Quote

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
Trying
Characters
World
Hear
Sort
Situation
Utilize
Friends
Relatives
Write
Situations
Character
Limited
Writing
Relationships

More quotes by Charlie Kaufman

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I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.
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The way I work is not the way that you work, and the whole point of any creative act is that. What I have to offer is me, what you have to offer is you, and if you offer yourself with authenticity and generosity I will be moved.
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Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true.
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I try to make things interesting and thought-provoking.
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There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due.
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There really is only one ending to any story. Human life ends in death. Until then, it keeps going and gets complicated and there's loss. Everything involves loss every relationship ends in one way or another.
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We try to organize the world, which isn't organized the way our brains want to organize it. We tell stories about the people in our lives, we project ideas onto them. We project relationships with people, we make our lives into stories. I don't think we can avoid doing that.
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Seriously, I don't consider myself a writer. I don't think I have writing talent. But I will continue to do it.
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I do a lot of things intuitively. I'm not often consciously aware of what I'm doing. It's like in a dream: There's something going on that's powerful but you don't know exactly why.
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There is so much crap in the world, both in show and other businesses, that I try to be vulnerable myself, in the hopes that there is some truth I can get to, that makes people feel less alone in the world.
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I'm in my mind a lot. I live there.
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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.
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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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I can talk endlessly about characters, or why someone did this or that, and what that dynamic and interaction is. I really love it, and I think that actors really respond positively to the fact that I like to talk about that stuff, because I'm not sure that all directors do.
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I think everything I do is based on my experience in the world in one way or another.
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.
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When I'm writing a script, before I can write dialogue or anything, I have two or three hundred pages of notes, which takes me a year. So, it's not like what happens next. I've got things that I'm thinking about but I don't settle on them. And if I try to write dialogue before then, I can't. It's just garbage.
Charlie Kaufman
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If you create something that is asking for people to respond as they're going to respond, you have to allow them to respond as they're going to respond. Some of the people are going to be uninterested and some people are going to be mad for some reason, which is their business. That's just the way the world is.
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I'm not working on anything. I was trying to write something new . . . I guess the goal for me now, at least at this point, is to try to direct again.
Charlie Kaufman
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I think there are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. We romanticize everything about people in movies. One of the things I don't like in movies is that people feel alone with their bodily functions in the real world, as if people in the movies don't do these things.
Charlie Kaufman