Flipping through Empire Online’s typically entertaining list of features recently, I stumbled across this portrait of filmmaker Charlie Kaufman (whose brilliant “Synecdoche, New York” opened in the UK this weekend) giving one-offs on the six features sprung from his twisted mind to date.

There’s talk of his working relationship with director Michel Gondry on their first effort, “Human Nature” (which I still haven’t seen), the agony of adapting Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” into 2002’s “Adaptation” and meeting Harvey Keitel and Pierce Brosnan at the Oscars in 2004 (when Kaufman one the original screenplay award for his masterpiece, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”).  My favorite is this aside about “Being John Malkovich”:

“There’s something about John Malkovich that’s odd and unknowable. There’s a look in his eye that makes me imagine there’s someone else looking out from inside his head. His name is funny, you know – when people say ‘Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich’, it’s funnier than any other name I’ve tried. And I’ve tried other names, because we didn’t know if we can get him. We also thought of Christopher Walken, we thought about Willem Defoe. I don’t know what that group is exactly, but they’re serious actors, they’re good actors, but they’re slightly odd. So it’s funny, but it’s not a joke in the way it would be if it were, say, Jerry Lewis.”

Kaufman also calls “Synecdoche” a “horror film,” which I’d be willing to go along with.  I’d be willing to go along with just about anything he has to say on that film, to be honest.  It’s the most bizarrely brilliant film that I can’t qualify to come across my path in a long, long time.  And suddenly I want to see it again.

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