By Iain Blair

Got back to L.A. and the first film I saw, Synecdoche, New York, immediately plunged me headfirst into the weird, wacky world of writer Charlie Kaufman, who first grabbed people’s attention a decade ago with his inspired, surreal script for Being John Malkovich, which came to life in the equally inspired hands of director Spike Jonze.

Since then, Kaufman has happily continued dancing to the beat of his own drum with such offbeat films as Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation  and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Now comes Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s latest script which also marks his directorial debut. It tells the funny, moving and very convoluted story of obsessive theatre director Caden Cotard  (Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose life collapses when his marriage to his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) disintegrates and she moves to Germany with their only daughter, and deals with everything from death to illness, gross bodily fluids, despair, heartbreak and bad sex  - but always with a twinkle in the eye.

I met Kaufman to discuss his directorial debut and he was quick to defend the film which, naturally, has confused a lot of critics. “I think the movie is funny,” says Kaufman, “but it’s funny in a weird way. Hopefully the movie will work on a lot of levels, and people can read different things from it depending on who they are.” Not so funny for Kaufman is the current state of indie film. When I asked him about it, he didn’t mince words. “It’s a total disaster! It’s a REALLY bad time and they can’t get audiences, so no one wants to finance them, so they do fake indie stuff. And all the companies with the big studio set up to do indies are now folding. By the time we were ready to sell this, eight of the 12 companies that do this type of movie had gone out of business – in one year! It’s scary and very sad.”

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