Tim Kern painting Robin Weigert behind the scenes of Synecdoche, New York Courtesy of Temptu

Other than skin, what kind of media, or medium, do you use?
I don't really have time to make as much artwork as I want to. Sometimes I'll do some small acrylic paintings. I really want to get more into doing oil paintings, because I like how they look. Sometimes I do scratch boards or marker drawings. I've done a lot of those. But I feel like paint is really more true to what I want to do, [but] it's hard to find the time because I have a very busy schedule tattooing.

How does the process work? They told you what they had in mind and then you designed it?
Charlie [Kaufman] had really specific ideas of how he wanted the tattoos to look, actually. So one of the tattoos is all flowers... he wanted specific flowers to go with some music he had written for the scene. So I did some sketches based on the ideas he had and showed them to the makeup people, and they showed them to Charlie. I did meet Charlie fairly early on but he's super busy, so I mostly dealt with Naomi in the makeup department. Charlie was very nice by the way — very cool guy. I showed them a couple different sketches, and they showed me the direction they wanted to go with it. Then I did the bigger, actual life-sized drawing, which took quite a long time to do, because it's pretty extensive. It took me about 60 hours to draw the final clean line work, for the one tattoo.

And that was drawn directly onto actress Robin Weigert?
Oh, no, that was on paper. And then they made stencil transfers with Temptu, which transferred the outline onto Robin. And then we painted it in with their paints. Another actress had [a tattoo] that Charlie designed and I modified for use in the movie.

How long did it take to apply the very large-scale tattoo?
Robin's tattoo took about 20 hours with 3 to 4 people working on it at the same time. It was pretty exhaustive. It was done over 2 consecutive days, and then they shot her scene right after we finished. It was really stressful for everyone, including Robin. But we tried to be very considerate of her because she basically had to lay there naked for 20 hours. I mean that can't be that much fun for anyone. But she was very good, very professional. She sang us a little rap song that she wrote and it was very good, actually, very funny.

Tim Kern painting Robin Weigert behind the scenes of Synecdoche, New York Courtesy of Temptu

So without giving away too much, would you say that the tattoo is essential to the plot?
I would say that the tattoos play an important part in the movie, but it's not a large part. There's so much going on in the movie that it's kind of on the periphery of all the weirdness and craziness in this guy's life. But it's still very important, and it's really pretty intense in one particular scene.

Are there are other characters in the movie who have meaningful tattoos?
There's one. Michelle Williams has a full back design that I painted with [makeup artist] Ralph [Siciliano]. It was designed by Charlie Kaufman but I modified it a little bit so it would be more like a tattoo. The original drawing was pretty close to what the final tattoo looks like, except [the sketch] his was a ballpoint pen and the tattoo is in color.

I designed the [the other] tattoos and Ralph was very much a part of getting them on. He was responsible for getting the stencils made and providing us with the paints and stuff like that. He also did a lot of the actual painting with me, and a couple of the other makeup artist people: Naomi did some, Judy Chin did some, Rondy Scott (makeup intern) did some as well... Even my girlfriend and Robin Weigert helped a little bit.

Several female characters in Synecdoche, New York have large tattoos and you don't see that very often in movies. Maggie Gyllenhaal had a half-sleeve in Stranger Than Fiction...
I don't think there was any significance to it other than it made her look more like an outsider, more punk rock, more bohemian. She ran a bakery and wasn't paying her taxes, so she was rebellious outsider. A lot of people associate tattoos with those kinds of characters. I'm sure that's why she had one.

Do you think that's true of these characters?
For Robin's character, yeah, it fits with what's going on with her character's story. The whole movie is pretty — I don't know how to really describe it — it's weird. But all of Charlie's stuff is a little bizarre. I don't think he would get offended by that description.