You'd think given the originality of his films, such as Being John Malkovich (about a puppeteer who discovers a portal into John Malkovich's brain) or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (about a love affair complicated by a memory-erasing machine), that Kaufman wouldn't care what anybody thinks. But he does.
Synecdoche has polarised critics. There's been much praise for what A. O. Scott, of the New York Times, termed "its seamless alternate reality", yet there's also been sniping about the film's opacity and air of gloom.
The film's lack of universal acclaim and the fact that it took so long to find its distributor (Sony Pictures Classics) have left Kaufman jangled and upset.
"I feel very vulnerable," he says.
So vulnerable that he's actually talking about quitting screenwriting.
This film "is really personal", he says.
"I feel embarrassed for even doing this in the world. I put this thing, that is like me, my soul, in the world, and I just feel like it's trampled. It makes me feel like I don't want to do this anymore."
He insists he's not kidding.
"It's not a threat," he says. "I need to figure out what I'm going to do to pay my mortgage."
It's slightly depressing to hear a dreamer like Kaufman speak so prosaically.
His name is practically an adjective in Hollywood, synonymous with a comically depressed inversion of reality, where people's interior lives are externalised for all to see.
He won an Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and was nominated twice more. He is one of the few first-time directors to get final cut.
Yet even Charlie Kaufman has to eat.
He spent five years on Synecdoche. Even with a cast of actors led by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Synecdoche, which cost more than $US20 million, may or may not make money for its investors.
Synecdoche, New York is like a sprawling garden of Kaufman's mind, filled with a jumble of wondrous sights amid human ugliness and a continual preoccupation with death.
On the plot level, it's about a struggling theatre director in Schenectady, New York, Caden Cotard, whose artist wife abandons him partly in disgust for his banal imagination (which seems to consist of a penchant for restaging classics).
Unexpectedly freed from monetary worries by a "genius" grant, Caden moves to New York, where he creates a simulacrum of real life in an abandoned warehouse.
It's an apartment building housing actors playing Caden and the various women Caden loves in a continual play that lasts for decades.
And, oh yes, Caden is perpetually obsessed with illness and dying.
A "synecdoche" is a term meaning the part for the whole, like referring to headlights to describe a car driving down the road.
The title might refer to the mutating theatre piece as the physical manifestations of Caden's psychological state.
Or the term might refer to Caden, as an alter ego, or kind of synecdoche of Kaufman himself.
Kaufman does not care to elucidate, except to say that, "There's nothing written that's not autobiographical. By that, I mean Transformers too."
He also does not care to explain any of the oddities of the film, like why one character lives in a house that is perpetually burning but never burns down.
Contributing to the film's dreamlike feel is the fact that Synecdoche spans 50 years, and yet is filled with what Kaufman calls "temporal inconsistencies" that are intended "to put you off balance."
It's hard to imagine that Kaufman didn't pop out of the womb with his idiosyncratic worldview fully formed, but in fact, he was 30 before he began writing professionally.
As a kid he wanted to be an actor.
That passion was thwarted during college, when he developed a fatal self-consciousness that made self-display impossible.
"I started to get embarrassed and just couldn't do it anymore."
He wound up studying film at New York University and eventually moved to Minneapolis where, at 30, he worked for $6 an hour as a receptionist at an art museum.
He spent years grinding away in the world of TV comedy, but when the work dried up, he wrote Being John Malkovich as a writing sample.
Unlike his other films that tilt toward absurdist comedy, Synecdoche lacks what Kaufman calls "an escape hatch", a jokey high-concept device like the brain portal in Being John Malkovich that "gives you distance and makes it OK even if you're dealing with subjects that are serious and upsetting".
• Synecdoche, New York screens at the World Cinema Showcase tonight at 8.30pm and on Wednesday at 3.45pm.
