“Synecdoche,” Empathy and Charlie Kaufman
Posted by Alison Willmore on
The Rumpus has a reprint of Charlie Kaufman’s introduction to “Synecdoche, New York: The Shooting Script,” which was published by Newmarket Press two years ago. In typical Kaufman fashion, it quickly leaps the boundaries of what you’d expect in an intro for such a project and looks on the whole process from above, dealing with Kaufman’s irritation (“I don’t get any money for these books. There’s a screenplay book for each of my produced movies. I think I got one eight-dollar check once. So I’m not motivated and a little pissy.”), his strange request for the editor, all coming around to a really lovely moment of empathy.
It made me think: How many hundreds of people have worked on this film whom I’ve never had a conversation with, whom I don’t know at all, didn’t think it was important to know? There is no periphery, it seems. Periphery is an illusion of individual consciousness. Each of us in our own mind is the center of the universe, and everything falls off in direct relation to its proximity or importance to us. But if you move to the periphery of your own existence, you find it to be the center of someone else’s.
You can find the whole piece here.
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