Charlie Kaufman Wasn’t Pleased With ‘Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind’
It’s not an accidentConfessions of a Dangerous Mindwasn’t shown as last week’sCharlie Kaufmanretrospective. Although theAnomalisawriter and co-director received sole credit onGeorge Clooney’s directorial debut, he had very little involvement in the film, and he wasn’t happy with the end result.
After the jump, read Charlie Kaufman’s thoughts onConfessions of a Dangerous Mind.
I remember listening to George Clooney and cinematographerNewton Thomas Sigel’s audio commentary for the film, and I was surprised that not once did Clooney even mention Kaufman. In the audio track, though, he mentioned a variety of changes he made to the screenwriter’s work, both on the page and in post-production — which Kaufman wasn’t a fan of.
On Marc Maron’spodcast(viaThe Film Stage), Charlie Kaufman discussesConfessions of a Dangerous Mind:
I didn’t like it. That was a movie in which I was not consulted. I mean, George Clooney changed the script, he didn’t talk to me during production. We kind of didn’t get along. I was invited to see the movie when he was pretty much done and I wrote a bunch of notes and gave them to him and I guess it was offensive to him.
With directorsMichel Gondry(Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) andSpike Jonze(Adaptation), Kaufman didn’t simply hand in his script and collect his check; he was very much involved. TheSynecdoche, New Yorkdirector never says too much about his apparently nonexistent collaboration with Clooney, but around the release ofEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, hewas honestabout his brief experience on the film:
EMILY: How did you feel about the way Confessions of a Dangerous Mind turned out?
CHARLIE: I’m not happy with that movie. I wasn’t involved in the making of it the director wasn’t interested in things that I was interested in when I was writing the script. I think he had a different plan. I don’t really want to have this conversation – I guess so but um, I wasn’t involved in it.
EMILY: How come sometimes you’re in control and other times you have to sit back like other Hollywood writers and say, “I sold the script – it’s theirs now?”
CHARLIE: I didn’t really sell it to them [in the case of CoDM]. I wrote a script that was an assignment. He came in and decided to become the director. It wasn’t written for Clooney. It was a complete ten years, maybe ten years down the road — with a bunch of different directors attached at different times. Different stars — it was kind of like “the movie that couldn’t get made.”
In terms of screenwriters having their work butchered, I’d say Kaufman got off easy compared to other horror stories we’ve heard.Confessions of a Dangerous Mind— at least to me, maybe not Kaufman — is hardly an embarrassment to have your name on. It’s an excellent film, and it’s arguably still Clooney’s best directorial effort. Kaufman’s frustration, though, is completely understandable.
