Synecdoche, New York
Short description
Caden Cotard is a theatre director in Schenectady, New York, whose life comes apart on several fronts at once. His marriage ends when his wife leaves for Berlin with their daughter, a new relationship fails to take hold, and he is troubled by a series of health problems that seem to affect his nervous system. Convinced he should not waste what time he has, he gathers a company of actors and takes over a large empty building in New York, where he sets about constructing a life-size replica of the city and asks the performers to live out fictional lives inside it.
Synecdoche, New York is the first film directed by Charlie Kaufman, who also wrote the screenplay; Anthony Bregman and Spike Jonze produced alongside him. Philip Seymour Hoffman leads the cast as Caden, with Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest among the principal players. The production had a budget of 20 million dollars and took about 4 million dollars worldwide.
On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.5 from roughly 104,000 votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 7.5, from far fewer votes. A critics' rating of 7.1 from 193 reviews places it somewhat below the audience scores on both platforms. Kaufman went on to direct Anomalisa, I'm Thinking of Ending Things and How to Shoot a Ghost.
What's left behind the scenes
- Among the residents of the house where Adele lives, there is someone named Capgras. There is a psychopathological disorder called "Capgras delusion," in which the patient is convinced that someone in their close circle (husband, wife, parents, etc.) has been replaced by a doppelganger, or when the patient mistakes strangers for acquaintances or relatives. The patient may also claim that their bad deeds were actually committed by their double.
- At the beginning of the film, the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014) reads the newspaper at breakfast and says: "Harold Pinter is dead. Oh no, he's being awarded the Nobel Prize." This is a reference to the incident when the British news channel Sky News mistakenly announced Pinter's death in a hurry, when in reality he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. (Harold Pinter, 1930-2008 – English playwright, poet, director, actor, and public figure.)
- The surname of the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman is Kotar. This is a reference to Cotard's syndrome, a psychopathological syndrome combining anxious depression, depersonalization, derealization, and Cotard's delusion. Cotard's delusion is a nihilistic-hypochondriacal depressive delusion with fantastic content and ideas of grandeur and negation.
- According to director Charlie Kaufman, Christopher Evan Welch was cast in the film at the very last moment, leaving him with less than a day to prepare for the role.
- Initially, Spike Jonze was supposed to direct the film, but he preferred to work on "Where the Wild Things Are" (2009).
- Applying tattoos to Robin Weigert's body, as required for the role, took 20 hours.
- The "Merriam-Webster" dictionary gives the following definition of "synecdoche": A figure in stylistics in which a part is a definition of the whole (for example, "ate a whole plate" means "ate the soup that was in the plate", and not the ceramic plate itself), the whole is a part ("the client went picky"), the replacement of a genitive structure with an elliptical one ("100 head of cattle"), elliptical instead of genitive ("head" instead of "a person thinking with its help"), or the name of the material instead of the thing made from it ("Boxes shine, the stalls and chairs – everything is seething"). The latter is considered metonymy in Russian.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
