L-l-l-love the Hard Way

Love ain't easy, and neither was making Eternal Sunshine.

by Sam Adams

If Charlie Kaufman were wearing a necktie, he’d be tugging at it. His dark blue dress shirt is unbuttoned at the neck, but the extra ventilation doesn’t seem to be helping. "Is it hot in here?" he wonders. Interviews, you might gather, are not his favorite thing, especially when most of the seats at the table are occupied by aggressively familiar members of the L.A. press corps. As he suffers through questions, Kaufman pulls at his sleeves, squirms in his seat, and finally says, after everyone else in the room has no doubt thought of it, "God, I’m acting like Charlie."

In truth, there are as many differences as similarities between Kaufman and his Adaptation alter ego; the real Kaufman has more hair, better taste in clothes, and altogether more determination than the onscreen Charlie -- though thankfully less than his opportunistic brother, Donald. The real Kaufman seems to fall somewhere in between Charlie's self-fulfilling failure and Donald's obsession with success. He's had enough of the latter, but it's the former he craves. "I've come to the conclusion that failure is to be sought, not avoided," Kaufman says. "It means that you're trying to do something you don't know how to do, or something that you haven't seen done before. Most of the time when you do that, you're going to fail."

That ought to be good personal advice as well as career counseling; Kaufman shies away from making the connection, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind does it for him. Kaufman isn't the only one who has trouble discussing the movie's subject. After a couple of reporters stumble while asking Jim Carrey questions at his press conference, he seizes the moment: "It's hard to say, isn't it? "This movie's about l-. It's about l-l-l. It's about l-l-l-l-ove."

You don't usually find the makers of a romance stumbling over basic vocabulary, but then Eternal Sunshine is hardly a traditional romance. In a sense, it's a romance in reverse, as Joel (Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet) fight to restore a relationship that has already failed -- so much so that Clementine has had it wiped from her memory, and Joel is in the process of following suit. "It's real love," Carrey says, "where you go, "You are ugly to me sometimes, and I love you.'" For Carrey, whose vulnerabilities surface even in the circus-like atmosphere of a press conference, the movie wasn't about the decision to erase someone you love: It was about being erased.

The film's complicated structure takes the audience inside Joel's mind, drifting through his memories as they're being erased. Though Human Nature, Kaufman's first collaboration with director Michel Gondry, met with mixed reviews and flopped at the box office, the two had no reservations about working together again. (Remember the bit about seeking failure?) But where Human Nature sometimes choked on its own artifice, Eternal Sunshine's bizarre concept is rendered by Gondry in simple, physical terms, with a minimum of effects. He even asked Carrey not to wear makeup, the better to see "the real Jim."

By all accounts, Gondry ran a freewheeling set, where a take might begin normally and end with the actors humming Miles Davis instead of saying their lines. At the same time, Gondry worked to blur the line between the actors and their characters; he kept shooting in between takes, sometimes cuing the actors with a tap on the shoulder instead of a shouted "Action!", sometimes not cuing them at all. For all Gondry's love of visual artifice (expressed with old-school camera tricks rather than digital effects), what he prizes in performers is simplicity.

Gondry, who shot music videos for years before moving into features, noticed time and again that models or extras he'd cast for their personality would lose it as soon as the cameras rolled. "A lot of times, the simple fact of switching a camera on will switch people off," he says. "They believe they have to project an image. When they are themselves, they're just great. But as soon as the camera is on, they become who they're supposed to be. Every time I would say cut, I would see what I was missing." He cast Carrey not for any of his previous roles (which almost worked against him), but after watching him descend a staircase between takes on Bruce Almighty. "That's the Jim I want," Gondry recalls thinking.

Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst, who play supporting roles, agree that Gondry's method inevitably means that more of their off-camera selves went into their Sunshine characters. And if Carrey doesn't exactly say so, it certainly seems to be the case. "Part of doing this role is you have to open up old wounds," he explains. "I also wanted to express a lot of anger and resentment of old hurts past. What ended up happening, and I'm so glad it did, is it became a love letter. I was saved from myself."

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