“I fucking blew it”: why Charlie Kaufman regretted his career
Every now and then, a talent comes along who makes the entire movie business sit up and take notice, leaving them with bated breath over what comes next. For a while, it looked like Charlie Kaufman was going to be that guy, but he’d be the first to admit he failed to strike when the iron was hot.
His first-ever screenplay was Being John Malkovich, the mind-bending surrealist comedy that earned him an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Original Screenplay’. He was tailor-made for Spike Jonze’s idiosyncratic style, and they bounced off each other effortlessly as the dialogue and visuals perfectly synergised.
He found another kindred spirit in Michel Gondry after scripting the filmmaker’s feature debut, Human Nature, and while it wasn’t a hit, better things were looming just over the horizon. Kaufman landed another Oscar nod for penning Jonze’s Adaptation, scripted George Clooney’s fantastic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and won an Oscar for co-penning Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Kaufman’s name became synonymous with a very particular, highly specific, and usually acclaimed type of film, but when he segued into directing, the wheels began to come off. Synecdoche, New York tanked at the box office and split opinion, Anomalisa flopped despite a rapturous reception and another Oscar nomination for writing, with I’m Thinking of Ending Things restricted to Netflix.
None of them were terrible movies, but in an interview with IndieWire, Kaufman offered a scathing self-assessment of his own career when he said, “I feel like I fucking blew it”. The opportunity was there for him to capitalise on the momentum he had when he first rose to prominence, leaving him ruing the fact he didn’t take the plunge.
“I don’t feel like I’ve got that cachet that I had at a certain point,” he reflected. “I see people seizing the moment when they have the same kind of explosion that I had, and I just didn’t do it. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t want to do it. I just thought ‘Oh, this is good! I’ll be able to just keep working.'”
A couple of hits are enough to turn anyone’s career around, but they’ve been in short supply. There’s also the chance to become a hired gun and work on projects he doesn’t hold close to his heart, but as Kaufman explained, he’s not interested in letting one of those hands feed the other.
“One speculates a lot on one’s failures,” he mused, “But there’s not really a lot of reason to speculate, because the only reason to speculate about bad box office is to decide that you don’t want to do something that you believe in next time in order to make more money. That’s not a choice I’m willing to make.”
Kaufman’s most recent credit – and first in four years – was for the screenplay of Netflix’s animated fantasy Orion and the Dark, but only time will tell if he’ll ever be restored to former glories.
