STRAIGHT FACE

Speaking of the film’s “counterintuitive” title—a bright quotation from Alexander Pope with only overtones of Sunshine’s warily-relieved darkness—Kaufman says he chose it because it’s “long and hard to remember.”

Is he serious, or sending himself up yet again? It can be hard to tell. One thing Kaufman’s frenetic characters do not share with their creator is his nearly-constant deadpan.

Asked a less-than-incisive question—whether he drew on personal memories for a sequence in which a childlike Carrey is washed in a remembered kitchen fixture—Kaufman replies, “I still bathe in the sink.”

After the formal interviewing is done, as one reporter expresses his adulation for a short film featuring Carrey on Gondry’s recently-released career retrospective DVD—quickly followed by surprise at the fact that Kaufman has not seen the segment himself—the writer volunteers a simple explanation for falling out of the loop.

“I don’t have a television,” he says in all apparent seriousness.

Really? The man who did an early stint writing for Chris Elliott’s groundbreaking sitcom “Get a Life,” not plugged in to the small screen? No, Kaufman reveals with a flashed smile and a clipped word after a moment of confusion. He does have a television, though he wouldn’t say he watches it a lot.

A few minutes later, the same student proclaims that he likes Human Nature better than any of the other films Gondry or Kaufman have worked on, simultaneously asserting that it is most viewers’ least favorite. Both creators frown, and Gondry objects that he thinks plenty of people liked his first film; Kaufman, meanwhile, volunteers that Human Nature is in fact the number one video rental in the country. Met with momentary befuddlement from even Gondry, Kaufman again gives the nod and half-laugh that indicates he is not, apparently, speaking genuinely.

Kaufman and Gondry say they had a similarly ambiguous, sometimes combative—but ultimately profoundly productive—relationship during the making of Sunshine.

“It’s like friends from school, you don’t really choose them,” Gondry offers after a while when asked about how the two work together. He is greeted with laughter.

Even now there are occasional flares of tension between the director and the screenwriter. Mentioning a key scene towards the end of Sunshine, Gondry unintentionally dredges up an on-set clash over how precisely to stage its action. The two turn away from the reporters to banter about the differing ways they thought about pulling it off, and Kaufman still seems somewhat sore that Gondry’s approach won out.

“The scene could have been 100 times better if you hadn’t done that,” he says to the director, adding that his could just as easily have been the wrong choice.

Still, they say this friction can be good for the final product.

“We have good fights,” Kaufman says.

“I beat him up because he’s tiny,” Gondry chimes in.