Tell someone you’re going to see Charlie Kaufman’s latest film, Synecdoche, New York, and they will invariably correct you. “That’s ‘Schenectady,’ New York, they will say, thinking you mispronounced it. But writer-turned-first-time-director Kaufman had some very specific reasons for giving his film such an unusual title.

“When I named Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, everybody said nobody would ever remember it,” he recalls. “But what’s cool is that the title is really easy to remember now. Everybody who knows that movie knows the title. And if this movie gets the proper amount of response, the  people will be able to pronounce it and everyone will be able to know the word, ‘synecdoche’ — which is a good word to know.”

Still, the movie itself never mentions the word, and Kaufman doesn’t want to spell it out for people. “One of the things I think is really exciting and joyful about the experience of being an audience member is finding things out,” he says. “When you make a connection, it’s yours and there’s a thrill to that. So people can look up ‘synecdoche,’ if they want. And if they do, maybe they’ll think about things it might correspond to in the movie, and if it opens up another understanding of the film for them, that would be great.”

The definition of synecdoche is as follows: a figure of speech in which the word for part of something is used to mean the whole, for example, “sail” for “boat,” or vice versa.

Still a little fuzzy? That’s exactly what Kaufman is going for.

“I think the movie is fun,” he says. “It has a lot of serious emotional stuff in it, but it’s funny in a weird way. You don’t have to worry, ‘What does the burning house mean?’ Who cares? It’s a burning house that someone lives in — it’s funny. You can get more than that if you want to. Hopefully the movie will work on a lot of levels and people can read different things from it depending on who they are.”

Perhaps the official synopsis will clarify things:

“Theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is mounting a new play. His life catering to suburban blue-hairs at the local regional theater in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) with her. His therapist, Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), is better at plugging her best-seller than she is at counseling him. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one.

Worried about the transience of his life, he leaves his home behind. He gathers an ensemble cast into a warehouse in New York City, hoping to create a work of brutal honesty. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside.

However, as the city inside the warehouse grows, Cotard’s own life veers wildly off track. The years rapidly fold into each other and Cotard buries himself deeper into his masterpiece. As he pushes the limits of his relationships, both personally and professionally, a change in creative direction arrives in Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), a celebrated theater actress who may offer Cotard the break he needs.

Kaufman, noted for his unconventional scripts like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Human Nature, never goes down the straight and narrow.

“I’m interested in dreams and how we tell stories to ourselves in dreams,” he says. “Let me make it very clear that this film is not a dream, but it does have a dreamlike logic. You can start to fly in a dream. In the dream it’s just, ‘oh yeah, I can fly.' It’s not like what your reaction would be in the real world. So everything that happens in this movie is to be taken at face value, it’s what’s happening. It’s okay that it doesn’t happen in real life — it’s a movie.”

The question is, will audiences find this movie a dream or a nightmare. The marketing of it is tough, because conventional wisdom says that films with titles that are difficult to pronounce or define do poorly. But Kaufman seems unconcerned. After all, "success" is a subjective term — it’s okay that it doesn’t happen in real life — it’s a movie.