The L: This movie really depressed me, but in a good way.

Charlie Kaufman: Good.

The L: And the premise kept bringing books to mind, more than movies or theater.

CK: Like what?

The L: The Borges story about the map that’s the size of the world, or the recursive movie scenarios at the back of Infinite Jest — like the one about the movie audience that’s watching itself on the screen.

CK: That’s funny, because I’ve had that idea. I haven’t read Infinite Jest.

The L: They’re really funny ideas, if you ever get the chance.

CK: Then I will have stolen them.

The L: But why that book and others also came to mind while watching Synecdoche is that at the heart of all the architectonic sentences and elaborate plot is often this really direct, raw appeal in terms of emotion.

CK: Well, wouldn’t it also go back to someone like Kafka? Or... I don’t know. But yeah, I know what you mean, and I like that stuff. Have you ever read Stanislaw Lem? He wrote a series of reviews of nonexistent books. He felt that the only way they could exist was in this form, and they’re really interesting and really funny. I love stuff like that. I do love fake real stuff, or real fake stuff. [Pause] Fake real stuff. And that ties into some of the stuff I’m doing in this movie. I like the idea of artifice, pretending that something exists that couldn’t exist. This warehouse with the life-sized replica of New York City, it can’t exist, but there’s something really appealing about the notion of it.

The L: Creating an impossible place, to open up a space for thinking about things.

CK: And also questioning what could be real and what is real, which seems like a really good thing to do. There’s a freeing thing to it for me. I don’t know why, but it does make me feel less shackled, to imagine impossible landscapes, for example.

The L: I also wanted to ask about—

CK: Are you from Canada?

The L: No, why?

CK: Well, you said “aboot.”

The L: My cold might be giving me a Canadian accent. So, originally, you started out writing for television?

CK: That was my first professional job. I started before that and I couldn’t get a job. But that was the first thing I did in professional show business.

The L: Were you able to work out ideas in TV, working on Get a Life and other places?

CK: Yeah, I mean, there were certain shows that were more conducive to that than others. Get a Life was a good place. And I did a couple of sketch shows where I had the opportunity to write a lot of highly conceptual sketches that never got made. But I got to write. I don’t know if it was a good training ground, but it was a good place to just work and get paid for it. It was a little frustrating not to get stuff produced but it’s a very competitive world and somewhat political, especially on sketch comedy shows.
I also did a few pilots on my own that were a little more odd and maybe closer to the stuff that I’ve written since, than what I wrote for the sketch shows. Some of that was pretty conventional.

The L: What were some of the pilots you wrote?

CK: I did a pilot called Ramblypants. I did a pilot called Depressed Roomies. I did a pilot called In Limbo. I did a pilot called Animals Behind Bars.

The L: What was that about?

CK: It was about animals in a zoo.

The L: So the characters were all animals?

CK: Yeah. I did a pilot called Astronuts. Which was a title that I was given. That was my assignment. I was in a development deal with Disney and they came to me. “We got a great idea for a show—Astronuts!” So I wrote it. They were so happy, they couldn’t believe how smart they were to come up with this idea. I was like, wow, really?

The L: I guess I would end up seeing a movie called Astronuts at some point.

CK: Well, it’s kind of similar to Space Chimps.

The L: That and Kung Fu Panda were two titles this summer that sounded randomly generated by a computer.

CK: I didn’t see Space Chimps but I did see Kung Fu Panda. Not bad. Better than I thought. When I saw Jack Black dancing with a bunch of guys in panda suits in photographs from Cannes, I was so depressed. I was heading to Cannes the next week. I thought, I could never see this movie. Then I went to Iceland after Cannes with my family, and I was hooked up with the Icelandic distributor of this movie. And he showed us Kung Fu Panda in a special private screening before it opened. And so I saw Kung Fu Panda before anybody, when I swore I would never see it. And I kinda liked it, it made me laugh.
I liked it more than Wall-E. I hate to say it, because I know that’s completely wrong-headed of me.

The L: Wall-E does have its brigade of supporters.

CK: Yeah, I think you can be in danger if you admit this in public.

The L: Did you get the chance to direct any of the stuff you wrote for TV?

CK: I did maybe one or two things I did on The Dana Carvey Show. I don’t think I was good at it at the time. I was nervous and I felt like, oh my God, what if I ruin this? Whereas when I did this movie, I just didn’t care. I was like, who cares, I ruin it, so what. I was more nervous in those days.

The L: With Synecdoche, how did you like collapsing the roles of screenwriter and director into one?

CK: I liked it. It’s what I wanted to do and it’s what I got to do. So it’s hard to complain about it. It makes a more idiosyncratic and personal movie, to have one voice throughout. I’d like to do it again, if they’ll have me. They may not have me.

The L: Did the studio want to see your final cut of the movie, or do anything to it?

CK: Yeah, they wanted to see it — but I had final cut. There were disagreements, and different people wanted things changed, but I had that. It’s an unusual thing that just worked out. Originally, the movie was at Sony, and then they put it into turnaround, and that was the deal we struck with the people that picked it up. I wouldn’t have gotten final cut if we’d stayed at Sony.

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