The day before talking with Marek Eben on talk show "Na plovárně" ("At the Pool"), Charlie Kaufman also met with journalists at a press conference. The questions focussed on such topics as his interest in directing, and the possibility of his performing in a festival trailer (made possible by receiving the Festival President's Award that he is due to accept at the festival's closing ceremony). "I don't love the camera, so I don't think that I would appear in the trailer. But I can write one for somebody," the famous screenwriter remarked.
Kaufman is presenting his film Anomalisa (which this year has received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature Film) at the festival in Karlovy Vary. "Animation is not a genre; it is a form that you can use for anything. If Anomalisa made 150 million dollars, then more animated films for adults would definitely start to be made. But that didn't happen," said Kaufman, who has problems financing his projects despite the fact that his film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind won an Oscar for Screenplay.
Several television pilots didn't work out for him, either. "HBO told me that my series was too complicated and that nobody would watch it," he revealed. And so the creator of Synecdoche, New York and Being John Malkovich makes a living mainly by editing other people's screenplays. He would like to return to animated film in the coming years ("I would like to make an animated horror film – a really terrifying one, not a cute, Tim Burton-style one."). However, it seems he wouldn't say no to directing a superhero action film. "But only if they would give me the freedom to make something eccentric," Kaufman adds.
