The “seminal” 1999 movie that changed cinema, according to Jason Sudeikis
Every decade has its seminal films, whether it’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, representing the 1970s or WM Murnau’s Nosferatu of the 1930s, and for Jason Sudeikis, when it comes to the 1990s, Being John Malkovich wins the title.
“That movie is seminal,” he told Collider, before going one further, “I think [it] changed movies”. It might be a big claim to make about a film, but it did push the meaning of a cameo to its limits, laying the ground for so many of the quirky, mind-bending, yet emotionally deep films that followed.
In case you haven’t caught the film, it both is and isn’t what it says on the tin. It is not in fact a documentary about what it’s like to be John Malkovich, but instead a surreal story of a desk jockey who happens upon a portal into John Malkovich’s brain. Of course, chaos ensues.
The film stars John Malkovich in a fictionalised version of himself, as well as John Cusack as the office worker and Cameron Diaz as a much more matronly character than the world is used to. On top of that, Being John Malkovich marked the first collaboration between Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, who were barely known names in the industry at the time.
Kaufman originally wrote the script on spec after working as a comedy writer for years, and through Francis Ford Coppola, the script found its way to Jonze, who was celebrated at the time for his quirky music videos for the likes of Fatboy Slim and Björk, and if you’ve watched any of the duo’s further work, both together and apart, it only makes sense that they found each other.
For Sudeikis and the rest of his crew working on the 2016 kaiju film Colossal, Being John Malkovich was the blueprint. When the script for Nacho Vigalondo’s bizarre monster movie found its way to Sudeikis, he wasn’t entirely sure it could be pulled off at first. But the script’s similarity to the mad world of Kaufman and Jonze persuaded him.
“I was like, ‘Who could pull this off?’” he explained, “You know it had that same kind of like fun feel that I think we’ve all shared when we saw Being John Malkovich, so in my head, like, ‘Oh, I guess Spike Jonze or like Michel Gondry’.”
But once Sudeikis caught up with Vigalondo’s existing short films, he knew that Colossal, for all its debt to the work of Jonze, Gondry and Kaufman, would be handled with care by the Spanish filmmaker. And it speaks volumes that when Sudeikis’ co-star Anne Hathaway spoke to Collider on the same issue, she simply said, “We’ve been asked, ‘What adjectives would you use to describe this movie?’ And we came up with Being John Malkovich-y.”
Clearly, if your film is the only one that people can conjure up when you’re working on a trippy, sci-fi comedy, then it is the blueprint. Luckily, Kaufman and Jonze worked together again for Adaptation, and the former went on to make gold with Gondry for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Who knows, without Being John Malkovich, we might not have gotten a whole genre of the weird and wonderful. Here’s hoping there’s more to come.
