Charlie Kaufman to make directorial debut at Cannes

Charlie Kaufman will make his directorial debut on Friday when his film Synecdoche, New York premieres at the Cannes Film Festival.

Kaufman, the celebrated scribe behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malcovich and Adaptation, originally wrote the Synecdoche, New York screenplay for director Spike Jonze. When Jonze backed out because of scheduling conflicts with Where the Wild Things Are, Kaufman decided to climb into the director’s chair himself. And if that’s not intriguing enough, Eternal Sunshine composer Jon Brion (I Heart Huckabees, Magnolia) reunited with Kaufman to score the film.

The film boasts a stellar cast, and a plot that’s best described in its official Cannes press materials:

“Theater director Caden Cotard's (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) life in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his body's autonomic functions. Worried about the transience of his life, he moves his theater company to a warehouse in New York City. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside.”