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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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Charlie Kaufman
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: November 1
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Based
Experience
Another
Everything
Way
Think
Thinking
World

More quotes by 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 feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.
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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You are what you love. Not what loves you.
Charlie Kaufman
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There are things that aren't represented in movies that are a big part of everyone's life. This is a movie about health and about the body.
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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I don't write genre stuff in any form. I'm not interested in it. I always try to do the opposite of that.
Charlie Kaufman
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I want to create situations that give people something to think about.
Charlie Kaufman
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I tend to not only read reviews, but also every little stupid thing online. It's a very bad idea, and there's a lot of angry people in the world. And it's weird to absorb all that weirdness.
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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If I were doing somebody else's script or I adapted a book by Philip Roth, on set there could be a million different interpretations of the material and people could argue with me. Certainly on Synecdoche, New York we had discussions and arguments, but I felt like I had authority because I'm a writer.
Charlie Kaufman
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I like titles that are a little difficult, because it's kind of counterintuitive.
Charlie Kaufman
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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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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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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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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.
Charlie Kaufman
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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.
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 have a tendency to hire people who tend to be unattractive to the studios. Maybe this is a bad idea.
Charlie Kaufman
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I do like escapism. I like going to the movies on a Friday night and seeing something fun.
Charlie Kaufman