Eternally Brilliant: Michel Gondry
Words: The Editors
"I simply take an idea and keep pushing it to an extreme."
Michel Gondry's clear-cut motto has spawned an astounding body of work that includes some of the best music videos ever made and now two feature films, each of which folds in the director's often humorous and uncanny effects to create touchingly human stories. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, is Gondry's newest film, and combines the director's trademark visual quirks with a mind-bending story about memory and identity from a script penned by Charlie Kaufman, who gained a peculiar sort of notoriety after the release of Spike Jonze's Adaptation, and who also wrote Gondry's first effort, Human Nature, as well as Jonze's Being John Malkovich. Eternal Sunshine is a knockout, at once charming and polished, and yet totally Gondry. It will squelch scurrilous questions regarding his ability to direct a feature, but more than that, the film firmly establishes Gondry's unique vision, which in all its idiosyncratic, personal glory, may be one of the most apt for our era.
Check out the complete article in the current issue of RES, which comes with an updated Gondry videography in which the director shares his thoughts about his video corpus. You can check out a few of Gondry's more recent videos in the player above, and read his thoughts on them below.
Björk | Bachelorette | 1997
"The idea was to carry on with this journey with Björk. She said, 'We did the video when I was in the forest. Now I'd like to be this character again, only I'm trying to make it in the city, and I meet somebody and I have this love story and it doesn't work really, so I come back to the forest and I?m happy ever after.' I took that and came up with the concept of the story within a story within a story to create a spiral like the Russian puppet."
Chemical Brothers | Let Forever Be | 1999
"My first video using DV. I always liked the TV shows from the '70s where they mixed up different sources, when it was outside it was shot on film, when it was inside it was shot in video and they don?t care because it is not aesthetic, it is just about a funny story. I really like the contrast between video and film, except it was the opposite. Every time the girl was outside we shot on video, and every time she was inside on set we shot on film. The idea was to reproduce a video effect [feedback loop] with choreography."
Chemical Brothers | Star Guitar | 2002
co-directed with Olivier "Twist" Gondry
"The idea was to take the most mundane images and recompose them to create a landscape representation of the song. The difficulty was to push it far enough to make the concept clear, but not too far to make you believe you are still watching a regular train window. We shot one train trip in DV 10 times to have a different quality of light at different times of the day."
The White Stripes | Fell in Love With a Girl | 2002
"I really like the basic-ness of the music -- one voice, one guitar and one drum. I like this concept, and I thought it was very close to the primary color of the Lego blocks. We shot a very basic video of the band, we edited it and then we had a program that pixelized the video, roughly the size of the Lego blocks and then we printed each frame [25 frames per second] on paper. Then we had an animation team building up Lego blocks to match each frame. Then we reshot each of those frames on a film camera. We didn't have enough Legos to do more than five frames at a time, so after five frames were shot [the Legos] were demolished to build the next five frames."
The White Stripes | Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground | 2002
"We used the same location two different times. We shot it one location and the next day, we projected what we shot so it would match on every angle. The idea was that it would be like the memory of the house when Jack was away."
