No Intention

“The subject is very serious. It’s ever-present and I think it’s obviously everybody’s life and everybody’s experience: Everybody deals with the continuum of getting older and death and the regret that comes with more and more life passing by…It’s a person’s life, and it takes it to the end, and all that comes with that. It doesn’t have a happy ending, but I don’t know if it has a sad ending, either. It’s a curious ending, and there are things to think about, and there are things that happen toward the end of the movie that are odd and, I think, raise questions. Questions about what it means to be an individual, or what it means to be old or what it means to lose yourself or find a connection or all those things that are part of a person’s life. You don’t necessarily have to come out of it feeling devastated. It wasn’t my intention. I really had no intention at all.”

~ Charlie Kaufman, talking about his new film, Synecdoche, New York, in Paste Magazine (Nov. 2008)