The heckling that convinced Charlie Kaufman to stop reading reviews: “It’s weird to absorb all that weirdness”

Posted On October 3, 2024October 3, 2024

It takes a bold creative to go out of their way and actively read reviews, reactions, and responses to their latest work, and there’s a reason why so many actors and filmmakers have sworn off it. Charlie Kaufman did eventually, but only when the final straw broke the camel’s back.

Having won an Academy Award for scripting Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and scooped additional nominations for the mind-bending classic Being John Malkovich and the semi-fictionalised existentialism of Adaptation, Kaufman was the idiosyncratic darling of independent cinema in the early years of the 21st century.

Nobody wrote stories the way he was writing them, with his habit of blending surrealism with the fantastical and finding unusual avenues to explore the concepts of identity, mortality, morality, and what it means to be alive winning him a legion of fans. Kaufman-esque quickly became a label, and it wasn’t one that everybody enjoyed trying to read from.

By his own admission, Kaufman became too wrapped up in his own hype, which negatively impacted his career when his feature-length directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, and stop-motion psychological dramedy Anomalisa cratered at the box office, knocking the filmmaker down a peg or two in the process.

Anyone can find reading what others say damaging, especially when it’s a project they hold close to their heart. Kaufman admitted he was one of those hardy souls for a while, but there came a point when he decided it was no longer in his best interests to try to gauge the consensus after being accosted for his craft.

“I’ve stopped,” he told The Guardian. “I tend to not only read reviews but also every little stupid thing online. It’s a very bad idea, and there’s a lot of angry people in the world. And it’s weird to absorb all that weirdness.” Synecdoche, New York was the tipping point, with one particularly befuddled heckler taking serious issue with the way the narrative was crafted.

“I was, like, what in the world would motivate someone to shout, ‘Rubbish’? I speculated it might be the same guy who asked later on, ‘I’ve noticed that your movies don’t have any structure, and I’m wondering if you are comfortable with your movies not having any structure or whether you’d rather they had structure,’” he explained. “He said ‘structure’ three times.”

The unidentified verbal assailant wouldn’t be the first person to be left scratching their heads at Kaufman’s unconventional approach to telling a story on the silver screen, but they were forceful enough in their criticisms that his structural integrity – or lack thereof – taking a pounding in a film decried as ‘rubbish’ was enough to alter the writer and director’s mindset permanently.

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