Being Charlie Kaufman

The cult screenwriter relives his big breakthrough – and offers a few writing tips for the Guardian.

From the piece...

I wrote Being John Malkovich while I was waiting for [the next sitcom] hiring season. My idea was that I would write a script and use it to get work. I had this idea that someone finds a portal into someone's head, and I had another idea that somebody has a story about someone having an affair with a co-worker. And neither one was going anywhere, so I just decided to combine them.

It got a really positive response. I started to get a little known. People would read it and tell me how funny it was, invite me for meetings, tell me nobody would ever make the movie. I had maybe 15 meetings like that, so I wasn't really expecting it to get made. Then it got to Spike Jonze, and he was in a position to get a movie made. I didn't really expect it to be anything. I don't think Spike did either. I remember it going to the Venice film festival, which was the first exposure it had. I wasn't invited, but they went: Spike and Cameron Diaz and Catherine Keener. I just got a phone call saying that it was this big thing, and then all these articles got written about it. It was exciting.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.