Word: kaufmans
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...camera, it takes away from the time you have to focus on the performances." In the final cut, he excised the most indulgent scene of the movie--a long, violent fight between Aristotle and Charles Darwin--even though it meant having to take Nicolas Cage, who plays Kaufman, out to dinner. "Nicolas said it would never make the movie, and I couldn't even believe he was thinking this," Jonze says. He's even earnest about his absurdity...
...earnestness that gets everyone involved. When Orlean read Kaufman's script, she originally decided she didn't want her real name in the movie because halfway through the film, Kaufman gives up trying to write an unorthodox screenplay and goes conventional, which means the movie's Orlean sleeps around, gets homicidal and deals drugs. But after meeting with Jonze, she was onboard. "Spike seems really earnest and sincere. He's not trying to be postironic ironic. I got this feeling that this was a very human effort and not an effort to be cool," she says. "You feel like, 'What...
When it comes to privacy, screenwriter Kaufman makes Jonze look like J. Lo. Kaufman refuses to be photographed or give his age (he's fortysomething) and won't talk about his personal life. So Jonze had to be the adult in dealing with the studio and the people depicted in the film. Jonze first got in touch with Kaufman after he read the Malkovich script, and Kaufman chose Jonze to direct it because no one else was interested. "When I heard Spike Jonze was interested in me, I thought it was the son of the bandleader who is also...
...hard to write when you're down in the dumps. Just ask Charlie Kaufman. Having written the deliriously original Being John Malkovich, he's hired to adapt Susan Orlean's nonfiction best seller The Orchid Thief. It's a meditative, philosophical, nonlinear narrative, totally resistant to conventional screenwriting technique. Charlie, played with morose and hilarious authority by Nicolas Cage, immediately develops an XXL-size writer's block...
...dissolved by stalking Orlean (Meryl Streep) to discover her writerly secrets. Or by enrolling in one of the infamous screenwriting seminars given by Robert McKee (Brian Cox). It is certainly not eased by Kaufman's best invention, a completely fictional twin brother named Donald (also played by Cage), who is everything Charlie is not--chipper, feckless, self-confident. For want of something better to do between dates, Donald starts churning out a totally fatuous action screenplay, which, naturally, he sells for a huge sum of money...