Ever since his debut film Being John Malkovich was released to widespread acclaim, it has been almost a cliché to describe Charlie Kaufman as an original screenwriter. That film focuses on a struggling puppeteer who discovers a portal into the mind of the enigmatic actor, a contrivance that should never have worked, but shows what Kaufman is all about.

His early career was dominated by collaborations with two directors who share his vision, Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. It was the former who directed Being John Malkovich, as well as his next major success, Adaptation. It was originally conceived as a straight adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief, but Kaufman struggled with the source material and went through an artistic crisis. In a move as desperate as it was inspired, he wrote himself and a fictional twin brother, Donald (who shared his writing credit and subsequent Oscar nomination), into a screenplay which would have been regarded as narcissistic and self-indulgent if it wasn’t so good. Adaptation satirises the Hollywood clichés that Kaufman traditionally avoids, ironically by using them all, yet manages to retain at its heart the poignancy of human relationships.

Kaufman was awarded an Oscar for his next film, the Gondry-directed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Here Kaufman is at his most controlled, and the result is a genuinely moving film that avoids sentimentality but shows faith in those romantic connections that are just meant to be. We are shown the fragments of a broken relationship as they are irrevocably erased from the memory, a process that reveals their intrinsic value however much it might hurt to remember them. The tragedy is that the characters know the relationship is likely to end badly but, having been robbed of a genuine ending, their connection is strong enough that they want nothing more than to go through it all again. To love and all its messiness, they say “OK”.

After Jonze opted to make Where the Wild Things Are, Kaufman chose to direct his latest film, Synecdoche, New York, himself. He is free to be at his most compulsive, and depicts a director, who is obsessed by death and estranged from his wife, attempting to create a vast theatre project that encompasses all human life. It is an attempt to understand who he is, who everyone else is, but it results in violent self-division and ultimately the destruction of the project that could only ever be a grand folly. In trying to understand life in its entirety, he is unable to live it.

Synecdoche, New York is a vastly ambitious and deliberately difficult film. In many ways, it is a synthesis of all Kaufman’s previous work, of which the recurring theme is that need to remember to live, no matter how much we are sidetracked by ambition, how much we fail to understand, how wracked we are with doubt. Kaufman is known for his imagination, but his intuitive understanding of humanity, and ability to find the creative devices to depict it, is what makes him, in the words of Roger Ebert, a “truly important writer”.