Behind the Camera: In Conversation with Michel Gondry

(andPOP) - Michel Gondry knows what it's like for me to interview him.

"I did an interview with Nicole Kidman a long time ago," the Science of Sleep and music video auteur (and director of one of my and many others' favourite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) tells me in his thick French accent. "I say how great she was in To Die For and she was like, 'c'mon, it was eight years ago! Can you think of any other thing to tell me?'"

It's not that Gondry resents being interviewed. Talking to me on his cellphone while driving on the Los Angeles freeway, his voice is animated, enthusiastic. But he gets noticeably colder when the subject of his most famous work comes up - but I loved that movie and it was an honour talking to him about it. "It's a ball and chain for me," he says of Eternal Sunshine. "It's my curse."

Thankfully for 95 percent of his conversation, I ignore Eternal Sunshine. The reason for this interview is to discuss his latest film, The Science of Sleep, which was released on DVD earlier this month. While it may not be as focused as Eternal Sunshine ("Everyone always compares them," he says) it succeeds as a wonderful showcase for Gondry's imagination. The first thing I ask him is what inspired The Science of Sleep.

"My experience. I have a peculiar way of interpreting dream and reality, my 'wake life' compared to my real life," he says. "And so I created this story seven years ago, to write a story about this guy who gets gradually more and more confused by dream and reality, and I mixed that with some of my personal experience that occurred in part because of those dreams."

EEW: How much of yourself is in Stephane (Gael García Bernal), The Science of Sleep's protagonist?

MG: A lot. 80 per cent of it. And there's a lot from Gael, because basically he's Stephane. I don't want to force the actor into the character, I want the character and the actor to merge. But it's very personal.

EEW: Why stop-motion animation for the dreams?

MG: I always loved stop-motion animation. There's a dream quality in it and I don't think dreams look like that. It's a little bit artificial, in a friendly way, which I thought was good for what I needed in the dreams,
and I think if I had created very complex or sophisticated work for the dreams it would have been too much, and I think the fact that everything was crafted, it said that everything was done by Stephane or Stephanie. It was not done by any of the crew but himself.

EEW: In real life, how large was the animation team?

MG: It was small, I was part of it. We did it six months before we shot in the house. We were like ten people for two months.

EEW: That probably added to the handmade feel of it.

MG: Yeah, I think it did. I mean, really, we were more artists (he says artistes) than craftsmen.

EEW: This was your first credited screenplay. What did you learn about writing while working on it?

MG: I think I learned more when I was shooting it than when I was writing, because I didn't know what was good or bad then. I wrote it by a period of time, like I would write three weeks and then not do anything for one year, or three other weeks. It was very uncomfortable for me to do that.

EEW: A lot of writers go through that. You found the process uncomfortable?

MG: Writing some personal stuff was very uncomfortable, but I really wanted to get there, so I really made myself not give up.

EEW: How many years did you spend working on it?

MG: Maybe six.

EEW: How much did the script change while you were writing it?

MG: It changed more in the editing room. We shot practically everything but in the edit we realized that some elements of the story were told twice. Some was not so necessary, it was a little too complicated. I wish I could shoot the film and rewrite and reshoot and write it again and reshoot it and figure out exactly what I need, because you spend so much time to shoot a scene that won't make it into the film. In fact the French DVD is going to be a version of the film that has alternative footage that you didn't see in the original film.

EEW: And how's that different from the one that was in the theatres?

MG: It's a complicated film. It tells the same story but there is much more reality (ree-ah-li-tee), very little dreams, and more about him and his mother.

EEW: My impression of the movie is that Stephane stumbles through life, and goes into his dreams to escape his boredom. I think that's a feeling a lot of people can identify with, but it's never addressed openly. At the end he's still basically the same person he was at the beginning.

MG: It isn't the type of movie where you learn something. In fact myself I was hoping to learn something through the shooting of the film, but I didn't. Art is the point of view of somebody who is going through life. I don't think that means we need to study changes. That's an element of the typical film, an arc that responds to the Hollywood demand. The film that is based more on what you've felt in life, or a slice of somebody's life, of this life, it doesn't necessarily go through a transformation. Stephane doesn't transform, and I think there is a moment where you feel, "okay, again, he is going to be better," but he doesn't because he's compulsive with rejection by Stephanie, and he can't deal with it.

EEW: Is that the reason you made this as a French film, because you doesn't think an American studio would have been willing to stand behind a movie where the main character doesn't change?

MG: I think probably yes, but my main thing was I wanted to be honest with the dreams, I wanted to depict the dreams the way I had experienced them. I think this cannot go through the process of explaining every step of the creation, why he has this dream, why this dream, how this dream is important to the story. I didn't want to work this way, I wanted to show, okay, I remember having this dream, and I remember it's like this to me, this way with this person, and I want it to be much more like the sort of image that you carry. I used myself as an emotional authority. I remember going through some of the emotional that Stephane goes through, and the insanity of the pain I was going through, and I said, "okay, well I'm suffering but I'm going to use that in my film." So I don't think this could fit into the process of doing a movie with a big studio and having to show...

EEW: Everything you did you'd have to justify.

MG: Yeah. I mean, I'm not against the big movies. You just have to know what type of movie you're making.

EEW: What kind of projects do you have coming up?

MG: I'm just finishing this movie called Be Kind, Rewind, with Jack Black, Mos Def, Mia Farrow and Danny Glover. It's a story about two guys who erase all the tapes from their video store by mistake, but they reshoot the films themselves.

EEW: Sounds good. You didn't write that, I'm guessing.

MG: Oh yeah, I wrote that.

EEW: You did?

MG: Yeah, I think I'm gonna write now, because I think it's part of my work. I think, in some ways now, I need to write my own material.

EEW: What would you rather be remembered for right now, if you had to pick one thing out of all your work?

MG: Right now I'm really psyched about The Science of Sleep. It's very personal, it affects me. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm learning a lot. I don't get embarrassed by what I'm doing because I'm not trying to be somebody else.