Charlie Kaufman is back.
The iconoclast behind films that weigh in mind such as Be John Malkovich And Eternal sun of the spotless spirit (he wrote, winning an Oscar for Sunscript) and Synecdoch, New York (which he wrote and directed) will be launched his latest film – How to pull a ghost – September 1 in Venice.
Ghost is a departure for Kaufman. Rather than one of her deliciously ironic and Bretzel-Logic ruminations on life and mortality, she is closer to an abstract art film. The script is from the Canadian-Greek poet Eva HD, which Kaufman met while working on a novel at the artist’s residence Macdowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
“I was not even aware of her history in the film,” she says via Zoom in a joint interview with Kaufman. “I thought Charlie was a budding novelist.”
The pair struck him and Kaufman incorporated one of Eva’s poems in its Netflix 2020 functionality I think about the end of things. They have since collaborated a series of short films, Ghost Be the last. A kind of Breathless For the beyond, he follows a recently deceased man and woman who wandered aimlessly in the attractive streets of modern Athens, taking photos of passers-by.
It is never entirely clear, even for the two protagonists, who among them are dead or alive. “We love this idea,” says Eva, “whether you don’t really know if someone is a ghost or not.”
Death was certainly a recurring subject of fascination for Kaufman, never more than in 2008 SynecdocheIncluding the protagonist, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), obsessively reproduced from New York in a vast warehouse in a quixotic attempt to define the human condition and, inevitably, the purpose of the curtain call of life.
“There is this kind of saying:” I will rest when I am dead, “says Kaufman. “But I’m not really sure it’s a rest. My feeling is that it’s nothing – not rest. Because rest is something, and that implies consciousness.”
The characters of How to pull a ghost “Died and they always hang on to something,” notes Kaufman. Adds Eva: “Metaphorically speaking, history has a residue. If you go to a country that was once led by a violent regime, there are vestiges. There is something there, which is the real ghosts we meet.”
The film served as an introduction from New York Kaufman to Athens – “A place that I did not know and where I do not speak the language. It was exciting for me to get involved with him this way. ” Eva spent her childhood there but now lives in Brooklyn and is often desire to see again. “So, if I can encourage people to make movies there, so much the better,” she said. “And that’s exactly what happened in this case,” adds Kaufman.
The next European judgment on the How to pull a ghost The tour is Venice, undoubtedly the most ghostly city in the world. The scene, therefore, could not be more perfectly defined for the world premiere of the film. Kanopy, the film streaming service based on the library, has joined as a producer and distributor of the film and will represent it at the festival. Everything awaiting is the reaction of the public – that Kaufman and Eva impatiently expect, with just a little admitted apprehension.
At the end of the day, however, it’s just a film.
“One of the advantages of the realization of short films,” says Kaufman, “is that you can experience the form. You do not have the obligation to earn money for the people who financed it, and no one expects you to do it.”
This story appeared in the August 20 issue of the Hollywood Reporter Magazine. Click here to subscribe.
