Charlie
Kaufman: I
don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound
life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcome obstacles to
succeed in the end. The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that, it just
isn't.
----------
Charlie
Kaufman: [voice-over]
I'm pathetic, I'm a loser. I have failed, I am panicked. I've sold out, I am worthless,
I... What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing here? Fuck. It is
my weakness, my ultimate lack of conviction that brings me here. Easy answers
used to shortcut yourself to success. And here I am because my jump into the abysmal
well - isn't that just a risk one takes when attempting something new? I should
leave here right now. I'll start over. I need to face this project head on and...
Robert McKee: ...and God help you if you use
voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing.
Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.
----------
[At
a seminar, Charlie Kaufman has asked McKee for advice on his new screenplay in
which 'nothing much happens'] Robert McKee:
Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered
every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in
the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day,
someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People
find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten
to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays
his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my
friend, don't know crap about life. And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious
hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it. I don't have any bloody use
for it. Charlie Kaufman: Ok, thank you.
-----------
John
Laroche: Then
one morning, I woke up and said, "Fuck fish." I renounce fish, I will
never set foot in that ocean again. And there hasn't been a time where I have
stuck so much as a toe back in that ocean. Susan Orlean:
But why? John Laroche: Done with fish.
