Charlie Kaufman, the director behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Human Nature (2001) and Being John Malkovich (1999), is finally returning to genre filmmaking with a new short, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Titled How to Shoot a Ghost, the movie is set to premier September 1st in Venice, Italy.
As THR notes, “rather than one of his delightfully wry, pretzel-logic-tangled ruminations on life and mortality,” (ie, Synecdoche, New York (2008), Anomalisa (2015), I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), etc.) Kaufman’s new short is diegetically about ghosts, and therefore, very much in this publication’s wheelhouse.
Described as “a kind of Breathless for the afterlife,” the short’s plot follows “a recently deceased man and woman who wander aimlessly around the beguiling streets of modern Athens, Greece snapping photos of passersby. It’s never entirely clear, even to the two protagonists, who among them is dead or living,” THR writes.
Notably, Kaufman’s new short is co-written by Canadian-Greek poet Eva H.D., whom the director met “while working on a novel at the MacDowell Artist Residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire.” Amusingly, Eva says that she “wasn’t even aware of [Kaufman’s] background in film,” and assumed he was merely “a budding novelist,” based on his appearance and demeanor, according to THR. Having spent much of her childhood in Athens, Eva makes a good case for the city as the perfect place to tell the tale of two ghostly tourists beyond mere set dressing. “Metaphorically speaking,” she tells THR, “history does have a residue. If you go into a country that was once run by a violent regime, there are vestiges. There’s something there, which is the real ghosts that we encounter.”
Kaufman, who told THR he was not familiar with Greece, said he found Athens “exciting for [him] to engage with it that way.” And Kaufman being Kaufman, he gives his take on whether there is, in fact, life after death: “There’s that sort of saying, ‘I’ll rest when I’m dead.’ But I’m not really sure it’s a rest. My sense is that it’s nothing — not rest. Because rest is something, and it implies consciousness.”
If you’re curious to see Kaufman’s latest, library-streaming service Kanopy has joined as producer, so the short could be made available to stream after its limited European engagement. Or perhaps, as Kaufman believes, the work will merely pass into oblivion.