Charlie Kaufman - You might not know his name, but you know his movies.  He is the screenwriter behind some of the most unique movies of our time: Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation., Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. You might recognize his name as one of the characters from Adaptation, a surrealist film about his troubles adapting Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief" into a screenplay.

The television turned film writer is finally stepping behind the camera, and we have the details on the story and cast, after the jump.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton and Tilda Swinton are all in negotiations to star in Kaufman's directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman and constant collaborator Spike Jonze will serve as producers.

 

The casting of Philip Seymor Hoffman is possibly the only thing that could make me want to see this movie more.

According to THR:

Hoffman will play a theater director who ambitiously attempts to put on a play by creating a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse. Keener is set to play his first wife, Williams will play his second wife, Morton will appear as his sometime lover, and Swinton will portray Keener's best friend and the dubious mentor to the daughter of Hoffman and Keener's characters.

Hoffman would play Caden, who find out there is something wrong with him after a trip to the dentist. The precise nature of this is unknown. The movie goes into themes such as the nature of family, of home, and of male-female relationships.

A "synecdoche," aside from being a clever play on "Schenectady", where some of the film takes place, is a figure of speech in which a part is used to describe the whole or the whole is used to describe a part. Confused? Me too. One person used the example of what "threads" do for clothes.

Anthony Bregman describes the film as "a massive undertaking of visually elaborate worlds and stunningly complex characters and ideas."

"Ambitious doesn't even begin to describe the sublime and scary head-trip that is Synecdoche, New York," wrote LA Times columnist Jay Fernandez, who had the chance to read the script last year. "[It's] really a wrenching, searching, metaphysical epic that somehow manages to be universal in an extremely personal way. It's about death and sex and the vomit-, poop-, urine- and blood-smeared mess that life becomes physiologically, emotionally and spiritually (Page 1 features a 4-year-old girl having her butt wiped)."

"It reliably contains Kaufman's wondrous visual inventions, complicated characters, idiosyncratic conversations and delightful plot designs, but its collective impact will kick the wind out of you," Jay continued. "Synecdoche will make Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine look like instructional industrial films. No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It's questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious."

Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze was originally set to helm the project, but eventually decided to direct an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are instead.

I can't wait to see what Kaufman will create. If it's half as good as his work behind the typewriter, then we'll definitely be in for a treat.

 

The film is tentatively scheduled for a spring shoot in New York.