Lessons from the 9 Films of Charlie Kaufman
April 30, 2025
If you were to survey the new voices of American cinema across smaller, auteur-driven outfits like A24 and Neon, there’s one pervading influence that seems to crop up more than any other, that of writer/director Charlie Kaufman. The New York-born filmmaker made his name writing scripts that used absurdist, comic premises to grapple with the personal anxieties and neuroses he experienced in mundane everyday life, oftentimes exploring the blurry line between performance and reality. The earliest of these films were lent a whimsical visual style by such inventive music video directors as Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, before Kaufman eventually took the directorial reins himself, resulting in a darker, rawer expression.
A quarter century on from Kaufman’s debut feature film, Being John Malkovich, his style still echoes prevalently in contemporary works as diverse as The Daniels’ Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once, Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You, Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid, Kristofer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, Aaron Schimberg’s Oscar-nominated A Different Man, and the dark comic works of Yorgos Lanthimos. Even Apple TV’s Severance and sci-fi romances like Palm Springs and Jonze’s own screenplay for Her, owe a debt to Kaufman’s unique voice.
In studying his career, one can trace how Kaufman developed and fought hard to stay true to his weird, distinct sensibility in a system increasingly averse to originality, from struggling sitcom writer, to inventive screenwriter-for-hire, and finally, to a singular filmmaker who would influence a generation.
1. Being John Malkovich (1999)
Charlie Kaufman was a married, 30-something, struggling sitcom writer when he wrote what would become his first produced film. Hopping between the staffs of Get A Life, The Dana Carvey Show and a number of other cancelled comedy programs, he tailored his writing to suit the tone of whichever show and performer he was serving. Perhaps it was having to shapeshift in this way while struggling on the outskirts of Hollywood that gave him the story idea of a portal into a celebrity’s head. He mixed this high concept device with a more personal idea about an anxious married man having an affair with a coworker, to create Being John Malkovich, a script that was about as far from formulaic sitcom writing as he could get, while still maintaining a vaudevillian humor.
Kaufman viewed it more as a daring writing sample than a producible film, but after much of the town rejected the script, it hit the desk of Francis Ford Coppola, who gave it to his son-in-law at the time, acclaimed music video director Spike Jonze. Ever the maverick, Jonze thought the script would be perfect for his feature directorial debut and he managed to bring Malkovich to life on a $10 million budget by attracting the star power of John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, and John Malkovich, playing himself, the titular celebrity whose head the leads transport into. The film became a minor hit, and what was meant to be an offbeat writing sample resulted in Kaufman receiving his first Academy Award nomination for Original Screenplay.
After toiling in the industry until he was nearly 40, Kaufman finally broke through by writing something deeply weird and personal, banging on every door he could until one finally opened, and then recognizing the right collaborator in Jonze. This wouldn’t be the pair’s last film together, and with Malkovich, Kaufman established a career-long habit, where when in doubt, he would double down on the raw, personal writing that got him his first big break.
2. Human Nature (2001)
Among the other feature scripts Kaufman wrote in the 90s was Human Nature, a screwball comedy that might’ve made a better sketch for The Dana Carvey Show than a full-length film. While it’s nearly impossible to formulate an eloquent logline, the story concerns a man raised as an ape played by Rhys Ifans, a woman with hypertrichosis who gets a complex hair-removal procedure to keep from resembling an ape, played by Patricia Arquette, and the zany scientist in the middle of it all, Tim Robbins. While the script brims with Kaufman’s typical complex comic ideas, it exists in a less emotionally grounded, and more heightened sitcom world that keeps the ideas at a distance. This didn’t stop Steven Soderbergh from becoming interested in directing, but amidst a career slump, he decided to make the Elmore Leonard adaptation, Out Of Sight, a surer thing after the success of Get Shorty.
Around the same time, Spike Jonze introduced Kaufman to fellow visionary music video director, Michel Gondry, who delighted in the possibilities of Human Nature’s absurd comic premise and signed on to direct. But devoid of the raw, personal storytelling that made Malkovich a breakout hit, Human Nature became a critical and financial failure. But he clearly didn’t blame Gondry, and recognized a great collaborator in him. Before they even made the film, Gondry asked Kaufman to help him develop an idea for a film that he wanted to direct about being able to erase painful memories. It would take Kaufman years to find his personal way into the sci-fi concept, but it ultimately became Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Kaufman learned to never again make a movie that was all conceptual if he didn’t have a grounded, personal way in, and to hang on to like-minded collaborators like Gondry, even if their first collaboration didn’t set the world on fire.
3. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)
In the early 1980s, Columbia acquired the film rights to Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, the “unauthorized autobiography” of 1970s game show host Chuck Barris, who among many unsubstantiated stories, claims to have worked for the CIA. The film version languished in development hell through many failed permutations until 1997, when Charlie Kaufman found a way in. As was the case in Malkovich and his other 2002 film, Adaptation, Kaufman was endlessly fascinated by the blurry lines between fiction and reality, and thought Barris’s autobiography, which liberally mixes the two, would be ripe for his brand of adaptation. George Clooney fell in love with the script and signed on to co-star as the shadowy CIA agent and decided to direct the film himself through his and Steven Soderbergh’s production banner, Section 8. It would be Clooney’s directorial debut and he was cautious about getting it right, so he made substantial cuts to Kaufman’s script in order to secure financing through Miramax.
Sam Rockwell won the Best Actor award at the Berlin Film Festival for playing Barris and the film was released shortly after Adaptation in December 2002. But the film didn’t resemble the script Kaufman had written, and he publicly criticized and disowned the film. In this early stage of his writer-for-hire, Kaufman learned how to find a personal way into adapting existing work, and alternately, that it becomes necessary to separate your emotions from the final result once someone else makes it their own. Confessions might not have been the film Kaufman hoped it would be, but it caused him to run back to two collaborators he knew he could trust in Jonze and Gondry. As a result, his other adaptation of a book would be as personal an “adaptation” of an existing work as has ever existed.
4. Adaptation (2002)
During his first taste of success, Kaufman signed on to write a feature film adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, an investigative non-fiction book about rare orchid poachers in Florida. He liked the book and Jonathan Demme was attached to direct hot off the success of Oscar-winners The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. But Kaufman got so knotted up while struggling through the writing process, that the only way he could eventually figure out how to adapt the book was by writing a script about his own struggles to adapt the book, even creating a fictional twin brother for his “Charlie Kaufman” character. Afraid to tell the studio about the bold direction his drafts were taking, he confided in Jonze, who thought it was brilliant, and signed on to direct after Demme left the project. With bankable stars Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep wanting to work with the acclaimed team behind Being John Malkovich, Columbia Pictures found outside financing and greenlit the movie.
Adaptation managed to achieve the same level of success as Malkovich and outshone Confessions in terms of critical acclaim and accolades. Chris Cooper won an Oscar for playing Orchid poacher John Laroche, and not only was Charlie Kaufman again nominated for a screenwriting Oscar, but his fictional twin brother, Donald, became the first fake person ever nominated for the award. After the failure of his attempt at a broader comedy, and his dissatisfaction with losing Confessions to Clooney, it was in doubling down on the personal to the point of fictionalizing his own writing of the screenplay that Kaufman was able to get back on track. And while “writing a screenplay about writing the screenplay” is not an advisable trick, by swinging for the fences, Kaufman did it as well as it could possibly be done and became a name screenwriter.
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Michel Gondry and his friend, Pierre Bismuth, came up with the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before he and Kaufman had even collaborated on Human Nature. They imagined a scientific procedure that could erase painful memories, and Gondry thought his new friend, Kaufman, could be just the guy to come up with a story. They developed a pitch together and sold it in 1998, before Malkovich had been released, but Kaufman would struggle to write the labyrinthine script over many years as his other writing assignments came and went. He wanted to get away from a sci-fi thriller premise, and focus more on the romantic relationship at the film’s center, something he could relate to.
In 2003, the film finally went into production in New York with Gondry in the director’s chair and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as the central couple. Though it was a tough production, with Kaufman on set, writing scenes as they went, and cinematographer Ellen Kuras collaborating with Gondry to do the practical effects in camera, like forced perspective and spotlighting, and utilizing shaggy, French New Wave tricks like bumpy wheelchair dollies and run-and-gun handheld camerawork, the final result is possibly the greatest movie of every talent involved.
The film was a box office success, and finally won Kaufman his first and only Academy Award for screenwriting. But the film’s stature would grow with time, and it has since topped several lists of the best films of the decade and millennium. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of those miracle films whose whole is so much greater than its parts. Sure, Kaufman wrote a great screenplay, Gondry had shown incredible visual flair in his music video work, composer Jon Brion had done wonderful scores for Paul Thomas Anderson films, and the quality of the esteemed cast speaks for itself. But through an all-hands-on-deck collaboration between the aforementioned creatives with Gondry steering the ship and his collaborators trusting in the chaotic process, the final film became something richer and more vibrant than any of the individual collaborators have done on their own. It would be 4 years before Kaufman’s next produced screenwriting credit, and as a first time director, he would be in full control. But Eternal Sunshine remains his masterpiece, perhaps because it’s such a great feat of collaboration between the perfect team at the perfect time, a lesson in letting go and trusting in the process.
6. Synecdoche, New York (2008)
After the success of Adaptation, Chair of Columbia Pictures, Amy Pascal, was anxious to remain in the Kaufman/Jonze business, and asked if the two of them would want to come up with an idea for a horror movie. In doing so, she might have unwittingly created a monster. Kaufman immediately turned to the many fears he had in his own life and came up with less of a straight forward horror movie than an anxiety nightmare that would become Synecdoche, New York. Jonze was keen to direct the picture, but not until after he made Where The Wild Things Are. Anxious to get a movie out after a lengthy absence from the big screen, Kaufman didn’t want to wait, and took it upon himself to direct for the first time.
The film follows an anxiety-ridden theater director played by the great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who battles failing health while trying to mount a complicated theater production that keeps growing in its ambitions until he can’t tell the difference between life and the unwieldy production. Somehow, first-time director Kaufman maintained his vision amidst the giant sets and complicated narrative, a process that must have been as taxing as the mounting of the play within a play. Without another director translating Kaufman’s words into their own vision, Synecdoche delivered as unfiltered and dark a look into the writer’s psyche as had ever been put on film, and landed it in competition for the Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival. But in a sad instance of art mirroring life, Kaufman’s ambitions cost him.
The film received polarizing reviews, and despite a contemporary reappraisal that landed Synecdoche on many best-of-the-century lists, its failure at the box office coupled with the 2008 recession left Kaufman with a crushed ego and an inability to get any project off the ground. Even after attaching an all star cast to his musical comedy Frank or Francis, no one would make it. Kaufman did uncredited polish work on studio movies such as Kung Fu Panda 2 and Chaos Walking and even wrote and directed an FX pilot that never went to series, but it would be 7 years before he was able to write and direct his next original film. In giving all of himself to his riskiest project yet, Kaufman experienced, for the first time, the consequences of doubling down on a personal vision.
7. Anomalisa (2015)
In 2012, as Kaufman was still struggling to get any project off the ground, his old writer friend from The Dana Carvey Show, “Dino” Stamatopoulos, got back in touch to suggest that they adapt Kaufman’s 2005 experimental audio play, Anomalisa, into a stop-motion animation film. Stamatopoulos and TV showrunner, Dan Harmon, had just formed Starburns Industries, a production company named for his character on Harmon’s series, Community, and were looking to develop new projects. Kaufman laughed off the idea, finding it hard to believe that anyone would want to finance an animated film about a customer service sales rep at an Ohio hotel who perceives all humans as looking and sounding the same. But when Stamatopoulos raised enough funds on Kickstarter to make a short film version, Kaufman agreed to join the project as a co-director alongside stop-motion specialist Duke Johnson.
Actors David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tom Noonan reprised their roles from the audio play, only now rather than standing on stage voicing freakouts and sex scenes in front of an audience as in the original production, stop-motion puppets would perform the actions. The production was a labor of love and eventually Paramount Pictures stepped in to shepherd the film into its feature form. Anomalisa was released to critical raves, marking Kaufman’s long-awaited return to movies. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and became the first animated film to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
After Synecdoche, Kaufman never could have imagined that his next film would not only be 7 years away, but that it would be a stop-motion version of an experimental audio play he’d written years earlier produced by his old buddy from The Dana Carvey Show, but old relationships and projects have a way of coming back around in Hollywood if you’re open to receiving them. With Anomalisa, Kaufman found an unlikely route back to the writer/director chair by taking a call from an old industry friend and embracing the unexpected, and it paid off big time.
8. I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
As the 2020s approached, Kaufman was on the lookout for a project that would fit the narrow criteria many creators were becoming accustomed to in an increasingly conservative Hollywood. The likelihood of getting a project made was far greater if a) the story was contained to a few locations and characters, to keep the budget down and b) if it was based on existing IP. While many filmmakers would opt for contained, popular genre stories, Kaufman decided, in true Kaufman fashion, to adapt the debut novel of Canadian writer, Iain Reid, I’m Thinking Of Ending Things. Having checked the boxes of a contained thriller-adjacent story based on existing IP, Kaufman then did what other singular auteurs of the time were doing; he took advantage of the streaming boom, and went to Netflix.
The style of the book is as surreal and disjointed as you’d expect, taking place in the mind of a woman, who would be played brilliantly by Jessie Buckley, on a road trip with her partner, Jesse Plemons, to meet his parents, depicted by Toni Collette and Anomalisa’s David Thewlis. But as the story progresses, the POV seems to deteriorate into unsettling hallucinations as the reader’s understanding of reality and the protagonist’s identity falls apart. Directing an adaptation of an existing work for the first time as opposed to just writing one, Kaufman took full advantage of the new directorial challenge, using tools of cinema like dance scenes and unsettling visual tricks to express the experience of the book rather than relying on words. And while the text is just as complicated as it sounds, the movie, shot in a 4:3 aspect ratio by Ida and Cold War cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, exists almost outside of logic, more representing the inside of a deteriorating brain experiencing life through memories, real and imagined, and through a prism of pop culture and romanticization. While the film stumped some critics and viewers, those who celebrated it accepted it less as a puzzle to be solved or a twist to be understood, than as a pure artistic experience to be felt.
The film came out on Netflix in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, enthralling cineastes and alienating just as many of the wide streaming audience Kaufman was able to reach. In a time where it felt like things might be ending, the experience of watching I’m Thinking of Ending Things felt totally uncanny. The film was an instance of Kaufman playing by contemporary rules, making a contained streaming film based on IP, but it’s also a masterclass in how to use those confines, and exploit industry trends, to make something truly distinct and individual.
9. Orion and the Dark (2024)
While most of Kaufman’s produced films have been passion projects, few filmmakers can make a living off making one personal movie every 5 years. And while Kaufman has done many uncredited big studio rewrites, it’s easy to see how his sensibility was a particularly good match for what would be his 9th credited movie, Dreamworks Animations’ adaptation of Emma Yarlett’s children’s book, Orion and the Dark. The book and film tell the story of an anxious adolescent boy who befriends a character named Dark and goes on a journey through the night and into his own subconscious to face his fears, a premise that’s heady for a children’s movie, but feels right at home in the Kaufman canon.
The animated film was released on Netflix in 2024 to much acclaim and marks Kaufman’s most recent produced screenwriting credit. While Kaufman has hardly, if ever, remarked on the film, it’s easy to find his voice, even in the youthful narrative. Anyone who is interested in bold and risky work will have to do work for hire to sustain a career, but watching Orion, it’s fun to see how Kaufman was able to find his way into the most unlikely of projects and make it his own.
Later the War (Announced)
There were rumors around the time of I’m Thinking Of Ending Things that the aptly titled film might be Kaufman’s swan song, but in February 2025, Deadline announced his next film as writer and director, an adaptation of a short story by Iddo Geffen about a dream manufacturer who begins creating nightmares. It sounds like a Kaufman premise if ever there was one, but if his experience in adaptation has taught us anything, it’s that no one should presume to know what to expect. Every new Charlie Kaufman work seems to come from a fierce uphill battle, but with Eddie Redmayne and Tessa Thompson in the starring roles and financing in place, it looks like this battle may be won, and we can look forward to another daring, offbeat work from one of cinema’s boldest contemporary minds.
The filmography of Charlie Kaufman is a story of tireless originality at war with a system that increasingly forbids such work. Later the War will be the next stand for a writer and director who has continually won acclaim and pushed the boundaries of the form by insisting upon his vision at any cost, and inspiring a generation of acolytes to do the same. In a time when the fate of the original theatrical film seems in peril, it’s good to know Charlie Kaufman is still out there, fighting the good fight.
