Charlie Kaufman

• 1. Introduction

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  Charlie Kaufman spent his first weeks on a professional writing staff too anxious to speak. Hired in the early 1990s to write for the sitcom Get a Life alongside star Chris Elliott, he sat through story meetings in silence. Only after colleagues began praising the pages he turned in privately did he loosen up enough to speak. That same reticent writer later won an Academy Award, three BAFTA Awards, two Independent Spirit Awards, an Emmy Award, and a Writers Guild Award. Three of his screenplays later appeared on the Writers Guild of America's list of the 101 greatest ever written. How does a man who could not talk in a writers' room end up shaping some of American cinema's strangest, most personal films? What carried him from unsold spec scripts and canceled sitcoms to directing his own movies? And what kept pulling him back toward stories about identity, memory, and the difficulty of being a self?

• 2. Early Life and Education

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  Charles Stuart Kaufman was born on the 19th of November 1958 in New York City. His parents, Helen and Myron Kaufman, raised him in a Jewish household. The family lived first in Massapequa, New York, before relocating to West Hartford, Connecticut.

  During his senior year of high school, Kaufman landed the lead role in a stage production of Play It Again, Sam. He had joined the drama club earlier and performed in numerous productions before that breakout part.

  After graduating high school, Kaufman enrolled at Boston University before transferring to New York University to study film. At NYU he met Paul Proch, a fellow student who became his writing partner. Together the two drafted many scripts and plays, none of which found a producer during their school years. That partnership would carry into Kaufman's first professional work.

• 3. Breaking into Television

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  Between 1983 and 1984, Kaufman and Paul Proch wrote comedic articles and spoofs for National Lampoon, including parodies of Kurt Vonnegut and the X-Men. Hoping to attract a talent agent, Kaufman also wrote a portfolio of spec scripts based on existing television series: Married... with Children, Newhart, It's Garry Shandling's Show, and The Simpsons. None of it translated into steady work right away.

  To support himself and his wife, Denise, Kaufman took odd jobs in customer service. During the late 1980s he lived in Minneapolis, working in the circulation department of the Star Tribune for four and a half years, and also at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

  In 1991, one of Kaufman's spec scripts finally caught someone's attention, and he landed a talent agent. The agent urged him to leave Minneapolis for Los Angeles, so Kaufman moved there alone for two months, interviewing for television writing jobs. The only offer he received was for a Comedy Central series called Access America, hosted by actor Fred Willard. By coincidence, the show was being filmed back in Minneapolis.

  Kaufman was ready to accept that job and move back to Minneapolis. Then David Mirkin offered him a different one: writing for the second season of Get a Life. Kaufman wrote two episodes before the show was canceled in 1992.

  After Get a Life ended, Kaufman tried to get hired on Seinfeld, The Larry Sanders Show, The Simpsons, and Mr. Show, without success. He found steadier work on Fox's sketch series The Edge, on The Trouble with Larry, and on Ned and Stacey, which he also produced. The most notable stop was The Dana Carvey Show. Fellow writers and performers there included Louis C.K., Robert Smigel, Greg Daniels, Stephen Colbert, and Steve Carell.

  On shows like The Edge and The Dana Carvey Show, Kaufman struggled to keep his material intact, and his unconventional writing and quiet manner made it hard to get scripts produced without alteration. That tension would follow him past television, into a very different kind of collaboration with directors who wanted his voice exactly as written.

• 4. Writing for Other Directors

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  In 1994, Kaufman wrote the script for Being John Malkovich on spec and sent it to company after company, all of which turned it down. The script eventually reached director Francis Ford Coppola, who passed it to his son-in-law at the time, Spike Jonze. Jonze agreed to direct it, and the film earned Kaufman an Academy Award nomination and his first BAFTA win.

  After that success, another Kaufman screenplay reached the screen: Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry and produced by Kaufman together with Jonze. Kaufman and Jonze then reunited for Adaptation, which brought him a second Academy Award nomination and a second BAFTA. The film cast a fictionalized version of Kaufman alongside an invented twin brother, Donald, who received a co-writing credit. The idea grew out of Kaufman's struggle to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief, when writer's block turned the assignment into the story itself.

  Kaufman also wrote Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a biopic drawn from the self-described "unauthorized autobiography" of Chuck Barris, creator of The Dating Game and host of The Gong Show. The film centers on Barris's claim that he had also worked as a CIA hit man. It marked George Clooney's directorial debut, and Kaufman later criticized Clooney for making major changes to the script without consulting him, turning instead to Barris. In an interview with William Arnold, Kaufman said: "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, reunited Kaufman with Gondry for a second time. It won Kaufman his first Academy Award, for Best Original Screenplay, and his third BAFTA, shared with Gondry and French artist Pierre Bismuth. The same team received the PEN American Center's 2005 prize for screenplay. Writing in Slate, critic David Edelstein compared the film's mood to an inverted romantic drama filtered through Philip K. Dick, citing echoes of Samuel Beckett, Chris Marker, and John Guare, before concluding: "But the weave is pure Kaufman."

  Four years would pass before Kaufman stepped behind a camera himself, as a director for the first time.

• 5. Behind the Camera

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  Carter Burwell's Theater of the New Ear paired two new audio-based stage productions under one bill in 2005. Kaufman wrote and directed one of them, Hope Leaves the Theater. It follows a middle-aged woman, dissatisfied with her life and relationships, who watches a play within the play. The cast included Hope Davis, Peter Dinklage, and Meryl Streep. The production debuted in April 2005 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York. The Coen Brothers wrote and directed the bill's other piece, Sawbones, though later stagings replaced it with Anomalisa, which Kaufman wrote under the pseudonym Francis Fregoli. Anomalisa follows a man, played by David Thewlis, who perceives everyone around him as the same person, voiced by Tom Noonan. He meets one exception, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

  Synecdoche, New York marked Kaufman's debut as a film director, with Philip Seymour Hoffman leading an ensemble cast. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. The idea began when Kaufman and Spike Jonze were approached to direct a horror film. Instead, they chose to confront things that actually frightened them, like mortality and life's brevity. Kaufman took over as director after Jonze left to direct Where the Wild Things Are instead. At Cannes, reactions split sharply; some critics called it the best film of the year, others found it pretentious. It has since turned up repeatedly on lists ranking the best films of the 21st century. In 2009, Roger Ebert called it "the best movie of the decade." Its poor box office made it harder for Kaufman to find funding for future directing work.

  Years later, Dino Stamatopoulos, a colleague from The Dana Carvey Show, wanted to adapt the Anomalisa play into a stop-motion film. With Kaufman's blessing, he turned to Kickstarter in August 2012, and backers pledged $406,237 by the campaign's end. Starburns Industries, the production company, covered the remainder of an $8 million budget. Kaufman co-directed with Duke Johnson, an experienced stop-motion filmmaker, and the original stage cast returned to their roles. The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on the 4th of September 2015, to universal acclaim. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. Like Synecdoche before it, Anomalisa struggled at the box office.

  In January 2018, Kaufman was announced as writer and director of an adaptation of Iain Reid's 2016 novel I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Brie Larson and Jesse Plemons signed on as leads that December, in a project 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." Filming began in March 2019, with Jessie Buckley replacing Larson and Toni Collette and David Thewlis joining the cast. Netflix released the film 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 played the lead role. Cinematographer Chayse Irvin shot the entire film on a Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone.

  That same willingness to work small and experimental carried over into a very different body of work. It included the many scripts Kaufman had written over the years that never reached a screen at all.

• 6. The Unmade Kaufman

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  Decades earlier, one of the only responses Kaufman and Paul Proch had ever received from the industry was a supportive letter from actor Alan Arkin, about their unproduced screenplay Purely Coincidental.

  Two unproduced pilots came from Disney: Depressed Roomies, a surrealist take on the buddy sitcom, and Rambling Pants, about a time-traveling poet named Pants. A third pilot, written for HBO, was called In Limbo, a naturalistic look at a romantic relationship without the usual conventions of romance films. None of Kaufman's own pilot scripts were ever produced.

  Before Being John Malkovich reached theaters, Kaufman was hired to pitch and write several film projects that never got made. One was a script adapting Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly. Another was a pitch starring Don Rickles and Rodney Dangerfield as a washed-up, murderous comedy duo, an idea Kaufman later reused in his novel Antkind. A third was a pitch for an R-rated version of the television series Gilligan's Island.

  Kaufman was also slated to write and direct a film called Frank or Francis, a musical comedy about internet anger culture. The planned cast included Jack Black, Nicolas Cage, Steve Carell, Kevin Kline, Catherine Keener, Paul Reubens, Jacki Weaver, and Elizabeth Banks. In July 2012, Black revealed that funding had collapsed, after the studio grew wary following the financial failure of Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman later said: "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."

  Trying to return to television, Kaufman sold a series to HBO in May 2012, with Catherine Keener attached to star, but it never advanced past the scripting stage. In 2014, he directed and wrote a pilot for FX titled How and Why, about a man, played by John Hawkes, who understands how a nuclear reactor works but is clueless about life. Michael Cera, Sally Hawkins, Catherine Keener, and Tom Noonan co-starred. FX chose not to pick it up.

  One writer-for-hire script imagined a satire set on a planet inhabited by everyone who had ever lived, meant for Spike Jonze to direct. Another adapted George Saunders's book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, intended for Ben Stiller. A third adapted Arthur Herzog's novel IQ 83, meant to star Steve Carell. Kaufman later tried, and failed, to develop it into an HBO limited series instead. He also did uncredited rewrite work on Kung Fu Panda 2 and Ad Astra. In April 2012, he was hired to adapt Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking book series and wrote its first draft before leaving the project. After further rewrites by other writers, the film reached theaters in 2021, with Kaufman uncredited.

• 7. Recurring Obsessions

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  In Being John Malkovich, a character named Lotte keeps a pet chimpanzee called Elijah. In Human Nature, a character named Puff is raised as a chimpanzee. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, a character named Penny dreams about a monkey, and an early version of Adaptation gave its climax a Bigfoot-like creature nicknamed the Swamp Ape. Non-human primates recur so often across Kaufman's early work that the pattern reads as more than coincidence.

  Kaufman often folds fictionalized versions of his own life into his stories, a technique most visible in Adaptation, in the audio play Hope Leaves the Theater, and in his novel Antkind. Gender identity surfaces repeatedly as well, another thread running beneath the more visible plots.

  Underneath these devices sit larger preoccupations: identity, mortality, and the meaning of life, often approached through a metaphysical or parapsychological lens. Kaufman resists easy labels, though "surrealist" is the one most often applied to him. He has named several writers and directors as favorites or influences: Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Stanisław Lem, Flannery O'Connor, and Shirley Jackson. He has also cited Philip K. Dick, Patricia Highsmith, Stephen Dixon, David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Roy Andersson, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers. He has singled out Tom Noonan's film What Happened Was... as a personal favorite.

  One of those preoccupations was about to take its most extended form yet, on the page rather than the screen.

• 8. Antkind and What's Ahead

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  Kaufman released his debut novel, Antkind, in July 2020. He had said back in 2016 that he was writing it deliberately to be unfilmable, describing it as itself being about "an impossible movie." In the book, film critic B. Rosenberg tries to reconstruct a three-month-long stop-motion film that was destroyed in a fire, convinced it is his last chance at the respect of his peers. His absurdist journey runs across all 706 pages, moving through comedy, film theory, philosophy, and social commentary.

  Kaufman lives in Manhattan today, having lived in Pasadena, California, since 1998. He is married to Denise Monaghan, and the two have a daughter named Anna.

  Kaufman has also written a script about dreams for Ryan Gosling's production company, and an adaptation of the novel The Memory Police, which Reed Morano is slated to direct. In 2025, the dream script was revealed to be titled Later the War, based on Iddo Gefen's short story "Debby's Dream House." Eddie Redmayne, Tessa Thompson, and Patsy Ferran were initially set to star, with Kaufman directing, before Redmayne was replaced by Channing Tatum. Filming is scheduled for 2027, in Cyprus.