There’s nothing confusing about Charlie Kaufman’s opinion of Hollywood and AI
The Oscar-winning screenwriter also proclaimed “garbage” as the only thing that makes money
Photo: Matej Divizna
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.”