Synecdoche, New York

Director: Charlie Kaufman, Charlie Kaufman

2008 / 124min / 35mm

In the wake of the dissolution of his marriage, New York theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) increasingly begins to disappear into a world of his own making—a sprawling and increasingly elaborate replica of his own neighborhood constructed inside of a Manhattan warehouse space, meant to be the setting of his ultimate coup de théâtre. As Cotard goes so far as to father a daughter with his therapist (Michelle Williams), hired as an actress, his reality and fantasy fold together in Kaufman’s majestically melancholic rumination on love, life, and the painful inevitability of death.

Q&A with production designer Mark Friedberg moderated by filmmaker Mira Nair on Friday, October 20th