On Saturday evening, the veteran American filmmaker Charlie Kaufman appeared at the Sands Film Festival in St Andrews, Scotland, for an onstage Q&A, originally billed as an exploration of the relationship between poetry and cinema.
Poetry was read on the night, but the session, chaired by Kaufman’s longtime collaborator, Eva H. D., also served as one of the filmmaker’s most unguarded and illuminating public interviews.
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The night began with a screening of Kaufman and Eva’s 2025 short film How To Shoot A Ghost, which was shot in Athens, Greece, and debuted at last year’s Venice Film Festival. The pair then proceeded to interrogate Kaufman’s unique creative practice through poems that have inspired him.
“I’m not interested in the conventional notion of entertainment,” Kaufman told the crowd in St Andrews. “I’m not interested in a carnival. I’m interested in something that has an emotional life and movement. And I think with poetry, when I respond to it, it has that. It affects me, it opens me up. The goal in poetry is to express something true.”
Kaufman said that when he begins the screenwriting process, he is similarly aiming to move away from anything that is “concrete or literal” to reach a story that “breathes and allows the opportunity for someone watching to perhaps experience their life through it.” Kaufman said he aims to stay away from what he described as “suffocating” forms of filmmaking that impose a particular way of seeing on audiences.
“There are a lot of methods and techniques that filmmakers employ to that end. And those films are very popular,” Kaufman said. “Anything that forces you to look in one direction and doesn’t give you the opportunity to sit with something. I find that unhelpful. There’s a goal there. It is to manipulate and make people feel they have to see it this or that way.”
Eva described this form of filmmaking as the “Leni Riefenstahl school of cinema,” in reference to the prolific Nazi propagandist, to which Kaufman responded: “Not only Leni Riefenstahl, but Quentin Tarantino. But if you look at a film by someone like Bela Tarr, that’s an example of someone who allows you to experience the environment in which the story is being told.”
Kaufman described the late Hungarian filmmaker as one of his contemporary inspirations and recounted a moving afternoon at Lincoln Center in New York, where he saw Tarr’s seven-hour feature Sátántangó (1994).
“I found myself engaging with it. I wasn’t bored, and I loved it. Afterwards, we were talking down 10th Avenue, and everything had changed. In my brain during those 7.5 hours, the way I experienced the world changed. Everything was slower.”
On the night, Kaufman had largely chosen poems by 20th-century American writers — everything from Lucille Clifton to Philip Levine — as his key inspirations. And it wasn’t difficult to see how works like Levine’s The Mercy, which are deeply personal but expansive in theme, could be instructive to the filmmaker behind titles like Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York.
Curiously, Kaufman told the Sands audience that he believes his time working freely within traditional systems of American film production is probably up.
“I really can’t get anything made these days, so I don’t know how to suggest anyone navigate the system because it doesn’t seem to be possible for me,” he said.
“And from speaking with other people, I know it has become more difficult for one to find their own idiosyncratic way. I got lucky. I wrote a script. No one wanted to make it. People seemed to like it, but no one thought it would ever be made. I just lucked out because this director, Spike Jones, who was in favor at that moment, wanted to do it. It didn’t cost that much, and then it did well.”
Kaufman continued to say that there was a short period when he was “able to do things, but that was just luck after many decades of no luck.”
Kaufman’s last feature project was I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which debuted on Netflix in 2020. The film, an adaptation of Iain Reid’s novel, follows a young woman (Jessie Buckley) who goes on a trip with her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to meet his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis). Buckley also starred in Kaufman and Eva’s How To Shoot A Ghost. That short follows two newly dead young people who meet on the streets of Athens, Greece. The project is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Sands ended on Sunday night with Rohan Kanawade’s Cactus Pears.
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