Her face obscured in shadow, a woman, the poet, Eva HD, takes a photograph. Cut to words on the screen, a quote from another poet, Toni Morrison: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
The paradox created by the juxtaposition of those words and that image animates How to Shoot a Ghost, Charlie Kaufman’s new Venice-premiering short film, written by HD, that sensuously and melancholically tangles with ideas around history, memory, cities and where consciousness goes when the body dies. Set in Athens, Greece, it stars Jessie Buckley (returning from Kaufman’s previous feature, I’m Thinking of Ending Things) and Joseph Akiki as two foreigners in the city who have both met violent, untimely ends — deaths that freeze in place their fractured family relationships, preventing any kind of resolution. The two drift through the city streets, discovering each other and co-mingling with the city’s other ghosts while gazing with a kind of empathetic wonder on the city’s living residents going about their days — playing chess, shopping, in libraries, in clubs. The ancient city’s history is present too in all these places and faces, as voiceover and archival footage interweave discussions of Thucydides and his Peloponnesian War writings with footage from the 1967 coup, among other moments.
How To Shoot a Ghost is a film about personal observation and historical memory, but it’s also a film simply about looking. As shot by DP Ella van der Houde, the film is lovely cascade of decisive moments, finding the sublime even during dark times. It’s the second collaboration between Kaufman and the Canadian-Greek HD, whose hypnotic previous short, Jackals and Fireflies, was more of a city poem. How to Shoot a Ghost, which began after HD began sharing photos from Athens and Kaufman got to know the city after attending the Oxbelly Retreat, is a progression, adding in the simplest of stories — the tender friendship of two regretful ghosts — and ending with quietly shattering emotion. (A brief scene with the two ghosts in a movie theater destroyed me.)
The street photographer Garry Winogrand once said, “If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there,” and, indeed, Buckley’s blue-haired ghost snaps Polaroids throughout this picture, marking her movements throughout the city. A necessary activity? Morrison suggests otherwise, something I discuss with Kaufman and HD below, as we chatted in a Little Italy cafe a couple of weeks before Venice.
Filmmaker: I’m reading a book by Adam Phillips, the British writer, psychoanalyst and critic, called On Giving Up. There’s a chapter called “Dead or Alive” that begins, “What do you have to give up in order to feel alive?” And then it goes into this sort of paradox about how we all say that at the end of our lives, we want to feel like we have lived, but of course we have lived. So, what is the distinction between thinking you have lived and actually having lived? What sort of actions or interventions do you need to take in order to feel like you “have lived?” I was thinking about this in connection with your film, which is about ghosts — people whose lives have been cut short, and both of whom have unfinished business on earth.
HD: They’re both cut off from solving any of the things [they] might want [to solve]. We don’t only hoard photographs and possessions, we also hoard the idea that we’re going to fix the things that we’ve undone, like our relationships. And I think these two are quite brutally cut off from [those family relationships] fairly early on, before they’ve even had a chance [to repair them], and they realize that are never going to be fixed. It happened that way because it happened that way, to make a tautology out of it. These hypermasculine notions, like “taking the bull by the horns,” don’t work. In the end, you’re never going to have solved everything.
Kaufman: I think anxiety is the culprit in not being able to be alive, because you’re constantly in the future, which is non-existent. You’re always going, “What’s next? What’s coming up?”
HD: And how could you have a satisfactory personal relationship with someone if you’re constantly trying to take life by the lapels and shake it? How could you just appreciate what you have?
Kaufman: You’d see [the other person] as a goal. I think that that the film does speak to that, that you can’t have anything. You can pass through [life] and experience it, I think. And in order to allow that to happen, and I speak somewhat from my own personal problems, you have to kind of figure out a way to calm those anxious waters, because it’s a grasping, it’s a fear. You have this basic notion based on precedent that [life] is going to end, and how is it going to end is the concern. And what can you do to control for that?
When Eva and I first started talking about this [project], I went outside one day with the idea that “this is my last day” — just walking in the streets and thinking about that. And maybe because of that thought, or maybe because of my mood that day, that allowed me to see things and appreciate them as I was just walking past people. I would look at some woman’s purse, for example, and think, this the last time I’m going to see that. That I noticed it gave it an importance, you know? [This experiment] made me feel kind of a love for… this [motions to the world around us], which I don’t normally feel.
I’m not doing it currently, but I would run first thing in the morning, and it was always the same thing: “Fuck, I don’t want to do this!” And then I would do it. I said this to Eva once, and she said, “On your run, find 10 things that I would think are beautiful.” It was really an interesting exercise, and what was helpful about it was because I was thinking about what I know about her, it allowed me to look at things in a kind of fresher way. The first thing I saw was the day moon still in the sky. I counted off ten things, and the last thing I saw was a woman in a magenta sweatshirt with some inscription on it about the moon, so it came full circle. Really, holy shit! And if I hadn’t been looking, I wouldn’t have seen it, you know?
HD: Usually, if you pay attention, these things write themselves, right? Like when you just notice everybody on the subway, they behave like they’re already scripted. And then you get off at your stop.
Kaufman: And that’s what I’ve loved about Eva’s poetry since I first became familiar with it, that sense of seeing that she is capable of, which, in theory, seems very simple but is not, right? And that’s not to say that what she does is simple because I don’t think it is. I think your language is very beautiful.
Eva HD: But it is really simple, that’s true. I just write down what I see.
Filmmaker: This film has a connection to street photography, a practice which is very much related to what you are talking about. I thought of Saul Leiter while watching this film.
Kaufman: We always talk about Saul Leiter and for this one, also Helen Levitt and Roy DeCarava.
Filmmaker: These words about being alive in the moment and observing the world, which is something you feel in this film as well as your earlier Jackals and Fireflies, seems to be part of a turn in your work, Charlie. You’re finding things in the immediate environment as opposed to writing a more constructed story. Does that make any sense?
Kaufman: I mean, yeah, and I think that’s built into the stuff that Eva and I have done together, and it’s not built into the stuff that I’ve done by myself, which is scripted and in which you kind of have to get through a narrative. In both movies, we felt there was an opportunity to — and a necessity to — explore the environments in which we were working. That’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to see these people in Athens, New York, and to a lesser extent, Toronto, which we didn’t have as much time in. In both films we had a second camera person who was off [in the city shooting]. On Jackals, it was funny — the script had so many things in it that Eva overheard on the street, and the crew got excited by [this writing approach] and about the notion of seeing the world that we’re in. They would all be going, “Oh, look over here!”
HD: They stopped using headphones while they were working so they could overhear conversations on the street.
Kaufman: It’s something that I would like to incorporate in other things I do, in more sort of conventional narrative feature stuff. One of the things I really liked about the idea of shooting in Belgrade for this movie that we’re going to make is that it’s such an interesting visual environment, and I want to take advantage of that.
HD: But that your films are more structured probably makes more sense. It’s nice to make sense.
Kaufman: I feel like both of these films are important to me in sort of pursuing something different, and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to be forced to think this way as opposed to the way that I have been thinking.
Filmmaker: To go back to the beginning of the project, did you start from the more structured place of the ghost story and then absorb these various life moments into it?
HD: We started with the idea that there would be a story, but we would be alive to the possibility of the things that happen in the [moment] —
Kaufman: — and that’s what street photography is.
HD: [The script] would have things we were hoping [to see written out] in square parentheses —
Kaufman: — and that was really confusing to everyone, because Eva was using them as placeholders, to a certain extent.
HD: But they thought I really meant it, like we had to find some ridiculous [thing].
Filmmaker: Well, as a producer I’ll say that when you read a script the first impulse is to take it all literally.
HD: But we don’t, right? I swear, you just stand on a street corner in any city in the world for five minutes and you’ll get whatever you need.
Filmmaker: So, to go back to the script, you had these moments scripted but you were open to the possibilities you’d find on the ground. And then you had your second cameraman going around to collect those moments.
HD: Yes, Giorgos Koutsaliaris had the second camera, and he had like a task list: “Old men arguing, pigeons…” It was a very poetic sort of list, and I also gave him a poem I wrote about Athens to get him in the mood. He really liked that, and then he just scampered out. There were so many beautiful shots that we couldn’t include.
Kaufman: And then that became a big part of the editing process, because we had all of this footage that we had to somehow figure out if we could use it and where we could incorporate it. What would be the juxtaposition of the various shots? It was a task on both films, but a very exciting task because something suddenly pops and it’s alive.
Filmmaker: There are a lot of point of view shots, or implied POV shots, from the perspective of your two protagonists, your ghosts, so you’re constructing all of those matches in the edit room.
Kaufman: Oh, yeah, definitely, but not entirely.
HD: And some of the footage is archival. There’s one archival piece that I find really moving, maybe because I know what it is. It’s after they see the cops beating someone up in the street, which obviously [is a scene] we arranged. Then there’s an archival piece that is on the first day of the coup on April 21, 1967. Somebody is just watching from their own balcony the tanks that have rolled down the streets of Athens. The government’s been overthrown, and there’s a man being frog marched down the road by the police and shoved into a police station. It’s awful, especially if you know that he’s gonna go into some CIA-sponsored dark hole and get tortured or something like that. But that [footage] is by an accidental photographer — it’s a home video by someone who had a camera on his balcony and was like, “Holy shit, I better film this.”
Filmmaker: Eva, I believe your father’s Greek, correct? What’s both of your connection to Athens?
Eva HD: I lived there when I was young. It’s special to me because I happen to have experienced early childhood there and then later gone through a lot of ups and downs. And there’s a queer arts collective in Athens called Lala, and they let me do a residency there for a month. While I was there I wrote to Charlie and said, “Hey, can we make an Athens film?”
Kaufman: And she would send me photographs that she took from the street, which got me excited about the idea of shooting in this beautiful place I’d never been. I mean, I had been there after Oxbelly —
HD: — But when I was sending you the photos you hadn’t yet been to Oxbelly. It was October of 2023 that I did this residency, and I had the idea before, in August of 2023. I was in Athens and talking to a scholar of the ancient Greek language. We were having a coffee at the cafe that we ended up shooting in the film, and he was like, “You should make a film in Athens, and you can come back here.” And then when I was at Lala the following October, I would send Charlie photos of graffiti, faces and people. I’d go into the spice store to get some pistachios, and the guy there would tell me these little stories that I’d write to Charlie. He was like, “Where would the world be without Greece? There would be no language; it would have no tongue.” And then he started ranting: “You know this Elon Musk character, he’s poor compared to me. You know why? I’m going to give you these lemon candies for free. He can’t give anything away, but I’m a king.” Beautiful! It’s like perorations just emerge in the city. If you want a random lecture on something unexpected, Athens is a great place to get it right in the face.
Filmmaker: And then how did it turn into a 23-minute film with high production values and great actors? It’s not like a little experimental sketch.
Kaufman: I think it started as something more modest. We thought we could do it for less and in less time.
HD: I first wrote something, and Charlie was like, “It’s expensive to have actors talking to each other.”
Kaufman: It’s more expensive to shoot sound, yeah.
HD: And so then I was like, well, it could a poem about Athens. And then he was like, “You know what? You shouldn’t worry so much about it.” And then it ended up being more of a combination of those, and we did keep the story of the two ghosts instead of just making a city poem.
Filmmaker: But it’s mostly without sync sound — recorded dialogue — right?
Kaufman: It’s all voiceover. And that felt that felt good to me, that these ghosts would not be chatting with each other. They communicate in a sort of non-verbal way.
Filmmaker: Watching How To Shoot a Ghost, you can’t help but think a little bit about Wings of Desire. You must have thought of that somewhere — another ghosts in a city movie.
Kaufman: I like that movie, but I didn’t think of it for this. [Wings of Desire] feels more structured, I guess.
HD: I will watch it someday. Several people have mentioned it. The title makes it sound like a potboiler.
Filmmaker: It is also about the history of a specific city. I believe the original German title is The Sky over Berlin.
HD: That’s so much better!
Kaufman: It’s so interesting how they keep changing that shit for English-speakers.
HD: But then there are some of your films that are really hard to translate the other way. Like Being John Malkovitch — most languages [titles] don’t lead off with a gerund. In Greece, it’s In the Mind of John Malkovitch. And in France it’s The Skin of John Malkovitch.
Filmmaker: Funny — one emphasizes the body and the other the mind.
Kaufman: The Italian of Eternal Sunshine is If You Leave Me I Will Erase You. Which is like giving away the store! The [Italian distributor] said, “We know what Italian people will go to see.” And that [their title] sounds very similar to a title of a very successful movie. I don’t know they were wrong.
Filmmaker: Eva, tell me about the Toni Morrison quote, which is so lovely: “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it.” That quote becomes a kind of structuring motif throughout the movie. Often, when there’s an opening quote like that, in a book or film, you kind of forget it. But this one, I really remembered it, and then when it comes back again, in the voiceover, it landed with me in a hard way.
HD: I was so horrified the first time I read that quote. It was so frightening to me, because I spent my whole life since I could write in this sort of desperate scramble to write down everything everybody says. Even when I was a really young child, I wanted to capture “this moment” that will never happen again. Which, I guess, is something the very, very young do out of ignorance or optimism. Or hubris, greed, gluttony or excitement — could be any of those things. But that quote shocked me. I always thought it’s good and really important to remember things. This is the problem of history, like the Santayana quote about being doomed to repeat it. That if you remembered the foolishness of the First World War, we wouldn’t have had the Second World War. But it doesn’t seem to actually work that way. I mean, we’re watching a genocide on TV, and we know all of the facts, and it doesn’t seem to matter in terms of the mistakes we make.
But I was like 20, and it blew my little mind when she said the last thing, which is that it’s enough to not even remember. I was like, “Toni, what are you doing?” I was so angry! You have to remember, right? This is why we have Holocaust memorials. To interrogate the past is to expunge the sins of the present. It seems like the moral imperative of our lives. So, to find out that perhaps there’s a possibility that we don’t have to do it is extraordinary, and because it comes not out of sloth, out of laziness, but out of some sort of radical acceptance of the human condition — it’s still rather beyond me, but I find it very interesting.
Filmmaker: At what point did you know that you wanted it in this film?
Kaufman: I think you sent it to me with that in mind.
HD: Yeah, and I sent it to the cinematographer at the beginning too. You have to tell the person filming what you have in mind, and I was like, “This quote is helpful.” I also said to him, “I want you to think about what you would want to remember if it was your last day. I want you to film this like you’re imagining taking it in on your last day. What you would cling to?” So the flip side of the [Toni Morrison] quote is that it makes you want to remember — that’s the paradox, right? You don’t have to remember, but you still want to fully experience that thing, which paradoxically means you might well remember it. If you let go of the desire to have to remember, if you stop thinking, I’ve got to remember this, [the event] will probably be memorable enough. Toni Morrison is very crafty!
Filmmaker: You’ve made two collaborative films about cities, and I understand people have been saying you should make a third?
Kaufman: Yeah, that was mentioned by somebody. We’d certainly like to do another one.
HD: We could do Toronto, disaster that it is.
Kaufman: We could do Toronto. That’d be simpler.
HD: Except for the fact that our two countries are at war.
Filmmaker: I realize I haven’t ask my usual Filmmaker questions, like how many days you shot.
Kaufman: Six days. We had a lot of locations. And it was very cold the last day, when we were on the beach at night. Joseph had to go into the water.
HD: We said, “We don’t want you to suffer. No film is worth that much. Just do one take.”
Kaufman: But he was thrilled with the idea that he was going to do it.
HD: That’s right, he stayed in the water, and we’re all on shore screaming his name: “Come back, Joseph!”
Kaufman: And the thing that you have to understand here is that we are trying to keep the light. It was sunset, we didn’t have any time, so we needed him to come back because we had other things to shoot before it got dark. But he couldn’t hear us.
HD: He also needed to come back because he was going to get hypothermia. But he was a stalwart. A loveable stalwart.
Kaufman: And we got that shot, that shot at the end, which goes from the back of [Jessie and Joseph], to him going into the water and then back to Jesse and him being gone. We had 15 minutes, and it was just the luckiest thing. It worked. The whole crew cheered. It was Jessie Buckley’s wrap, and we still had more stuff to shoot that night, but it was such a nice ending. I was grateful for that, not just because we got the thing we needed but because it ended on that emotion.
