\n\tCharlie Kaufman is back.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2018s script) and Synecdoche, New York (which he wrote and directed) will debut his latest film \u2014 How to Shoot a Ghost \u2014 Sept. 1 in Venice.<\/p>\n
\n\tGhost is a departure for Kaufman. Rather than one of his delightfully wry, pretzel-logic-tangled ruminations on life and mortality, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI wasn\u2019t even aware of his background in film,\u201d she says via Zoom in a joint interview with Kaufman. \u201cI thought Charlie was a budding novelist.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe pair hit it off and Kaufman incorporated one of Eva\u2019s poems into his 2020 Netflix feature I\u2019m Thinking of Ending Things. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tIt\u2019s never entirely clear, even to the two protagonists, who among them is dead or living. \u201cWe like that idea,\u201d says Eva, \u201cthat you don\u2019t really know if someone is a ghost or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDeath has certainly been a recurring topic of fascination for Kaufman, never more so than in 2008\u2019s 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\u2019s curtain call.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s that sort of saying, \u2018I\u2019ll rest when I\u2019m dead,\u2019 \u201d Kaufman says. \u201cBut I\u2019m not really sure it\u2019s a rest. My sense is that it\u2019s nothing \u2014 not rest. Because rest is something, and it implies consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe characters in How to Shoot a Ghost \u201care dead and they\u2019re still clinging to something,\u201d Kaufman notes. Adds Eva: \u201cMetaphorically speaking, history does have a residue. If you go into a country that was once run by a violent regime, there are vestiges. There\u2019s something there, which is the real ghosts that we encounter.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe film served as New Yorker Kaufman\u2019s introduction to Athens \u2014 \u201ca place I wasn\u2019t familiar with and where I don\u2019t speak the language. It was exciting for me to engage with it that way.\u201d Eva spent her childhood there but now lives in Brooklyn and often finds herself longing to revisit. \u201cSo if I can trick people into making films there, all the better,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd that\u2019s exactly what happened in this case,\u201d adds Kaufman.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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\u2019s 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 \u2014 which Kaufman and Eva eagerly anticipate, with just a little bit of admitted apprehension.<\/p>\n
\n\tAt the end of the day, however, it\u2019s just a film.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOne of the advantages of making short films,\u201d Kaufman says, \u201cis that you can experiment with the form. You don\u2019t have the obligation to make money for the people who financed it, and no one\u2019s expecting that you will.\u201d <\/p>\n