‘How To Shoot A Ghost’: Director Charlie Kaufman & Writer Eva H.D. on Athens, Poetry & Jessie Buckley In Their New Short Film [Interview]

Charlie Kaufman became the talk of the film industry at the turn of the millennium with screenplays for “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” that probed the nebulously defined territory of dreams. As a director, he’s now moved on to mulling over death.

His new short film, “How to Shoot a Ghost,” follows the wanderings of Anthi (Jessie Buckley) and Rateb (Josef Akiki) through the city of Athens. Their liminal existence as newly-dead individuals highlights a similar quality in the Grecian capital surrounding them, which is similarly unmoored from time as history overlaps and intersects with the present. All the while, poetic narration from the short’s writer, Eva H.D., forms an aural collage when blended with the ghosts’ conversational reflections on their past.

Kaufman devotees might be waiting with bated breath for the director to resume his next feature effort, “Later the War,” following a production shutdown earlier this year. (The scorn was evident in his voice when he made a passing reference to the “current climate” of cinema in our chat.) But in the meantime, fans can rest assured that this beloved artist continues to push his filmmaking form in new and exciting directions here. “How to Shoot a Ghost” marks Kaufman’s second short working with writer Eva H.D., following 2023’s “Jackals & Fireflies,” and it will be fascinating to see how he incorporates the poetic stylings from their collaboration into his prosaic aesthetic.

I spoke with Kaufman and H.D. at the Venice Film Festival, where “How to Shoot a Ghost” celebrated its world premiere. Our conversation covered how they brought the concept from page to screen, why a short film was the right medium to evoke their ideas, and what the true perspective of death might look like.

I know this is not your first collaboration, so how did this one come about?

Eva H.D.: How did it come about, Charlie?

Charlie Kaufman: Well, we had made the other film, and then we talked about doing something else. Eva was in Athens, and she’s got a history there, so we talked about that.

EHD: I was doing a residency at a queer arts collective in Athens called Lala. They’re great, if you ever go there. They do obscure film nights curated by one of their members, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of all the obscure films from all time. I was there and thought there was a good chance to write a play about Athens.

I just went for the first time two years ago for a wedding!

EHD: Did you recognize stuff? What did it make you feel like?

I felt similarly to how the film evokes this sense of suspended time, of the living and the dead walking amongst each other. You see all these overlapping histories and feel the sense that you are part of a place that extends far past you and beyond you.

EHD: That was eloquent. Put it on a T-shirt!

Charlie, I know Eva is the only writer besides yourself whose work you’ve ever directed. What is it you find about her writing that lends itself so much to your style?

CK: I love her writing. I find it very moving. That’s what – [throat catches] I’m choking up. That’s what poetry should do, or I think it should do.

EHD: Choke you? Poetry is here to choke you?

You have both worked across different media, so what is it that you like about short films? Why was it the right fit for “How to Shoot a Ghost?”

CK: Well, they’re easier to get the money together for…

EHD: Which is liberating!

CK: It doesn’t have the same narrative convention requirements that features have. For me, it’s like an opportunity to explore different ways of doing things. I wanted to figure out if I could interact visually with poetry as a filmmaker. So that was an opportunity, both the films we did, was an opportunity for me to try to do that. I like trying to do things I don’t know how to do, which is almost everything! That’s what I think the difference is. You couldn’t do this in a feature, obviously. Not in the current climate.

Did these films expand on the way that you had incorporated Eva’s poetry into “I’m Thinking of Ending Things?”

CK: That was a big challenge. That was something to figure out, and I was very worried about whether or not that was gonna work. How to shoot it and who would say it. That was the audition for that role, somebody reciting that poem. That’s why Jessie Buckley got the part, because she did so beautifully in the audition. I had an introduction to Eva; we were at the same arts residency, and I asked her if I could use that poem. This is an extension in the sense that was just someone talking in the car, but this is more like finding images that support the poem.

EHD: Or offset and juxtapose.

CK: Either way, I was trying to figure out how to do that. I didn’t know how to do that, and I was interested in learning.

What did “How to Shoot a Ghost” look like on the page?

EHD: Very confusing to people, apparently, because I was not familiar with a number of the format conventions of screenwriting and how you indicate [things] to people. It looked from a distance like a script, but when you read it more closely, maybe it looks like a script on acid or something.

CK: It was more dense. It was a lot more words.

EHD: I would put things in square parentheses, which I then learned is not custom[ary] in screenwriting, to evoke imagery that I know you will find in Athens. But you can’t tell that exactly to a street photographer because that takes all the joy out of it. But I would say something like “a scene in this area involving this type of person you will see.” It’s not something you can recreate with props and extras.

CK: Eva would write something that was evocative of a mood, and people would try to figure out how to recreate it when it really was just a suggestion. Both films we did together, we wanted to incorporate street photography, which obviously you cannot plan ahead for. It’s what’s happening that you happen to catch.

EHD: But there are great moments like the guy in the yellow Speedo…

CK: That was not in the script.

EHD: I didn’t write him in, but I did write in things that are wild and typical of Athens. I wrote an extra poem and gave it to Giorgos Koutsaliaris [the second unit director of photography] so he would know the type of things to look for. I think in the original script, there was something about a priest exhaling into the road. Because, often on the streets in Athens, you see these wildly dressed Orthodox priests doing curious things. We didn’t get one of those; we got a guy in a yellow Speedo instead. It was more abstract.

CK: [deadpans] It could have been a priest out of uniform.

Were the visuals obvious on the page, or was that something that you were working with your DP, Michał Dymek, and the crew to figure out?

CK: There were allusions and ideas of things that we were looking for, so those were not obvious on the page. Then, the stuff that was scripted, we had to find locations for them. Once we found locations for those things, we had to figure out how to choreograph it. We didn’t know ahead of time what those locations were going to be. There were certain places that Eva wanted or had written about that we couldn’t get to. We had to reimagine them, and we did that when we scouted.

In many ways, the actors on-screen are giving silent film performances. On a practical level, how do you direct that?

CK: I don’t know how to answer that. I would say that, practically, it helped to have really good actors.

EHD: We also had a lot of conversations with them about backstory. We had a lot of conversations about who these people were and what they had done outside of [the film]. So when Jessie’s character is fighting with her father, she has to know more than you know to get the feeling of that all-out brawl. We had a whole great conversation with Josef about his character. Those two actors are very good writers. Jessie Buckley is an excellent writer, actually, and they write very poetically. He wrote a little paragraph about his mother and who he felt she was and how she had been in her life.

That’s not fair. She can’t be a good writer and a good actress, too.

CK: And an amazing singer.

EHD: But she’s a distinctive writer, which is maybe even more impressive than her singing.

How did the narration interact with the visuals in the production process? Were those recorded before or after the cameras rolled?

CK: They were pre-recorded, and then they were recorded again afterwards. We had them ahead of time, so we knew what it was going to feel like. Then, based on stuff we discovered and changes we made, we had certain things re-recorded afterwards.

So is what we hear in the film a mixture of both sessions?

CK: Correct.

There’s a mention of the plague in the film. Is that a direct allusion to COVID?

EHD: It’s nice if you can think that it is, because that’s an obvious one. Thucydides, the writer that the character is translating, is speaking about the plague of 430 BCE in Athens, but it certainly invites comparisons to later plagues and our recent experience of COVID. There are a lot of really heart-wrenching lines in that text where he’s talking about the struggle that people are having between getting infected and leaving their fellow man to suffer alone. This was culturally very impermissible back then, so people would cluster together when they were not supposed to, which they were slightly less aware of. Thucydides had the plague himself, but he survived.

In terms of the plague that we all survived, was that something in the back of your head that made exploring death more poignant?

EHD: That some of us survived! I think probably having that coming off of that period makes certain passages more resonant. I knew a lot of people died during the pandemic, and most, if not all, of them did not die of COVID. They had diseases they couldn’t get treated because hospitals were flooded with COVID patients. There were so many different ways to die during that time.

Charlie, I was revisiting the BAFTA lecture that you gave and thinking about how you talked about the nature of perspective as the “misrepresentation of an experience.” In this short film, where we’re seeing characters from the vantage point of death, do you think that still holds true?

CK: I don’t think perspective is a misrepresentation. I think perspective is the only representation that a person can have. Everything that you experience is filtered through your brain and your past. There is no objective world that I’m aware of. Whatever it would be, it certainly wouldn’t be this [gesturing at room]. This is clearly my perspective. I don’t have your perspective or anything outside of this room right now.

EHD: Do you think death might be a more all-encompassing perspective?

CK: My suspicion is that death is no perspective, but I think every perspective is a function of your sensory organs and how your brain processes stuff. I don’t know what it would be after.

EHD: There’s that Jack Gilbert poem where the character says, “‘Perspective,’ he would mutter, going to bed.” That’s a good line.

CK: I guess I would need to know the rest of that poem. Is it bad what I said? I just don’t know how else to experience the world. I can think about it a lot: What would a ghost be like? Why would a ghost see? Seeing is a function of your eyeballs interacting with the part of your brain that can interpret that. If you don’t have any of those things, the eyeballs or the brain, then what would the world look like … if it would look like anything? I don’t know how to imagine that. What does it look like to look at the world from every conceivable angle, inside and outside?

EHD: It’s either black or pure white.

I saw in the credits that this was listed as “a Kanopy original” — what does their support for the project look like?

CK: Well, they’ll be able to watch it on Kanopy, and that was their involvement is for educational showings of it through libraries and universities. Perhaps there’ll be another streaming service; we don’t know. That’s what we’re hoping for.

“How to Shoot a Ghost” had its world premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.