US writer-director Charlie Kaufman blasted the Hollywood studio system while making some sharply pointed observations about Artificial Intelligence (AI) amid the ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes in a fiery masterclass presentation at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Monday.
Asked the difference between art and entertainment, Kaufman replied: “If by entertainment you mean conventional Hollywood fare, I would say that it is the difference between truth and bullshit. If the agenda is to sell a product and that product is the movie…then that can’t be art.”
Kaufman, whose directing work includes Synedoche, New York, Anomalisa (co-directed with Duke Johnson), and I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, as well as the screenplays for seminal films including Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, both directed by Spike Jonze, was speaking in his capacity as a director to a packed audience of several hundred mainly young Bosnian film enthusiasts in the main hall of the Bosnian Cultural Centre.
The filmmaker went on to attack Hollywood marketing techniques - and how they have affected audiences’ tastes.
“I think because the diet is so corrupted and has been for so long, if you eat shit all your life, then you want shit. If you eat processed food, then you crave it - and you wouldn’t crave it if you hadn’t been fed it all your life…I feel like that is what the movie machine does. I find it really offensive and dangerous - and it makes me angry!”
Kaufman also weighed into the ongoing debate about AI and writers’ rights remuneration.
“I feel that the writers have been trained to make and eat the garbage too. As long as there are in that arena, making that shit, you might as well let AI do it because AI can do it because that is what they are. They [the screenwriters] are doing AI. They can be better than that and they should be better than that, and they will be better than that. But once you give that up and allow the studios to use AI to write their screenplays, then there is no going back. There is no hope for it,” he said.
“[But] AI can’t create a moment of humanity and I think as long as people are doing it [screenwriting] and there is that struggle, there is always the chance and hope that something will come out of it that will be worth something to human beings.”
The filmmaker reminisced about writing for situation comedies earlier in his career. “It is very interesting how quickly you get trained into that kind of humour by working in it. And you have to figure out a way to stop thinking in that way, how many jokes there are on a page, set-up jokes…which is garbage as a form,” Kaufman said of how writers are absorbed into the Hollywood machine.
The antidote, he suggested, was “people making real things, people taking the time to try to understand what it is they think, what is happening in the world and trying to think past an easy solution to characters’ problems.”
Kaufman advocated “making films outside of the studio system as much as possible.” However, several of his own projects have been made with backing from major companies.
The Sarajevo audience was shown a clip of his 2020 feature I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, written and directed by Kaufman. “It was made for Netflix and also I didn’t have to think about box office at all,” he said to emphasise what he described as his complete creative freedom. He also revealed that Netflix had agreed to make it “for very little money” because it was based on a thriller. “I think they thought it was going to be a thriller.”
The masterclass included a screening of Kaufman’s New York-set short film Jackals & Fireflies, featuring poet Eva H.D, who was invited on stage alongside Kaufman. The film is based around one of her works. It was made with backing from a mobile phone company using cellphones - but Kaufman refused to mention the name of the company (understood to be Samsung) and pointed out that he again had complete creative control.
As for his earlier projects, most, he claimed, weren’t pitched by him to studios. “A couple of movies, I wrote them without a studio and then there were directors who wanted to make them. They were directors who could get movies made,” he said referring to Being John Malkovich in 1999 and Human Nature in 2001, directed by Spike Jonze and Michael Gondry respectively.
With Synecdoche, New York in 2008, Kaufman was assigned to write a horror movie for Sony with Jonze directing. When Jonze withdrew, Sony’s interest cooled.
“It has been very difficult, I can tell you that. Which is why I’ve made very few movies…especially after Synecdoche. I think with Synecdoche, it was like ‘he’s this hot screenwriter, let’s give him a shot [directing]’ and then that didn’t do well commercially at all. Nobody wanted to give me another shot….I spent a bunch of years trying to get stuff made and I couldn’t. Then we crowd- funded Anomalisa,” he said of 2015 animated drama.
The Sarajevo Film Festival is running until Friday August 18.
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