"I read, therefore I'm interested in writers"
About this Quote
Kaufman’s line is a sly remix of Descartes: swap “I think” for “I read,” and you get a credo that’s less about proving existence than declaring allegiance. Coming from a director - a profession stereotyped as visual, managerial, even auteur-mythologized - it’s a quiet insistence that cinema starts on the page, in the mind, in the private act of absorbing someone else’s voice.
The punch is in the second half: “therefore I’m interested in writers.” Not “books,” not “stories,” but writers: the people, the sensibilities, the stubborn fingerprints behind the sentences. The subtext is a rebuttal to an industry where writers are often treated like replaceable parts in a machine built to flatter directors and stars. Kaufman positions himself as a collaborator by temperament, someone whose curiosity runs toward authorship rather than just “content.”
Contextually, it fits his career-long attraction to adaptations and literary-minded projects (from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Henry and June). He’s signaling that his taste is formed in dialogue with literature, and that directing, for him, is an interpretive art: translating a writer’s interior weather into images without sanding off the idiosyncrasies that made it worth reading.
It also reads as a small flex: a director claiming cultural seriousness without sounding pious. Reading becomes both passport and radar - proof of attention, and a method for finding the people worth paying attention to.
The punch is in the second half: “therefore I’m interested in writers.” Not “books,” not “stories,” but writers: the people, the sensibilities, the stubborn fingerprints behind the sentences. The subtext is a rebuttal to an industry where writers are often treated like replaceable parts in a machine built to flatter directors and stars. Kaufman positions himself as a collaborator by temperament, someone whose curiosity runs toward authorship rather than just “content.”
Contextually, it fits his career-long attraction to adaptations and literary-minded projects (from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Henry and June). He’s signaling that his taste is formed in dialogue with literature, and that directing, for him, is an interpretive art: translating a writer’s interior weather into images without sanding off the idiosyncrasies that made it worth reading.
It also reads as a small flex: a director claiming cultural seriousness without sounding pious. Reading becomes both passport and radar - proof of attention, and a method for finding the people worth paying attention to.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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