Charlie Kaufman is back.
The iconoclast behind such mind-bending films as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which he wrote, earning an Oscar for Sunshine‘s script) and Synecdoche, New York (which he wrote and directed) will debut his latest film — How to Shoot a Ghost — Sept. 1 in Venice.
Ghost is a departure for Kaufman. Rather than one of his delightfully wry, pretzel-logic-tangled ruminations on life and mortality, it’s closer to an abstract art film. The screenplay is by Canadian-Greek poet Eva H.D., whom Kaufman met while working on a novel at the MacDowell Artist Residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
“I wasn’t even aware of his background in film,” she says via Zoom in a joint interview with Kaufman. “I thought Charlie was a budding novelist.”
The pair hit it off and Kaufman incorporated one of Eva’s poems into his 2020 Netflix feature I’m Thinking of Ending Things. They’ve since collaborated on a series of short movies, Ghost being the latest. A kind of Breathless for the afterlife, it follows a recently deceased man and woman who wander aimlessly around the beguiling streets of modern Athens, snapping photos of passersby.
It’s never entirely clear, even to the two protagonists, who among them is dead or living. “We like that idea,” says Eva, “that you don’t really know if someone is a ghost or not.”
Death has certainly been a recurring topic of fascination for Kaufman, never more so than in 2008’s Synecdoche, whose protagonist, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), obsessively replicates New York City inside a vast warehouse in a quixotic attempt to define the human condition and, inevitably, the finality of life’s curtain call.
“There’s that sort of saying, ‘I’ll rest when I’m dead,’ ” Kaufman says. “But I’m not really sure it’s a rest. My sense is that it’s nothing — not rest. Because rest is something, and it implies consciousness.”
The characters in How to Shoot a Ghost “are dead and they’re still clinging to something,” Kaufman notes. Adds Eva: “Metaphorically speaking, history does have a residue. If you go into a country that was once run by a violent regime, there are vestiges. There’s something there, which is the real ghosts that we encounter.”
The film served as New Yorker Kaufman’s introduction to Athens — “a place I wasn’t familiar with and where I don’t speak the language. It was exciting for me to engage with it that way.” Eva spent her childhood there but now lives in Brooklyn and often finds herself longing to revisit. “So if I can trick people into making films there, all the better,” she says. “And that’s exactly what happened in this case,” adds Kaufman.
The next European stop on the How to Shoot a Ghost tour is Venice, arguably the most ghostly city on earth. The scene, therefore, could not be any more perfectly set for the film’s world premiere. Kanopy, the library-based movie streaming service, has joined as producer and distributor of the film and will represent it at the festival. All that awaits is the audience reaction — which Kaufman and Eva eagerly anticipate, with just a little bit of admitted apprehension.
At the end of the day, however, it’s just a film.
“One of the advantages of making short films,” Kaufman says, “is that you can experiment with the form. You don’t have the obligation to make money for the people who financed it, and no one’s expecting that you will.”
This story appeared in the Aug. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.