ISLAND's Rollo Doherty on the ambition of Charlie Kaufman

As a child I was keen to embrace the quirky - appear a little weird even. Loudly informing a carriage of tube travellers “I’m not normal” certainly entertained my mum. Whenever an eagerly anticipated delivery arrived at our home, I apparently showed little interest in the contents, and instead would collect up the packing materials, polystyrene and cardboard and cart them off to my room, along with sellotape and paint, with sometimes bizarre results.

Maybe I had already become a cliché of someone ready to think outside the box, or in my case - about the box. But as a result of these early tendencies, I’ve always been attracted to artists who do things differently. Like many other 12 year olds, I made stop motion films in my bedroom. (Sadly, no copies of The Adventures of Lego Man John survive). Despite my aspirations to be different, I thought there were rules to follow when making film. I would marvel at novel dialogue or soundtrack, use of lenses or light, but I saw each of these variables within an immovable canvas that was film itself. I didn’t have the imagination to see this canvas could be ripped up. But then I came across Charlie Kaufman and he did just that.

The screenwriter seems a shadowy presence despite being at the heart of any film. Of course that doesn’t apply to such icons as Sofia Coppola, the Cohen brothers and Quentin Tarantino, all of whom both write and direct - something that Kaufman would go on to do. Yet Hitchcock said “To make a good film you need three things: the script, the script and the script.” Kaufman’s style makes him impossible to ignore. Spike Jonze took on Kaufman’s script for Being John Malkovich when no one else dared and that put Kaufman on the map. It was Jonze again who directed Kaufman’s later film Adaptation. I’ll only scrape the surface of the story but I’m going to have to include spoilers.

Charlie, a revered screenwriter, is given a book by his agent called The Orchid Thief. She tells him that his next job is to convert the novel into a screenplay. Charlie struggles to find anything in what he calls “a book about flowers” that he is able to adapt effectively for the big screen. He needs an angle. But then something happens, Charlie is hit with an idea. He begins to write himself into his own script. Charlie Kaufman becomes his script’s central character, converting the screenplay into a chronicle of the very struggles he is going through while attempting to write. As this idea develops we see that what we are watching is the film we are seeing him write.

Fact is muddled with fiction, and Kaufman himself, balding and sweating, is at the centre of the melee. And it’s confusing, but at the same time brilliant. Not an easy watch but a film to marvel at for its inventiveness. In one scene a dejected Kaufman reluctantly attends screen writing conference, and as we listen to the voiceover of his pained inner thoughts, they're interrupted by the conference speaker: “and God help you if you use voiceover in your work”. He's playing with the entire medium of scriptwriting, finding a dimension to storytelling that's genius, but also mocks itself. And it’s the self-deprecation of Kaufman that really provides the film’s flavour. When the idea to write himself into the script comes midway through the film, he admits “'it's self indulgent, it's narcissistic, it's solipsistic”.

I’m in awe, particularly as Kaufman really was asked by his agent to turn a book about flowers in to a film, he really did struggle and this was the result...to be creative under pressure is one thing, but the ability to transcend a whole craft, under the same pressure, is surely another. Turning his own dilemma into ammunition, this was Kaufman's response to falling into writer's block.

As a musician, working against deadlines, I’ve known this stress, and hope we’ve managed as a band to turn pressure into the right kind of energy when given very tight deadlines. Our song “Spotless Mind” is my ode to Kaufman but really there's no way I can thank him enough for showing me that there’s no limit, there’s no canvas. His message is one I try to pursue in life too: every creative must appreciate themselves, they are different. So perhaps we should all be telling the tube travellers we’re not normal - well, that's what I like to think. In his own words: “I can't tell anyone how to write a screenplay, because the truth is that anything of value that you might do comes from you. 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 be moved.” And that's good enough for me.