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So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.

Charlie Kaufman

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Charlie Kaufman
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: November 1
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Friends
Relatives
Write
Situations
Character
Limited
Writing
Relationships
Trying
Characters
World
Hear
Sort
Situation
Utilize

More quotes by Charlie Kaufman

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I try to present something that is true so I don't further destroy the world with my contribution to it.
Charlie Kaufman
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Writing is a journey into the unknown.
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I'm trying to tell a story and do it truthfully.
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Every day of your life, you have information that enters your head, and that information informs your understanding of things, or shifts it, or changes it, or deepens it, or confuses you. Every day, every moment of every day - it's like this thing that happens.
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I'm in my mind a lot. I live there.
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You spend most of your time as a director trying to move forward with the movie. It happens on a daily basis, if not more than once a day, that you are struggling with budgetary constraints. Whereas when you're writing, the limitation that you have is your imagination. So it's decidedly non-pragmatic.
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I want to do my own thing, and I'm trying to get closer to realizing that as a filmmaker.
Charlie Kaufman
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I think generally I'm kind of interested in subjective experience, what goes on inside someone's head, that being all they really know of the world.
Charlie Kaufman
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I think you just assume that your memory is just sort of a video playback of your experience, but it's nothing like that at all. It's a complete refabrication of an event and a lot of it is made up, because you're filling in spaces.
Charlie Kaufman
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I do throw out a lot of ideas, and I forget completely about them.
Charlie Kaufman
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As a writer, or as a filmmaker, you have to present yourself, and part of what yourself is is what you're interested in, or what you think is funny, or what you think is sad, or what you think is horrible.
Charlie Kaufman
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I actually think I'm probably more interested in structure than most people who write screenplays, because I think about it.
Charlie Kaufman
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I'm not a celebrity. I'm intentionally and defiantly not a celebrity. I don't have any interest in it. I don't have any talent for it. I keep my personal life out of my public life as cleanly as I can.
Charlie Kaufman
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Failure is a badge of honor. It means you risked failure. And if you don’t risk failure, you’re never going to do anything that’s different from what you’ve already done or what somebody else has done.
Charlie Kaufman
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Story ideas, but it's also musing on stuff that I'm thinking about. This leads me to this and this leads me to this. They're kind of random and haphazard. Often I can't find anything. Somehow, by doing that, even though I don't necessarily refer to them in a specific way, I have some sort of architecture in my head.
Charlie Kaufman
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I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.
Charlie Kaufman
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Before you start production, you have characters you have created without actors in mind, then all of a sudden you've got actors. They bring an enormous amount in creating these characters, and creating the dynamics between the characters that you've written.
Charlie Kaufman
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The only honest and generous thing for me to do is to give people myself. That's all I've got as an artist, so I want to do that in an unflinching way.
Charlie Kaufman
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Directing was a big learning experience for me because I had to deal with every aspect of everything-all this constant decision-making, with people asking you questions at every moment, and you have to have answers for them all.
Charlie Kaufman
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The way I write is very much without kind of a goal. I have something I'm interested in and then I decide I'm going to explore it. I don't know where the characters are going to go, I don't know what the movie is going to do or what the screenplay is going to do. For me, that's the way to keep it alive.
Charlie Kaufman