![]() That wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or successful as if he felt completely free to make of it what he wanted. “I didn’t want him to just feel like he had to film the book. “Not only did the material resonate with Charlie but he was going to take it and put it through his filter and make it something new,” Reid says. But after speaking with Kaufman about the project, he became excited by the prospect of handing over his story to him. ![]() Reid had always considered his book virtually unfilmable. (Kaufman won the original screenplay Oscar for “Eternal Sunshine” and also earned a screenplay nod for “Being John Malkovich” and an animated feature nomination for “Anomalisa.”) Tasked with adapting Susan Orlean’s 1998 nonfiction bestseller “The Orchid Thief,” Kaufman turned his own writer’s block into the basis for a dizzyingly self-referential and darkly comic fantasia that ultimately earned him - and, in a Kaufmanesque twist, his fictional brother Donald - an Oscar nomination for adapted screenplay. I thought maybe I could do something with this.”Įven when translating someone else’s work, Kaufman can’t help but make it his own, as anyone who has seen “Adaptation” knows. “I thought visually it was interesting, in that it was so claustrophobic and it took place mostly in a car during a snowstorm. Thinking he might have better luck adapting someone else’s material, Kaufman came across Reid’s novel and sparked to it right away. “Emotionally, it had been very frustrating for me.” “The lion’s share of my time over the years was trying to get my own stuff made, specifically a movie called ‘Frank or Francis’ that kept coming close to being made and falling apart,” he says. Time itself becomes unmoored.įor years, Kaufman had been trying in vain to get his unconventional scripts onto the screen, often feeling abandoned by Hollywood in what he calls “the desert in which I existed.” Stymied by the studio system, he eventually turned to fiction his debut novel, the 700-plus page opus “Antkind,” came out in July to strong reviews. The identities of key characters shift unexpectedly and unnervingly. ![]() Long philosophical conversations take odd turns. Along the way, mysterious clues portend some terrible event to come. A young couple (Plemons and Jessie Buckley) drive through a snowstorm to the home of the boyfriend’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis). OK, but what happens in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”? On the surface, not very much - but surfaces, especially in a Kaufman film, are deceiving. “There are genre-y moments in this film, but only to subvert them.” ![]() “Genre stuff, to my mind, is by definition dishonest, because you’re playing with a formula,” he says. ![]() Kaufman, who wrote and directed the picture, has never been a fan of neat genre categories. Perhaps the easiest way to describe “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which debuts Friday on Netflix, is that it’s a Charlie Kaufman film.Īdapted from a 2016 novel by Canadian author Iain Reid, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is a psychological thriller - or maybe it’s a horror film or a surrealistic meditation on life or something else entirely. “A couple drives to the boyfriend’s family farm and …” He trails off. “I’ve been saying it’s a road-trip movie,” the actor says. Actor Jesse Plemons has been having a hard time explaining to people what exactly his new film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” is about - or even really what it is. ![]()
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