What’s your very first memory of seeing Andy Kaufman?
Jim Carrey: I saw Andy Kaufman on the Dick Van Dyke special, Van Dyke and Company, when I was a child. I was a big fan of Dick Van Dyke so I was tuning in for him, and Andy came on the show and he was doing the cowboy business, the cowboy song. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, what a different, special human being this is. He doesn’t seem to be like everybody else.’ And I, being not like everybody else, identified with him. I was a weird little kid with my monster models and my sketchpad and spent a lot of time in my room by myself and as it turns out he was the same way, making shows in his room.
What was it about him, about his work, that made him so different and really, a revolutionary?
JC: Just breaking the form. Rebelling against the edges of the canvas. I have paintings where I allow the paint to pour over the edges of the canvas and dry and then flop down the wall underneath the painting. They represent my resistance to boundaries. I’ve always been like that, ever since I was a little kid. In school when I was fooling around in class, it was rebellious and a reaction to boredom. Generally I’d get my work finished pretty quickly and then I’d start messing around and making trouble. It was a rebellion against the norm and it was also a service. I always felt that in doing so, I transferred a sense of relief or a sense of freedom to other people. And I think that that’s what Andy did for a lot of people, especially in the time he came to be known. It was a time when we needed to question everything and to rebel against the so-called norms…. That time has arrived again.
Milos Forman required an audition to give you the part of Kaufman in Man on the Moon. What was it about Kaufman that made you so want to take on the role that at that point in your career you were willing to audition for it?
JC: There’s no reason why other than just being compelled toward it. I didn’t go, ‘You know what? This is the guy. I have to be there for him, I have to tell his story.’ It was just a compulsion: Talk about an interesting character! Often the choices I make consciously have nothing to do with the real reason they’re happening. There’s some kind of drive that makes you try harder on one thing than another. How do you know when you fall in love with somebody? There’s something unconscious going on there. Everybody says, ‘You should fall in love with somebody who does this.’ Well, when love becomes a choice, then talk to me. There’s no choices in that regard. You’re compelled to what you’re compelled to. Andy was a personality I was compelled to because we had a lot in common, I guess. We had a common need to question authority, to question norms and play with them in a rebellious way and turn them on their heads and show the world, ‘Your sacred cows are silly.’
Once you got the part, you disappeared completely into the role not just of Andy but also of Andy’s character, Tony Clifton. What did it feel like to inhabit those beings?
JC: It was a relief. At first it was a daunting idea, the idea of allowing your own character to take a back seat, to die. Then it became super energizing and completely rejuvenating because I was free from myself. I didn’t have my own concerns. Initially people on the set said, ‘Here goes some crazy actor.’ They soon realized that it was born out of reverence, it was born out of respect for the character. When Andy was around, there was no one else in charge. Andy took charge no matter what. If everybody’s energy was huge, Andy would pick the opposite, he would find a pocket that was so special and so different that he became the one on top. So I just let him be on top.
It ended up being a wonderful break from myself and eventually the awakening into the façade that is our normal character. That’s the really interesting thing about this documentary, it not only looks at Andy’s work, it not only looks at my work and how he affected me and how this wonderful thing happened behind the scenes on Man on the Moon, but it became an exploration of identity itself, of the frailness of character and the ideas we cobble together into an identity. Most of identity is just ideas. There’s a body and there’s a mind and then there’s this Jim Carrey character that was able to disappear and suddenly become Andy Kaufman. And then when I went back to Jim Carrey, he was less solid. It was more like, ‘Well, this is a character too.’ That’s the beauty of this documentary, it explores that experience of becoming less of a person, more of a whole.
Now I’m living in a space that definitely sometimes gets caught up in a story and believes the character exists, but for the most part I live in a place—actually I don't live in a place, the place just lives—in a whole place, not just this body. It’s part of my journey of discovery, letting go. In the Vedanta, there’s the relative and the absolute, these are the two planes of existence. The relative is: I’m a character that’s separate from you and I’m relating to you and I’m relating to objects and objects are separate from me. The absolute is the knowledge that there is no separation at all, there is no you, there is just all that is and you are that. It has been a long experience leading to that and Man on the Moon was part of it for sure.
Actors often talk about “becoming” their characters but in Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond you suggest that you think something deeper was going on—essentially that Andy came back and used your body to play himself. Had you ever experienced anything like that before?
JC: No, not at all. Once that choice was made, it was—and I’m sure great actors have experienced this, the feeling of being lost in a character—but to me there is only one character, it’s everything that is and everyone that is. I look at the world as one soul that’s having all of these incredible experiences. It’s experiencing being the person that’s talking to you, it’s experiencing being the houseplant, it’s experiencing being the chair underneath my butt and that’s the genius of it, it’s one soul. So all it really is is a matter of dialing in the frequency that was Andy Kaufman and allowing him to use my body and voice and mind—and my heart hopefully.
Going back to the question of identity: In Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond you say, “At some point you have to live as your true self, you have to face the abyss of being true to yourself.” Have you done that? And if you have, how would you describe your true self?
JC: Nothing and everything. It’s the everything that’s nothing. It’s the greatest space… It’s really impossible to describe. It’s everything arising out of nothing and you’re all of it. You could just as easily describe it as a tone, a ringing, like a high-pitched dog whistle that’s quiet and free from thoughts of your individuality or any individuation at all, any thought patterns that are borne of fear or projection. To me, there’s two ends of the spectrum and I’m always going up and down that dial. There’s hell, which is complete belief in your thoughts and your fears, regret of the past and fear of the future, and noise, mental noise, and a total belief in separateness from everything else in the world. That’s hell. At that point your brain is noise, your consciousness is noise, and you’re attracted to darkness and darkness is attracted to you. And then there’s a climb up the vibratory scale, and as you get higher and higher there’s less and less mental noise, less and less belief in a separate self and ultimately I believe that’s what heaven is, here right now. Some masters have gotten to a point where they can actually stay in it pretty much all the time. I don’t know if I believe anybody can really stay in all of the time. That’s why they say there’s no such thing as an enlightened person because by the time you get to that enlightened place, the highest end of the scale, there’s no one there. I’ve been there and felt that. And sometimes I’m at the other end, with a total belief in politics, fear of North Korea, fear of what they’re going to say about me, believing that this character has something to lose. The two always coexist. Heaven is right here, it’s just you can’t be there. I have this discussion with people about heaven and I go, ‘You’ll never be in heaven, because when heaven happens, you’re not there. There’s no you involved, there’s no you noise.’
It’s a difficult thing to describe. The closest I can get is that heaven is like a dog whistle that’s always calling and always there and you can’t tune in because you’re so caught up.
In the documentary, you also say, “All we really yearn for is our own absence.”
JC: I heard that from a revolutionary non-dualist teacher named Tony Parsons. I’ve listened to a million teachers. I’ve always been looking for answers my whole life. I’ve always been two people—well, I’ve always been everything!—but in a relative sense, I’ve always been two people: the kid in the living room entertaining everybody and the kid in the bedroom trying to figure out the universe.
How does the person that the world knows as Jim Carrey fit in to that yearning for absence? Does he even still exist?
JC: I would say there’s an avatar like on a video game and his name is Jim Carrey and he’s a cool player. He walks through the world to represent a perspective that means nothing, that just is and that doesn't matter. There’s a game to be played so how do you want to play it? There’s a choice to be made every day as to what that avatar is going to be dressed in, you pick weapons and a personality….
I try not to do that any more, I try to almost dial myself away from choosing a character to be because I know it’s a conscious choice. So instead I go, ‘How about I just start at sea level and let things happen?’ I’ve found lately that somehow the raw, undoctored non-character is resonating with people in a way that even Jim Carrey didn’t.
What made you now, two decades later, decide to revisit Man on the Moon and do this documentary?
JC: It just happened, like everything else. I was talking to Spike Jonze every once in awhile: He would call and check in on me ‘cause I was going through some stuff and I was also shifting in my perspective toward things. He’s a thoughtful guy and he was curious about where my journey was going. He’d ask me questions like, ‘How do you see the world?’ or ‘How do you feel the world right now?’ And I’d say, ‘It’s almost like things have shifted the other way around, and I’m being felt by the world. It’s strange what’s happening.’ We started talking about identity, and Man on the Moon came up. I started talking about what an experience that was, losing my identity. He said, ‘I’d love to see some stuff sometime,’ and I said, ‘Yeah I can put a bunch of stuff together and send it over if you want.’ When he saw it, he said, ‘There’s really something here, man.’ He brought Chris on board and Chris found the narrative, which was beautiful. It was above and beyond just a retrospective and an account of this special thing that happened. It became about what I’ve been involved in or not involved in, it became about identity, it became about the deconstruction of Jim Carrey.
We’re so afraid to let go of our characters. We’re so afraid to not believe in them. Stuff is happening and sometimes you get completely caught up but then you realize it’s not personal, it just is. It’s not happening to me, it’s just happening. The difference between the two is gigantic. Searching for enlightenment is like riding all over the countryside on a white horse looking for a white horse. Just stop. Stop where you are and be done. The spiritual version of Einstein’s theory of relativity is Heaven = Consciousness – You.
When someone is asking me questions about it they’re generally coming from a place of hanging on to identity so it's very confronting and it’s easy to find yourself facing the collective ego who are going, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, man? I have to take care of my kids, don’t I?’ Yeah, that’s the illusion that you have to play out just like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita had to go to battle but it’s not who you are. You’re not a doctor, a lawyer, a Catholic, an American. Everything about identity that’s been given to you since you were born is an idea. If you really drill down, you’re an organism that you think ends at the edge of your skin but does not. The organism is molecular, beyond your imaginings in both directions forever, macro and micro.
What do you think Andy Kaufman would think of Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond?
JC: It’s hard to say. He could come down anywhere, you just never knew with Andy. I think he would think it was an interesting discussion. He was certainly a spiritual being, into transcendental meditation and different modes of thought and experience, so I think he would find it fairly fascinating. I would hope that he would at least appreciate the attempt at authenticity. I think he would appreciate that we cared about him. That’s what all comics are after ultimately. It’s like the girl who keeps her hair messy so no one thinks that she cares so she can’t be criticized. We rebel so that no one thinks that we care.
What would Tony Clifton think of it?
JC: Tony would probably say that it’s not good enough, there’s not enough of him, that he was the real genius behind Andy and that Andy was a sycophant who was feeding off of him. He would secretly love it but he would never, never let anybody know that he did. He likes to keep people in that place of feeling like they’re not good enough or didn’t do well enough, that they’re lucky he’s just putting up with them. He would think, ‘Great, if it gets me laid.’