Charlie Kaufman interviewed about writing, directing your script, and Synecdoche, New York

Scott Tobias recently posted a great interview with the ever-enlightening Charlie Kaufman over at the AVClub. I always love hearing this guy talk about his writing and the writing process, if only to hear something beyond the traditional character arc and three-act structure dialogue that most writers will get into when prodded about what makes them intriguing writers. That stuff is all important, but it's nice to hear things that weren't part of every screenwriting class or book that you've already managed to devour.

Kaufman talks about his writing, his new movie, and interesting (considering all of our recent discussion on here about giving up our babies) directing your screenplay for the first time. As a frustratingly slow writer, here's one of my favorite, most reassuring bits of the interview:

AVC: You don't seem like the sort of writer who has a set of note cards and knows what's going to happen in every scene, but your movies are very intricately constructed. How do you pull that off?

CK: I take a very long time to write them. By doing that, I can allow myself to be expansive. As ideas come in, I can include them and then go back and figure out how to introduce them. So it's an ongoing process of back and forth and back and forth until I have a script. In this case, that took two years. So by the end, I'm pretty clear on it. I don't need cards to know where things are, and I start to understand relationships not only between people, but between parts of the movie, in new ways, and that's exciting for me. It keeps me excited about the process, and it allows for a certain amount of complexity in the construction. You know, it's weird: If you set up something early on as a structure or a goal, then that's what you write toward, and there's no opportunity to allow other stuff in. So you end up saying, "I can't do this, because this movie goes here." That doesn't interest me, and it doesn't feel exciting to work that way. So I don't.

You can read the full interview here.

And if you've got some time on your hands, WIRED has a five-part, two plus hour audio interview with Charlie Kaufman up on their blog. (Parts three and four focus most on his writing and career.)