It’s not giving away much to reveal that the last line of dialogue spoken in Synecdoche, New York is the lone word “die”. It does, however, help to illustrate the emotional starkness and the near-mythic intent of this directorial debut from Charlie Kaufman, the 49-year-old absurdist screenwriter of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

For here in Synecdoche (pronounced “Sin-eck-dock-ee”, a word meaning a whole that implies its parts or vice versa) Kaufman crafts an intricate tale of a neurotic small-town playwright called Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who creates a sprawling theatrical “happening” set in a giant New York warehouse and slowly balloons over two decades to become bigger than, and indistinguishable from, life itself.

So far, so Kaufman. But whereas the zany Malkovich took pot-shots at celebrity egos and fractured identities, and while the tender Sunshine spoke of long-term love-pain, this ambitious movie has nothing less the very nature of existence within its crosshairs. Thus Caden is forever questioning his own worth, his mortality (he’s a compulsive hypochondriac) and his relationships with three successive women (played by Catherine Keener, Sam Morton and Emily Watson). He has a moment of serene insight where, in his dotage, he looks at Morton and sighs, “You have been part of me for ever. I breathe your name with every exhalation.” But otherwise, he lives his tortured life under the shadow of a permanent question mark.

“The movie is about the question, which is: ‘What does it all mean?’ ” Kaufman says, sipping thoughtfully on an early-morning coffee. He has a reputation for being meek and taciturn in conversation. But here, today, within the confines of an empty restaurant, he is engaging, open, loquacious and, given the right prodding, even fiery. “Everybody spends their life searching for an answer to that question,” he continues. “And there isn’t one. We are just swimming through circumstance, trying to make sense of it. It’s not cynical or nihilistic; it’s just the truth!”

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Kaufman is big on the truth. While other screenwriters are content to trade in formula and cliché in the writing of “big stupid cynical blockbusters that say to the world, ‘I’m an a**hole, I don’t care and I’m going to make money off you!’ ” Kaufman is stringently honest in his work. “Every time I sit down to write,” he says, “I have to do what feels truthful to me. Otherwise what’s the point?”

This same rigour has thus produced a string of eccentric screenplays that have included, among others, a sweaty masturbator called “Charlie Kaufman” in Adaptation, a sexually underendowed protagonist in Human Nature, and some of the most bitterly unflattering portrayals of romance yet seen on screen (in Synecdoche it is, literally, every man and woman for themselves).

And yet, perhaps because of this, Kaufman has also acquired cult status among the Hollywood Alist, the Jim Carreys and the Nicolas Cages (both Kaufman vets), who queue up whenever a new script appears. He has become his own adjective too. “‘Kaufmanesque!’” he groans. “There’s a lot of marketing bulls**t that happens around that. I don’t want to be a part of it, and I certainly don’t want to write something that is deliberately ‘Kaufmanesque’.”

Nonetheless, he is protective over his own brand, and the mere mention of golden boy George Clooney, who famously tinkered with Kaufman’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind script before directing it, sends him into a mild rage. “I spend a lot of time working on these scripts, and it would behove any director to collaborate with me,” he says, steam building. “But what Clooney did was he walked away and rewrote it himself! He ruined it, in my mind. He made mistakes that have my name on it and are never going to be made right again!” He fiddles with his coffee cup and explains, “If I’m passionate it’s because it’s my work. And I care about it!”

Of course, it might have all been so different if Kaufman had stuck to acting. A shy child who grew up in Long Island, and then Connecticut, and who was, he says, “for a long time the go-to guy to beat up in school”, he was drawn to acting because “I could be somebody else, get laughs, and get attention without asking for it”. After high school he wanted to be Al Pacino but figured that he had a better chance of being Woody Allen, and so began to study acting at Boston University. “But after a year I somehow got really embarrassed by the notion of studying acting. Perhaps I secretly still wanted it, but I decided to become a director and went to film school in New York instead.”

After college he moved to LA and worked as a lowly writer on the TV comedies, Get a Life, Ned and Stacey and The Dana Carvey Show. “But as soon as I wrote Being John Malkovich, even though no one wanted to make it, I was suddenly like this new guy that everyone was interested in.”

Through four subsequent screenplays and now Synecdoche the interest in him hasn’t waned, he says, but with a wife and child to support and a mortgage to pay, he’s not exactly flush with cash. “I spent five years on this movie,” he says. “I haven’t had a job since I started this one, so I’ve been living on that money for five years now.” And in the current climate, with independent production companies closing by the month, he is, he says, genuinely worried about the next pay-cheque. “I know money shouldn’t be an issue but the idea of embarking on something else that’s that time-consuming and not being able to find someone to make it at the end of it is paralysing me a bit.”

Ultimately, he wonders aloud, is he going to have to break his golden rule, to ignore the need for honesty, and write a trashy thriller script for the money? “Am I going to have to figure out how to be an a**hole in the world?”

He thinks about this for a minute, then answers himself, definitively, in the negative. “I can’t do that. I’ve just arrived at a place where I’m doing something that I feel good about. Regardless of quality, I’m trying to put something honest into the world. And that’s all I can, and all I will, do.”

Synecdoche, New York shows at OWE1, Oct 28, 9pm, and at OWE2, Oct 29, 3.15pm

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