Philip Kaufman Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Philip Kaufman (born October 23, 1936, Chicago, Illinois) directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

Kaufman came to film late, by way of Chicago, law school, and Europe

Kaufman grew up in a Jewish family on Chicago's north side, studied history at the University of Chicago, spent a year at Harvard Law School, and returned to Chicago for graduate work in history. Before settling into filmmaking he lived in Europe — teaching English in Greece and math in Florence — and came back to the States in 1962 carrying a European cinephile's appetite. (wikipedia, philipkaufman.com)

Kaufman reached Body Snatchers after two revisionist Westerns and an Arctic drama

By 1978, Kaufman had directed The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), a revisionist take on the Jesse James gang; The White Dawn (1974), an ethnographic survival film shot on the Arctic ice pack with an Inuit cast; and a contribution to the story of The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), from which Clint Eastwood fired him partway through the shoot. Body Snatchers was his first film in a major studio genre — a horror picture with recognizable stars and a built-in title. It was also his breakthrough. (wikipedia, imdb)

Kaufman described his early formation as an autodidactic one, built on foreign film and jazz:

"I could feel the cry of America, the sense of jazz ... So I came back to Chicago in 1962 and set about trying to learn as much as I could, seeing every foreign movie I could." — Philip Kaufman, Wikipedia (biography)

Kaufman treated the remake as a new envisioning, not a copy

Kaufman had seen Don Siegel's (in Body Snatchers, as director) 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers on first release and spent years thinking about it with friends. When producer Robert H. Solo came to him, his precondition was that the project be open to reinvention:

"Well this doesn't have to be a remake as such. It can be a new envisioning that was a variation on a theme." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

The two large moves were the shift to color and the shift to San Francisco. See The 1956 Original and San Francisco as Setting.

Kaufman directed for behavior rather than plot mechanics

Kaufman's interest is in how people carry themselves, and Body Snatchers depends on that interest. The pod people are terrifying because the real people are particular — small gestures, private rhythms, the specific way two friends eat dinner.

"Often people on the set or at the studio are so worried about just getting content, and content is not necessarily going to make the scene full of humanity." — Philip Kaufman, It Came From Blog (2019)

Annette Insdorf, in her monograph on Kaufman, identified this as the director's signature method across his career — not imposing a style on material but discovering the one the story requires:

"Kaufman finds 'l'image juste' — the precise cinematic device appropriate to the story." — Annette Insdorf, Philip Kaufman (2020)

Kaufman put it in plainer terms:

"For me, the fun is in the learning experience, in figuring out the vocabulary you need for each movie." — Philip Kaufman, quoted in Annette Insdorf, Philip Kaufman (2020)

This same sensibility — literate, patient, interested in how groups absorb individuals — runs through the films that followed. The Wanderers (1979) tracks a Bronx street gang on the eve of the Kennedy assassination. The Right Stuff (1983) sets the Mercury Seven against the bureaucratic machine that packaged them. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) and Henry & June (1990) are adult literary adaptations of Kundera and Nin. Quills (2000) is a debate about speech and the state, framed around Sade.

Body Snatchers fits this shelf more comfortably than its genre billing suggests. It is a paranoid thriller about group dynamics — the way a therapeutic culture that preaches openness produces a population ready to be hollowed out. Insdorf placed Kaufman in a category of one among American filmmakers:

"No other living American director has so consistently and successfully made movies for adults, tackling sensuality, artistic creation, and manipulation by authorities." — Annette Insdorf, Philip Kaufman (2020)

See Themes and Analysis (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Post-Watergate Paranoia.

Kaufman has described the film's moral as daily self-examination

Asked in 2019 what he took from the film himself, Kaufman framed pod-dom as a condition to be guarded against on a personal schedule rather than defeated once:

"If we go to sleep we could turn into pods. We should not only say our prayers before we go to sleep, but we should examine ourselves upon waking... It pays to re-examine what you stand for each day." — Philip Kaufman, Hollywood Reporter (2018)

Elsewhere in the same interview he describes American life as "other-directed" — a phrase that locates pod-dom in the sociology of postwar conformity rather than in any Cold War ideology. The film's threat isn't something that can be killed; it's something you have to keep waking up inside of. See Themes and Analysis (Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

Kaufman kept the ending from his own crew

Kaufman told only Richter and Solo how the film ended. Sutherland learned the night before shooting it. The secrecy was treated as a practical matter — the image that closes the film needed to land without being leaked — but it also fits Kaufman's general instinct to leave actors without the safety of a settled conclusion. See The Ending (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and The Pod Scream.

Kaufman as director, 1972–2012

Year	Film	Notes
1972	The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid	Revisionist Western
1974	The White Dawn	Shot on location in the Arctic
1978	Invasion of the Body Snatchers	San Francisco remake; breakthrough
1979	The Wanderers	Bronx street-gang drama
1983	The Right Stuff	Mercury Seven; 8 Oscar nominations
1988	The Unbearable Lightness of Being	Kundera adaptation
1990	Henry & June	First film released with NC-17 rating
1993	Rising Sun	Crichton adaptation
2000	Quills	Sade and the French Revolution
2012	Hemingway & Gellhorn	HBO feature