Also this issue:

Let's Waltz Again
The Last Waltz hits theaters one more time.
-Sam Adams

Workingman's Dead
An unemployed man deceives his family in the haunting Time Out.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks

new

continuing

April 18-24, 2002

movies

Hair Apparent

monkey man: Rhys Ifans goes ape.

Human Nature’s scruffy scribe and downy director talk about making their comedy of hair-ors.

by Sam Adams

“I wanted to write something about hair,” explains Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman ducks personal questions from our cozy little roundtable (although one persistent fellow does manage to coax the hirsute humorist to reveal that he’s Jewish) -- in fact, he disdains any disclosure of personal information whatsoever; the “interview” with Kaufman in the back of Human Nature’s published screenplay is, it turns out, actually a barely modified interview with Paul Thomas Anderson (complete with photo), with the name of Anderson’s then-paramour Fiona Apple replaced with that of Kaufman’s presumably never-paramour Mercedes Ruehl.

The hair thing, though; that he'll give up. "I wanted to make fun of those movies about idealized people who have been raised in nature, the myth of purity, to have fun with that. And I wanted to write something about a feral man. And also something about hair interested me. I think it's fascinating that it is so repulsive to people, and it's so natural. Especially for women, but for men as well -- your body has to be hairless and shaved. It's obvious that's an acculturated thing."

For Human Nature, the Being John Malkovich scribe teamed again with a director whose only previous experience was in music video: Frenchman Michel Gondry, whose sleek appearance presents a marked contrast to Kaufman's shaggy frame. "In certain civilizations, I would have to wear a moustache," admits the smooth-skinned Gaul, "but I can't. I have skin like a fish. But it doesn't stop me -- I don't have to transform myself to go out in the street. If I was a woman with too many hairs, I would have to shave it. Our movie is a little bit about that."

Well, yeah, a little bit, considering that the film's main character is a woman with a genetic condition that causes her to grow hair all over her body. (Patricia Arquette spent up to six hours a day having tufts of human hair glued to her body.) It's also a little bit about the clash between new and old technologies, which fits Gondry's style perfectly. Following in the tradition of Meliès, Gondry is both a traditionalist and a technophile -- like his videos, Human Nature is full of special effects, but some are created with techniques that go back practically as far as cinema itself. (His clip for Cibo Matto's "Sugar Water" is simply an elaborately choreographed three-minute shot run in different directions on each side of a split screen, the action of each side overlapping and commenting on the other.) "I like the cutting-edge technology," Gondry explains, "and I try to find it in any time. It's like when you're listening to some old jazz music: You can listen to something that is very conventional, but if I play Fats Waller or Duke Ellington, I find it very modern. I try to understand even in something which is from the past what was modern at the time, and why it was modern. What is bad is to now use modern technology to do something that you could do without it. When I use digital, it is to do something that couldn't be done with the camera."