Daily Inspiration Quote by Milos Forman

There is a sly humility in Forman calling Andy Kaufman and his orbit "other characters", as if the director himself were just another hired hand drifting through someone else's bit. It frames the work of making Man on the Moon not as a production ordeal or an auteurist conquest, but as a prolonged hangout with a creature who treated reality like a prop. The line turns two years of filmmaking - a famously logistical, compromise-heavy grind - into an act of chosen intimacy. That phrasing matters: Forman isn't praising a performance, he's praising the privilege of proximity.

The subtext is that Kaufman can't be captured cleanly on screen; you can only live near him and let the strangeness leak into the process. By leaning on "company", Forman hints that the set itself had to become a kind of Kaufman-esque environment, where sincerity and prank, art and harassment, were constantly swapping clothes. It's also a gentle defense of the chaos that surrounded Jim Carrey's method immersion. If everyone was acting, then the discomfort, the confusion, even the resentment become part of the texture rather than collateral damage.

Context sharpens it further. Forman, a Czech New Wave director shaped by state absurdities and systems of control, had always been drawn to outsiders who expose how performative institutions are (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus). Kaufman is that impulse in pure form: a man who made the audience's need to categorize him the real punchline. Forman's intent reads like admiration with a wink - less "I directed a biopic" than "I survived a long joke, and it was worth it."