<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Poetry was read on the night, but the session, chaired by Kaufman\u2019s longtime collaborator, Eva H. D., also served as one of the filmmaker\u2019s most unguarded and illuminating public interviews.<\/p>\n
More from Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n The night began with a screening of Kaufman and Eva\u2019s 2025 short film How To Shoot A Ghost<\/em>, which was shot in Athens, Greece, and debuted at last year\u2019s Venice Film Festival. The pair then proceeded to interrogate Kaufman\u2019s unique creative practice through poems that have inspired him.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not interested in the conventional notion of entertainment,\u201d Kaufman told the crowd in St Andrews. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in a carnival. I\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Kaufman said that when he begins the screenwriting process, he is similarly aiming to move away from anything that is \u201cconcrete or literal\u201d to reach a story that \u201cbreathes and allows the opportunity for someone watching to perhaps experience their life through it.\u201d Kaufman said he aims to stay away from what he described as \u201csuffocating\u201d forms of filmmaking that impose a particular way of seeing on audiences.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are a lot of methods and techniques that filmmakers employ to that end. And those films are very popular,\u201d Kaufman said.\u00a0 \u201cAnything that forces you to look in one direction and doesn\u2019t give you the opportunity to sit with something. I find that unhelpful. There\u2019s a goal there. It is to manipulate and make people feel they have to see it this or that way.\u201d<\/p>\n Eva described this form of filmmaking as the \u201cLeni Riefenstahl school of cinema,\u201d in reference to the prolific Nazi propagandist, to which Kaufman responded: \u201cNot only Leni Riefenstahl, but Quentin Tarantino. But if you look at a film by someone like Bela Tarr, that\u2019s an example of someone who allows you to experience the environment in which the story is being told.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s seven-hour feature S\u00e1t\u00e1ntang\u00f3<\/em> (1994).<\/p>\n \u201cI found myself engaging with it. I wasn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n On the night, Kaufman had largely chosen poems by 20th-century American writers \u2014\u00a0everything from Lucille Clifton to Philip Levine \u2014 as his key inspirations. And it wasn\u2019t difficult to see how works like Levine\u2019s The Mercy<\/em>, 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<\/em>, and Synecdoche, New York<\/em>.<\/p>\n Curiously, Kaufman told the Sands audience that he believes his time working freely within traditional systems of American film production is probably up.<\/p>\n \u201cI really can\u2019t get anything made these days, so I don\u2019t know how to suggest anyone navigate the system because it doesn\u2019t seem to be possible for me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd 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\u2019t cost that much, and then it did well.\u201d<\/p>\n Kaufman continued to say that there was a short period when he was \u201cable to do things, but that was just luck after many decades of no luck.\u201d<\/p>\n Kaufman\u2019s last feature project was I\u2019m Thinking of Ending Things<\/em>, which debuted on Netflix in 2020. The film, an adaptation of Iain Reid\u2019s 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\u2019s How To Shoot A Ghost. <\/em>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.<\/p>\n Sands ended on Sunday night with Rohan Kanawade\u2019s Cactus Pears.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Best of Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Deadline’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s longtime collaborator, Eva H. 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