Word: film
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Briefly, what's the film about?It's the story of a woman whose child went missing. The police couldn't find him for months, and they got a report that the boy had been found in Illinois. They brought the kid back, but it turns out that it wasn't the right kid. They had invested so much into having a happy ending for the story that they couldn't acknowledge their mistake. The story follows Angelina Jolie's character trying to convince the police to admit their wrong...
...story. Every bit of it. We wanted to go from "Based on a True Story" to "A True Story" in the credits. To do that, I had to work with Universal Studio's legal department and go through every single scene and provide attribution. Every single scene in that film can be traced to something. I spent a year researching this thing and ended up with 6,000 pages of documentation...
...used to be a journalist. Did that training come in handy here?It was hugely important. Usually, when you're asked to tell a true story in film, there's already an article or something where the leg work's been done. In this case, there was nothing available. It was all primary research-City Hall archives, county courthouse archives, criminal records, hospital records. I just sifted through stuff, often spending a whole day paging through records just to find one reference...
...Charlie Kaufman you know as the gifted, mulish, effulgently idiosyncratic screenwriter - one of the few non-directors to establish a unique film voice - of Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The typical film scribe making his move to the director's chair would pick a modest project, one that doesn't tax his tyro status. But Kaufman's first work as a total auteur is his most daunting project yet: a portrait of a creative mind in artistic and emotional crisis, painted as a vast mural that encompasses...
...with 8-1/2 and other challenging films of its time, Synecdoche poses cosmic questions about itself. Are we being shown Caden's imagination or projection of the rest of his life? Is the film fantasy or dread, or is it real? The answer, of course, is that it's a movie, which need only create an alternate world, populate it with memorable characters, and be true to its internal logic, however skewed. Kaufman has constructed a most devious puzzle, a labyrinth of an endangered mind. Yet it's one that - thanks in large part to a superb cast...