take on it?
CK: Ummm… Yeah. [laughs]
DG: Which is it?
CK: I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to say a whole lot more about it….
November 2002