The movie Charlie Kaufman admits did his career no favours: “It doesn’t make me dislike the movie”
It’s a tale as old as time that critical success doesn’t necessarily mean good box office results in Hollywood. There’s a gulf between the two, and it’s a gulf that swallows up talented directors and screenwriters who find themselves darlings of the critics but unable to get their ideas financed. So it goes with Charlie Kaufman, the visionary screenwriter behind films like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, who turned to directing with projects like Synecdoche, New York, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
While he’s the mastermind behind some beloved films, some of his own directorial work has been polarising to critics. However it was Kaufman’s swivel into the world of animation that garnered the most widespread positive acclaim – and somehow it’s the film that he says caused his career the most harm.
The film in question is 2015’s Anomalisa, a stop-motion tale about a man suffering from the lonely quirk of seeing everybody else in the world as an identical figure voiced by Tom Noonan. David Thewlis’ profoundly lonely protagonist meets the titular Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – a person who miraculously has their own unique face and voice. It’s a full-throated treatise on the extreme limits of solitude, bolstered by uncanny animation and well-pitched performances. Yet when it hit cinemas, it lost more than $4million within the United States on its $8m budget.
Speaking to The Playlist in 2016, Kaufman was honest about his feelings on that result and what it did to his career: “Y’know, I’m disappointed it got these great reviews and it didn’t do any business. It doesn’t make me dislike the movie. I still really like the movie and I’m still glad we made it, but I was thinking when Paramount took it on I thought, ‘Well, O.K., this is gonna make some money and this is gonna help my career.’ I don’t think it hurt my career, but I don’t think it gave it that thing where it’s like, ‘O.K., this guy is viable. We can make a movie and people will go and see it.”
He was surprised by the result, especially seeing that the critical response was positive in consensus in comparison to his previous directorial effort, the labyrinthine Synecdoche, New York, a film that feels as likely to be received at either extreme as captivating or alienating.
Kaufman said the opinion on the Philip Seymour Hoffman-lead metadrama was divided: “There were great reviews and then [other] people hated it. It’s like you could sort of see why people wouldn’t go to it because of that. This was like, ‘Why this time?’ And I don’t know the answer, and I never will, but it’s frustrating to me in that regard.”
After Anomalisa, Kaufman turned his attention to novel-writing, penning an epic called Antkind about the filming of an ‘unfilmable’ stop-motion movie. That book ended up coming out in the throes of the pandemic alongside his next directorial feature, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which saw David Thewlis become part of Kaufman’s returning cast.
Reviews for the latter film were generally positive, although a quick release on Netflix would have hampered the box office sales that might have given him the chance to spread his wings in his next project.
