Charlie Kaufman names his personal desert island movie
Screenwriters often don’t get the praise they deserve, overshadowed by the directors who lead their original idea to cinematic success. Sure, whilst the likes of Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are rightfully known as some of the best directors of all time, iconic writers like Paul Schrader, Aaron Sorkin, and Charlie Kaufman are too often brushed under the rug, despite their astonishing talents.
One of the greatest modern screenwriters is the aforementioned Charlie Kaufman, who penned some of the finest films of the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, even if you may have never known he was the mastermind behind them. Winning an Academy Award for his efforts on the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine, Kaufman has since gone on to direct his own screenplays.
Though his directorial debut came back in 2008 with the Philip Seymour Hoffman-led drama Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman didn’t consistently take to helming his own projects until the mid-2010s. The animated stop-motion thinkpiece Anomalisa was his second foray into filmmaking, whilst his third solely led movie came in 2020s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, with each of his films finding critical acclaim in some shape or form.
Largely staying out of the glare of modern media, Kaufman rarely casts an opinion on the state of modern movies and his opinion towards the greatest of the medium, yet in 2016 he sat down with Criterion for an enlightening interview.
With the movie distribution company, Kaufman revealed some of his most closely-kept cinematic secrets, recalling his earliest film memory, among other facts. “I think The Sound of Music was the first movie I saw in a theater, in Long Island,” he told the platform: “I fell in love with Julie Andrews, and she was my first big crush. Especially for a little kid, there’s something very maternal about her”.
Still, despite having an evident love for cinema, Kaufman admits that he “gravitated more toward theater and acting, and film was kind of an offshoot of that”. Distancing himself from such filmmakers as Quentin Tarantino, who obsess about movies, the screenwriter and director explains that his passion for the art form gradually developed over time.
As a fan of theatre first and foremost, he mentions the likes of Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco as three particularly inspirational dramatists, adding: “I think Woody Allen has a play in one of his books, where the characters on stage talk to the audience. I like stuff like that. I liked Lanford Wilson when I was a kid, and I like John Guare”.
When it comes to cinema, Kaufman departs the interview by revealing the one movie he would take to a desert island. “A movie I really love is Barton Fink,” he states, referring to the Coen brothers’ 1991 black comedy: “I don’t know if that’s the movie I’d take to a desert island, but I feel like there’s so much in there, you could watch it again and again. That’s important to me, especially if that was the only movie I’d have with me for the rest of my life”.
