There’s nothing confusing about Charlie Kaufman’s opinion of Hollywood and AI

Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman doesn’t always produce the most immediately coherent work. His brain-scrambling scripts for Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, and I’m Thinking Of Ending Things often leave viewers wondering, “What the hell did I just watch?” It’s part of his charm because he is a human being with a perspective and a way of doing things that make his writing his own. So it is no surprise that the striking screenwriter doesn’t have many nice things to say about Hollywood or its proposed use of generative A.I.

Speaking at the Sarajevo Film Festival, per Deadline, the writer was at his most optimistic, stringing together phrase after phrase of rage against the machines threatening his well-being. He warned attendees that once algorithms start producing scripts, “there’s no going back” and mused how “fascinating” it is that “the only thing that makes money is garbage.”

“[Garbage] makes a fortune, and that’s the bottom line,” Kaufman said. “It’s very seductive to the studios but also to the people who engage and become the makers of that garbage, especially if they’re lauded for the garbage because they don’t have to look inward or think long about what they’re doing.”

However, it wasn’t just the machines churning out garbage that caught his ire, but also the writers who have “been trained to eat and make the garbage, too.”

“As long as they are in that arena making that shit, then you might as well have A.I. do it,” he said.

So why doesn’t Kaufman think that a screenplay generator can produce anything good? “A.I. can’t create a moment of humanity,” he said. “As long as people are doing it and there’s that struggle, then there’s always a chance that something will come out of it that will be worth something to human beings.”

Though it wasn’t just writers and apps that were pissing Kaufman off, he also spread the love toward the moviegoing public, who can’t “see past the cynical sales pitch” even though the pitch “suggests they are being fed something of value, they’re not.”

“The diet is so corrupted and has been for so long. It’s like if you eat shit all your life, you want shit. If you eat processed food, you crave it. And you wouldn’t if you hadn’t been fed it all your life. That’s what the movie machine does, and I find it really offensive. It makes me angry.”

At long last, Charlie Kaufman and Zachary Levi are aligned on something. Over the weekend, Levi told the crowd at Chicago Fan Expo, “I personally feel like the amount of content that comes out of Hollywood that is garbage—they don’t care enough to actually make it great for you guys. They don’t.”

If Levi really wants to rile up the crowd next time, maybe he should try saying, “It’s like if you eat shit all your life, you want shit.”