Charlie Kaufman | I'm Thinking of Ending Things

0:07Welcome to the Talks at Google podcast, where great minds meet. I'm Emma, bringing you this episode with Charlie Kaufman, Academy Award-winning writer and director. Talks at Google brings the world's most influential thinkers, creators, makers, and doers all to one place. You can watch every episode at youtube.com slash Talks at Google. Charlie Kaufman is one of the most celebrated screenwriters and directors, known for movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Anomalisa. Three of his scripts appear in the Writers Guild of America's list of the 101 greatest movie screenplays ever written.

0:49He's received an Academy Award, an Emmy, three BAFTA Awards, two Independent Spirit Awards, and a Writers Guild of America Award. He joins Google to discuss his film, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, a psychological thriller exploring regret, longing, and the fragility of the human spirit. The film tells the story of a young woman, played by Jessie Buckley, who makes a road trip with her boyfriend to his family's farm. After being trapped at the farm during a snowstorm, she questions the nature of everything she knew or understood about her boyfriend, herself, and the world. Originally published in September 2020, here is Charlie Kaufman.

1:34I'm thinking of ending things.

1:45Thanks so much for joining us, Charlie. Thank you for having me. It's great to have you. So to kick it off, I'd love to hear more about the genesis of this movie. I know it was based on the eponymous 2016 novel by Ian Reid. Can you tell us a bit about how the adaptation came about and what drew you to the source material? I was actively looking for something to adapt. I thought I might have a better chance of getting a movie made if it pre-existed in another medium. So I was looking for novels and I happened upon this one and I liked it. And it was small. So I thought I could maybe get the financing.

2:21Small in terms of its budgetary needs, you know, four characters more or less and a few locations. So it seemed doable. And so I went to Netflix with my producer, Anthony Bregman, and they agreed to make it. So that was pretty much how it happened. Awesome. Well, what really struck me in watching this movie, I just, you know, for an adaptation, I still kept thinking how quintessentially Charlie Kaufman it was. It felt like a real companion piece to a lot of your earlier work in terms of the themes and ideas that it explored, like being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Really sort of deepening the philosophical inquiry at the heart of both of those two movies.

3:03A lot of really deep questions of, you know, identity and memory that come about in the course of this movie. And I was curious your thoughts about that. Well, thank you for thinking they're deep. But yeah, I certainly agree that that was my goal and the stuff that interested me about it. The novel itself is is very interior. So it's a subjective piece. It's written from the point of view of the young woman. And and she's going over her concerns about the relationship and also kind of some question of identity herself. so um you know that interested me and then and um yeah that's what I that's what I was working with yeah yeah for me what I found really interesting is it felt like a continuation almost especially of being John Malkovich in terms of the exploration of identity so in being John Malkovich you've got identity that is is very literally looked at as a form of ventriloquism you know expressing one's essence through other vessels um so like uh you know puppetry is a metaphor but but it's also incredibly literal in that movie.

4:13And in this movie, I think that the problematizing of identity seems to go even further, just challenging the whole notion of some sort of stable intrinsic identity that's piped into other characters. Yeah, well, I mean, there's definitely a lot that I was exploring about projection in romantic relationships and sort of assigning people personalities and roles and qualities that you want them to have, which I think is a fairly common thing, especially early on in relationships. And the other thing that was, I think that's part of the sort of idea of almost ventriloquism is the sort of notion of us being a product of the culture in which we live, the movies that we see, the books that we read, you know, the sort of having this sort of curated reality by the society outside of us for, you know, questionable reasons often, you know, monetary reasons or reasons of capitalism.

5:16And so I was playing with that kind of thing too. Yeah, most definitely that totally came through, especially in the sequences in the car in which basically the dialogue is overtaken by discourse, whether that be snippets from a poem or a Pauline Kael movie review or the exchange around a specific Christmas song that has questionable sexual politics. Yeah. And there are quotes in the movie, actually, from other movies that are not pointed to, but are there. So that this person's world is kind of created by things that they've seen in the world around them, in movies and in media. Yeah, exactly.

6:00So much of actual identity is sort of externally imposed by culture into someone's, you know, specific inherent essence if they have one. So what I found really disorienting the first time I caught it just briefly that the young woman who's one of two basic main characters in the movie, her name changes throughout the movie. She's referred to as Lucy at one point and by other names, you know, at other points. So it's very disorienting, you know, even at that level to not be able to get a read on who she is and what she does for a living as the movie progresses. Yeah, she constantly changes. A lot of other things change too within the movie, kind of subtly like costuming and set design and stuff like that is being, is constantly sort of switching around.

6:47So, yeah. Yeah, so what I found really interesting in that sense, it's a very postmodern film in that basically all aspects of identity and memory are problematized to a degree. So in that sense, it feels really contemporary, but it also feels like very timeless and almost a throwback to earlier times as well, you know, with the iconography of the ice cream shop and some of the other cultural references that exist. So these few brief scenes of her using an iPhone, I felt like the movie could basically be set anytime in like the past 50 or 100 years almost. Yeah, well, I think that there is a thing going on in the movie and it's difficult for me to kind of talk about because I don't want to give too much away.

7:31but there is a sort of a sense of a span of years that's being presented as if someone's remembering something a life that goes back many many years so like there's different represent different representations of the ice cream stand from different periods as if you were looking at McDonald's ads from the 50s and the 70s and the 2000s and how they'd all that how they'd be different, but they sort of represent the same company that exists in the Tulsi Town presentation as well. So it's suggesting that there's a long time being remembered, a long period of time being remembered. Yeah, exactly. And again, without getting too much into spoilers, that's sort of mirrored by some of the things that are happening when the young woman meets her boyfriend's parents in the farmhouse.

8:26where a lot of the interactions become somewhat unmoored in time throughout. Yeah, definitely. And yeah, it is along the same lines and it is for the same reasons. You know, how much of our lives are we living in our memories and how many different versions of a person, for example, a parent or a child, we would have in our memories because they exist at different points of time in our memories. And I wanted that to be part of the experience. Yeah, that definitely came across. I was also curious, this is a very interesting novel, I think, to adapt because it's a psychological thriller, so it's inherently incredibly cerebral.

9:09And I was curious what process you went through in terms of thinking about how to represent that visually on screen. Because I think the movie makes a lot of really interesting choices about how to sort of represent that disquiet visually. Yeah, I mean, I use some of the images from the book. The book is a monologue in the head of this woman. So it's a lot of talking. and I used some of that to sort of, I wanted to keep it in her voice, but I didn't want it to just be wall-to-wall talking. So I think that I had in my head what I felt were like images that could be pulled from memory or fantasy or dreams.

10:07and I tried to, you know, talk to my production people and trying to create that on the set and also the actors and, you know, to try to convey not necessarily the experience of the book because this is separate from the book, but my version of that story, which is what I had to do because it's my version of that story. I couldn't do Ian's version of the story because that's Ian's version of the story. I had to somehow make it mine so that I understood it from my own very subjective point of view. So, you know, that was the process really of adaptation was deciding what worked for me from the book, what could or could not translate to a movie in my mind, and what I would do to, you know, to bridge the gulf between those things.

11:00Yeah, I thought one thing that the cinematic choices did really incredibly well was conveyed this feeling of real claustrophobia, especially the car sequences, which are really extended. And there was something about the way it was filmed where you're never really inside the car. You're just sort of peering in through the windows. So you're external to what's going on, but still really confined at the same time. Yeah, I mean, they're all claustrophobic elements, particularly in the movie. You are inside the car, actually, sometimes, but you are outside of it a lot. But when you're inside, you're, you know, the characters are isolated and it's a very small space.

11:42And, you know, some of that, you're just dealing with the practical constraints of filming people in a car. But, you know, my, my cinematographer, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this should feel like. Cause it's a lot of it is very static. It's in a car, it's around a dinner table, it's in a sitting room, you know, there's, there's not a lot of movement and um we didn't want that to be tedious um and i there there's a kind of a a choice we made in camera movements that are designed to sort of feel like they're anticipating the action because that was the thought that when you're when you're imagining a scene um you know what's coming next you as the person imagining it and so we wanted to sort of present that as almost jumping ahead of the story.

12:36So, um, often the camera leads the character. Um, it'll move to, um, uh, you know, like Jesse Plemons before he's, before he says something, when the camera lands on him, he'll say something, it'll, it'll move to the living room. Um, at which point he'll invite her to sit in the living room and then she'll go there. You know, those kinds of things were one of our kind of designs to kind of create that sense of life in a very sort of constrained space. Yeah, one thing I thought related to that was really interesting. Like, you chose a very interesting aspect ratio for the movie itself, which I think actually, you know, added to that feeling of confinement.

13:18I think it's an aspect ratio that used to be used mostly for television, like 1.3 to 1 or something like that, as opposed to a wider screen, which we're used to now. So when you're watching it, you actually feel the, feel the, the, the action is boxed in at a meta level as well. Yeah. Lukash, um, wanted to use that, that aspect ratio and, um, you know, I liked it and Netflix wasn't, um, really thrilled with it as an idea because I think they, they, their experience in the past was that people think there's something wrong with their TV and, um, they, they're afraid that people are going to turn the channel, but, and so So we experimented with different aspect ratios and we found that this one really served the story.

14:02I think for the reasons that you said is that it really feels boxed in. It feels very claustrophobic. It's also somewhat sort of tense because the less you show people, the more you don't know what's outside of that. You know, and that also creates attention. So it was interesting because in our early tests, we would shoot a still photograph with that aspect ratio and one that was much wider. And it was like there's no tension in the wider one. So we just, you know, we said we're going to use this. And they allowed it, obviously, because that's the movie. But, yeah, that was a bit of an interesting evolution of choice there.

14:43At first, it was a little disorienting, like just because I think we're not used to it. But it felt very, very effective in the way everything was so tightly framed throughout that characters, especially I'm thinking of some of the farmhouse sequences, characters would appear and disappear out of the frame. And that was very organic because of the way it was framed rather than having like a wider panorama. Yeah. And I think it's also it's really nice for close ups, which were important in this movie. Yeah. Also, relatedly, I wanted to give a shout out to all the actors in this movie. I thought the acting was absolutely incredible, incredibly challenging roles, the way that, you know, Jesse Buckley shapeshifts pretty much effortlessly through all these different personas.

15:25And the Toni Collette and David Thewlis, who play her boyfriend's parents, they're shapeshifting as well through personas, but also time as the movie progresses. Yeah. And Jesse Plemons is the center of it. he's the he's the anchor of the whole story and everything is really being seen through his eyes and um his his his very subtle sense of um anxiety is something that i think holds the movie together and and and hopefully will be recognized as such yeah yeah his performance is so subtle but it's it's very very deep in in just the same way as the other actors are as well that he's doing a lot with very, very subtle changes in tone and things like that.

16:17Yeah, absolutely. This has been a pretty busy year for you. In addition to, in addition to I'm thinking of ending things, you also had your debut novel come out a couple months ago, Antkind. I was wondering what spurred you to sort of set aside screenwriting and do literary fiction instead? Well, I think, you know, I couldn't get stuff made. And so this offer, I was frustrated and this offer to write a book came up and I thought this is an opportunity to get something made in a different medium. And so, you know, it seemed interesting to me. So I decided to go go with it and see what would happen.

16:59Great. Great. So tell us a bit about about the novel. um it's about a film critic a somewhat unsuccessful film critic who um it goes down to florida to to um work on a an essay or a monograph and um stumbles upon a very old man who's been making a movie for the past 90 years that is at this point um a three-month long stop motion animation. No one has seen it. The man is a recluse. The narrator of the story sees it and thinks it's the most brilliant thing he's ever witnessed. The filmmaker dies during the process of his viewing it and the film ultimately burns up and he's left with nothing but very little memory of it.

17:49And the rest of the book is him trying to remember the film and various ways in which he he tries it's i mean it's surreal um it's silly uh i i i don't know it's funny basically again quintessential charlie kaufman so i don't know i mean it's very very jokey okay i think part of the reason i didn't really know if i wanted it to be funny when I first started writing it or scary. I just didn't know. But, you know, the movie that I, the last movie that I'd made before I started writing it was Synecdoche, New York. And a lot of people don't seem to recognize that as a comedy because it's a very sort of dry, dark, quiet comedy.

18:41But it is a comedy in my mind. And I just thought, well, I'm going to write a comedy that people will understand as a comedy. So that's what I set out to do. So it's got pretty much like 40 jokes a page for 700 pages. And it was a long time in the writing. It took me about five and a half years to write it. So it's chock full of gags. Awesome. That's a very good joke to non-joke ratio. I'm sure it'll be an incredibly entertaining read for a lot of folks. I hope so, yeah. So as we've been chatting, I've been seeing that we have a ton of comments that are coming in from the audience who's tuning in.

19:22So I'd love to do some audience questions now. Sure. So we have a question here from Katie. And Katie's question is, any unique and talented actors have given life to your work? Whose performance surprised you the most? Who revealed something you didn't imagine when you first wrote the character? um you know i i'd have to say in all honesty every one of them uh every one of them and that's the joy of bringing actors on to something that you've written is that they if they're good and the people i've worked with have always been good is that they'll they'll bring something surprising to it something you didn't see or something you couldn't anticipate or just a kind of a personality quality.

20:09And I really, I sincerely, I'm not avoiding answering that question, although I would avoid answering that question for political reasons, but it's just the truth. I mean, everybody I've worked with has brought enormous amounts to the stuff that I've written. Excellent. So here's a question from Ray. Charlie, so many of your characters express a fatalism about life that they can't or won't change. Do you personally feel this way? Are you a Charlie Kaufman character?

20:41I mean, I think I'm interested when I write of sort of like bucking this sort of formulated convention that, you know, in mainstream movies of, you know, what does this character learn and what is the arc of this character? And I feel like those are almost forced into stories and force fed to us as audiences. So I bristle at that. I think people can change somewhat. I think I can change. I think I've changed. I mean, but there are certain aspects of me that probably are the same as when I was, you know, a little kid. Um, so I guess my response is I, I, I'm, I, I'm more interested in the struggle than I am in the, in the resolution.

21:35Question from, from Danny. I read that you have a few projects about dreams that you're working on. Can you tell us a bit more about the projects and why do you find dreams interesting? I have one project about dreams, literally, although I would say that everything I do is influenced by dreams. I'm writing a movie for Ryan Gosling's company about dreams. I don't want to be more specific about the details of the story, but I am fascinated by dreams because I feel like the symbolism and the imagery and the ideas in them are not bound by sort of the mundane reality in which we live in our waking lives.

22:28and that you can have very emotional ideas and storylines and dreams that are free of that. And I find that helpful in writing, not getting stuck in that sort of, well, this couldn't happen, or how could this happen? You know, I don't find that interesting and an interesting sort of place to work for me. So I'm attracted to Dreams for that reason. Question from Brian. For the last three films, you've been both director as well as writer. And I'm wondering if that makes it easier to align with your vision for the story.

23:16Yes. Yeah, it does. I mean, I think there's a value to collaborating in that regard as a writer with a director. and I've had very good experiences with directors who've directed my writing. But yeah, it's a more, there's, for better or worse, there's no compromise in a thing that you write and then direct. I don't, and when I say compromise, I don't mean that as a negative term. I mean, compromise can be good and useful, but I'm interested in sort of eccentricities. And I feel in my work and in the way I think and in other people's work, and I feel like those are going to get kind of get, you know, sandpapered away the more people that are involved in making those kind of decisions.

24:13because you have to, you know, when I was younger, I had a writing partner and, you know, we wrote together and it was very valuable in a lot of ways. And I learned a lot from working with him and it was comedy. So it was very helpful because you would, you know, people, the other person would laugh or not at your joke. And then you would kind of have a sense of whether it worked, which is a harder thing to do maybe by yourself. But by definition, it couldn't be very personal, the stuff we did together, you know, because it wasn't my stuff and it wasn't his stuff. It was our stuff. And so the stuff we did had to be stuff that we could, we could agree on.

24:54And the very sort of secret things and private things and vulnerabilities that make a work eccentric and interesting to me, almost by definition, couldn't be there. So I feel that is the same with my film work that it that I I like the idea of of it being um unpolished in that sense yeah and I think when you when you were working with with other directors you sort of stuck to a specific stable folks Spike Jones I think you were on very much the same wavelength as he with uh with adaptation and and with being John Malkovich and also Michel Gondry that you worked with a couple films yeah and I like both those those guys a lot and I liked working with them a lot and I would work with them again if the situation arose.

25:42It wasn't about them. It was something, I mean, and aside from everything else, it's something that I've always wanted to do. I did it when I was a teenager. I went to film school. I intended to be a director. It was just kind of a circuitous path to it for me. Question from Daniel. What piece of media inspires you most right now as a writer and storyteller? um i don't know i don't know if i'm being inspired right now by anything i'm sorry to say uh are any particular pieces of uh you know culture art that that have really spoken to you obviously ian reed's novel did uh but uh anything recently that that's really stood out for you I fairly recently read the novel Stoner, which has been recommended to me for decades now, which I avoided reading because I thought it was going to be boring.

26:42And it's certainly one of the best books I've ever read. It's an astounding, an astounding novel. And I recommend it to everyone. Excellent. Question here from Stefano. Have you also considered other media? Video games seem to offer a lot of possibilities. Yeah, I thought about it and I've sort of engaged a little bit with it, but I've never really. It's not a thing that I'm even involved with in my own life. So it would be kind of like a learning curve for me to get into that. I don't have the vocabulary for it. I like the idea of stories that can have lots of different endings, which I think is probably something that video games can do.

27:28That interests me, but I haven't done anything with it. Question from Mark. Can you talk about some of the soundtrack music choices and how that pairs with visuals? in this movie or i'm assuming in this movie or yeah i'm assuming as well yes yeah well um we really um initially i wasn't going to have any score aside from the stuff that was from oklahoma and um and uh and the jingle from tulsi town uh but we started to put some other versions of it into the story, which are kind of, in a way, acting as foreshadowing for things that are about to happen, which I think is interesting in the context of this movie, because it's sort of like a, because the movie is like a stew of ideas and, you know, things that this person has heard and thought about and witnessed and then put into this, made into a story.

28:33Um, and I, and I, um, so, so that's, you know, that, that's, there's very little score in the movie. Um, there's one piece that's repeated a lot. It's repeated backwards at some point, uh, in the movie. Um, and so, I mean, that's what, you know, I, I don't know what else to say about it other than that. Another, another question from Stefano, what other movies about memory do you particularly like or find worth watching um i don't know i can't think of any movies about memory i can't remember any um what what are they well i mean i'm sure they're out there but i i don't i can't think of any i don't feel like i've been influenced by movies about memory that i've seen i guess um can you think of any i i honestly can't yeah i think probably like fairly contemporary the movie memento by christopher nolan back i think that was 2000 or 2001 so i i think that does touch on some of these same ideas of eternal sunshine but from a different angle um yeah yeah i mean i'm that didn't that wasn't an influence on me that movie i can say that uh question from oc did you have any influence on the casting tony collette looks brilliant even in that short trailer um yeah i mean i'm i casting is my is my choice entirely uh i mean it's it's my choice to ask people they don't necessarily have to agree to be in the movie but it nobody else is casting the movie but and i mean i think that's generally true that directors cast a movie i mean you can be um you know you you can have suggestions made by the casting director.

30:20And usually that's for the smaller parts. People you might not necessarily know about, they can recommend. But, you know, I mean, everybody in this movie was my call. I think it came together really fantastically. The casting just felt really, really great. And especially in those scenes where they were all together, the family. Yeah, yeah. I'm very happy with the cast. They're great actors. A question here from Krithika. What are some deeper questions, ideas that you think filmmakers will address more coming out of this pandemic? um well i mean i i don't know what other filmmakers are are thinking about or planning to do so i'm you know i i have no idea what what uh what they're what they're going to come out with i'm doing a developing a series for hbo which is about a virus based on a screenplay i wrote several years ago based on a novel from the 70s called IQ83, which is about a virus that causes stupidity.

31:27And so I wrote that as a screenplay and it didn't get made, but now HBO is asking me to develop it as a short, a limited series. So I will be in my own way, I guess, writing about the pandemic and stupidity, which I do seem to go hand in hand right now. Yeah, well, I'm looking forward to seeing that. And I also felt like this current movie, even though it was filmed prior to the pandemic, I think it had some additional resonance when you think about all the claustrophobia in the movie and how that hits us now as we're somewhat, you know, quarantined in our own particular lives and boxed off from each other.

32:08Yeah, it even has a conversation about viruses in it. Mm-hmm. Question from Michael. What is your favorite proudest single scene in one of your works? Do you have a favorite scene or some of your favorite scenes? There's so many good ones. Uh, yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I like things in the movies that I've worked on, but I don't know if I have a favorite. It's not, it's not, I don't, I don't really like ranking things. Yeah, there are so many hilarious, really memorable moments in all of your films. For me, like the seventh and a half floor from being John Malkovich is just a very indelible.