Human Nature
dir. Michel Gondry
Opens Fri April 12 at the Metro.

Charlie Kaufman represents a genuine rarity: a Hollywood screenwriter whose popularity with audiences and filmmakers alike is a function of his originality. The author of Being John Malkovich spoke to me on the phone and discussed his second film, Human Nature, which stars Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette, and Rhys Ifans, and opens this weekend.

Human Nature and Being John Malkovich both deal with classical archetypes: morality vs. desire, artist vs. compromise, man vs. nature kind of stuff. Are you interested in updating these archetypes?

In some way, I was making fun of them. I think initially one of the things I was interested in was the idea of this pure being out of nature, who comes and teaches the civilized people the truth about what it means to be human. That stuff seems to crop up now and again in movies, and it's always seemed so silly to me. So I think I wanted to make fun of that. But at the same time there are human issues that I'm interested in--issues of isolation and feeling outside, and loneliness, and taking condemnation from a society and turning it on yourself; those are things I'm interested in on a smaller, more personal level.

There seems to be a lot of solipsism going on in your work. Malkovich is loaded with it, and Human Nature, too. I'm thinking in particular of the scene where Tim Robbins thinks he's about to go to heaven, and pokes his head out the door on the right side of the room, and finds himself looking in the door on the left side.

It's interesting, I do think a lot about solipsism. And actually the next movie I'm doing is maybe almost exclusively about that. That image you picked out is one that Michel [Gondry, director of Human Nature] came up with, and maybe he came up with it based on what he saw in the script. It's interesting in light of [my next movie], Adaptation, because that's what it's about: being isolated in your own existence and not having the ability to step outside of that and see the world. Just because it's the nature of existence, not because of any shortcoming necessarily.

It also has a lot of echoes in Hollywood, and the entertainment business.

A lot of my stuff is about Hollywood, maybe in reaction to my experience with movies growing up. [With] this movie Adaptation--which is about my being hired to write a screenplay from a book written by a New Yorker writer--the real question when I'm hired to do something like this is: How can I write this person's work? How can I be this person? It's similar to what I think is in Malkovich maybe, and I guess Human Nature as well. So often, this has come up, in A Beautiful Mind and a million times before, which is Hollywood taking some truth and appropriating it and doing what it wants with it to make money. It's odd to me that that movie... I mean, I guess it was orchestrated to become a "big deal," as they say, but I've seen it a hundred thousand times in movies.

It's interesting when a writer manages to attract the attention of some fragment of an audience--

--and it is a fragment, by the way [laughs].

Right. I mean, it's easy from where I'm sitting, to say that everyone I know saw and loved Being John Malkovich.

I thought that was the case as well, from where I stood. And then you see the box office numbers. It did well; it did fine, but very few people saw it compared to an opening weekend of Panic Room. Our whole run was less than the opening weekend of Panic Room. It felt like everyone saw it because it got so much attention--which was like, from zero to 60 for us.

If you've been wanting to get a film made and it gets not only done, but done well, and gets seen and gets a lot of acclaim, that must be a feeling of great success. But for the industry that you're working in--it's like, well, nice, but no Panic Room.

I feel really successful with [Malkovich]. I don't aspire to write or be involved with blockbusters, and I wouldn't want to write what I would have to write and deal with the sort of demands I would have to deal with. If it happens--if I write something which becomes oddly, enormously successful--it would be interesting and it certainly wouldn't hurt me, but I like the idea of having a small group of people like my stuff [rather] than a mass audience.... Nothing against the masses, but when a band sells 10,000 records, it's cool to know about it.