CHARLIE KAUFMAN

He’s the brain behind some of the most fiendishly clever concepts to hit cinemas in the past two decades. Charlie Kaufman tells Total Film why Netflix is the right home for his latest film, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, and says his ambitions aren’t what they used to be…

- Charlie Kaufman

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 highconcept, 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 refreshing candor 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.”