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This Issue 03/18/2004

Also in this issue

• From the editor
• Thai one on
• "We have to talk."

Everyone already knows that Charlie Kaufman is a genius. This is an acknowledged fact. The man who brought us both Being John Malkovich and Adaptation could not possibly be anything less. This week, with the release of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Hollywood's master of the brilliantly bizarre will try to reaffirm what is really no longer in doubt: that he is the go-to man for screenplays that are surprising, confounding, weird and joyful.

It was strangely gratifying, then, to find that Kaufman is not a people person -- or at least not a press person. Short, bearded, with a hat of curly brown hair, he seems vaguely irritated as he fields 30 minutes worth of questions from a roundtable of reporters, all of whom want to learn about his influences, his methods, his relationships with directors and where all those insane ideas come from.

"It's all personal," he says of his latest project, which is a love story that takes place in a world where unpleasant memories can be erased with a simple overnight procedure. "It's not all my life, but a lot of it is, and my thinking about what might be true about relationships."

Despite the concept's roots in science fiction, Kaufman wanted to apply it to his characters rather than develop it as an end in itself. "I was more interested in what I could write about a relationship using this conceit, and also structurally, what it allows you to do with a story .... Whether or not you could actually erase memories and what it could mean is of less interest to me than other things in the story."

Jim Carrey agrees: "I love the clunky sci-fi aspect of this movie .... It doesn't take [the movie] over, it's just a function within it."

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who has seen Kaufman's earlier films. Malkovich turned a corker of a gimmick -- a puppeteer discovers a portal that allows him to spend 15 minutes inside the head of John Malkovich -- into a genuinely touching story about longing and loss. Adaptation similarly took a clever meta-film idea and came up with an incisive analysis of the creative process. Kaufman may make this look simple, but he assures us that it's not: "It doesn't come easily for me. It's a real struggle .... There's nothing I do to prepare, I just kind of think about things a lot, and I go over things a lot in my head even when I'm not wanting to ... a lot of obsessive thinking."