Quote

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.

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
Like
Aware
Exactly
Powerful
Often
Dream
Going
Something
Intuitively
Things
Consciously

More quotes by 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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I think that people create the world that they live in. Your existence is very subjective, and you tell stories and organize the world outside of you into these stories to help you understand it.
Charlie Kaufman
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Clementine: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon. Joel: I know. Clementine: What do we do? Joel: Enjoy it.
Charlie Kaufman
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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.
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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Seriously, I don't consider myself a writer. I don't think I have writing talent. But I will continue to do it.
Charlie Kaufman
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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.
Charlie Kaufman
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I'm old enough, by a long shot, to remember going to the library and spending days researching. If I was looking for a line from a poem or something else I needed, that would be the trip I would have to take.
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.
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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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.
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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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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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.
Charlie Kaufman
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Yeah, once we decided to use that replacement animation, and the seams are a function of that animation, and other movies paint those out, we decided we wanted to keep the presence of the animation and the type of animation that it was rather than make it look polished. It created a kind of vulnerability, I think.
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.
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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And so not only do you have to make that work, you can't really start putting the thing together in any form because some of the shots are very short and obviously many of them take so long, you're waiting months and months and months before you can see if it's going to be working emotionally.
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
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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