Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
I love the times I've spent with Michel Gondry over the last couple of year. When we met up at SXSW earlier this month, it was the third time I've interviewed him, and it probably helps the whole process that I think the man is a visionary genius. His mind as a filmmaker, commercial and music video director, and maker of all manner of documentaries (both long and short) works like no other, yet when he discusses his view of the world, it always makes sense and seems exceedingly organic. He also has a wicked sense of humor, despite sometimes coming across as terribly serious. If you don't own his two collections of music videos and other short works, you're certifiably insane. This is essential viewing; I'll let you borrow my copies if need be.
But beginning with HUMAN NATURE (his first feature), and continuing on through what remains his masterwork, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, followed by THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, DAVE CHAPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY, BE KIND REWIND, and his "Interior Design" segment for the anthology collection TOKYO!, Gondry shows not just a willingness but an insistence of defying each and every expectation placed upon him as a feature director. Not all of these films were great, and some had deep flaws, but each and every one was a statement of great originality and was made exactly how Gondy wanted them made.
The world waits for his take on Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's screenplay for THE GREEN HORNET, but in the meantime, Gondry managed to squeeze in his first feature-length documentary, THE THORN IN THE HEART, and not surprisingly, he continues to defy expectations but making this not a visual tour de force, but a simply told tale of someone very close to him, his aunt Suzette, who spent most of her life as a teacher during some sometimes-violently changing times in France's history. Gondry takes Suzette and her now grown son, Jean-Yves, to some of the places where she has so many of her most vivid memories, and they discover some startling things about the times and the family.
THORN is an exquisite, fragile, and painstakingly constructed work that strips away many of the myths we often tell about our own families. It's a lovely film, and I hope it gets some play in theaters (it is being distributed by Oscilloscope Pictures, and special thanks to Lauren Schwartz from Oscilloscope for making this interview happen). Actually the film will be opening in New York City this week at the Village East, where Gondry will be doing Q&As both Friday and Saturday night. He's always so much fun to talk with, so fans should flock to these screenings. Check directly with the theater about exact showtimes.
Gondry and I cover a lot of ground during our talk, including some more details about GREEN HORNET. Without further adieu, please enjoy Michel Gondry…
Michel Gondry: You are from Chicago, yes?
Capone: Indeed, although the last time I saw you was a Comic-Con when you unveiled the Green Hornet's car Black Beuaty.
Michel Gondry: [laughs] We all decided at the last minute to take a jet. You take a jet and you go to Comic-Con and I took my son. It was wonderful.
Capone: Oh, our son was there, too?
MG: Yeah. We did a rap together. He is very good doing a beat box, and I was rhyming as I whipped out of the car.
[Both Laugh]
MG: It’s on YouTube, I think. You can see it.
Capone: Yeah, a lot of those are, because everyone filmed it.
MG: You have a nice recorder.
Capone: Thank you, it was expensive. [Laughs]
MG: The tape recorders are all different. I don’t see two of the same one.
Capone: Yeah, that’s probably true.
MG: This one is very interesting.
Capone: This is actually… A lot of people who bootleg concerts use this, because it has these very nice stereo microphones, but I would never used it for such nefarious purposes.
MG: Ahh, of course! [laughs]
Capone: Well when I saw you before we were talking GREEN HORNET, but now we will talk about families here. I think probably everyone thinks that there is something in their family or somebody in their family that is worth making a movie about or at least talking about. What made you decide to tell your aunt’s story.
MG: It’s a complicated question, is it worth making a film about, because I think you don’t know it until it’s done, and then when it’s done you put much of yourself and your friends, the people who worked on it on the subject you shot, that makes it worth putting out, because you can’t tell them, “Well, we made this film, but I don’t think it’s worth showing it.” So we are going to show it and see. This notion of worth it, there were a few people today who walked out and I understand that some people may not be interested in that, but the people who stayed, which was the majority of course [Laughs], had sort of an experience that was… It’s pretentious to say “profound,” but this idea that they see themselves in this character or see their family, it's not something that you necessarily see in a typical commercial movie, because it’s so manufactured, and it’s all conceived as a product. So they make you think that you are watching people like you, but they are all being acted by people who are totally removed from your life, and they live a different life. The life of a famous actor has nothing to do with the life of yourself or your family, so to see those people, I think it’s really worth it, because you realize that they are stars and there are tons of character and they have much, if not more, specificity to be looked at than the people you generally see on film.
Capone: You couldn’t write a character like your cousin.
MG: It’s true. He’s pretty extreme. [laughs] Yeah and he doesn’t really respond to any sort of expectation, but he has made his life up there by himself, and he is who he is in this. He went to visit me in Los Angeles when I was filming GREEN HORNET and he was always on the set taking pictures with his cell phone and he wore his bandana, and when we shot this big scene in the wasteland and it was all dusty and smoky, he used his his bandana to protect himself from the smoke, and it was completely appropriate. He was the only one to be really protected, so it made sense actually.
Capone: I like that it’s not just a story about your family; it’s in a lot of ways about you rediscovering your family. I think what a lot of people can identify with is that idea that you think you know your family when you are a child, but when you grow up and you hear the stories retold--even events that you experienced--you hear, “Well, here’s what really happened,” and it completely changes your perception of family.
MG: Yeah, that's true, and I think there is as well the part of the story that you hear and you perceive, so people tell you why they did this and that, so therefore they are not so great. But then if you take the story in hand and decide to explore it yourself, then you take control of it and you make your choice either of really liking those people for all of them or finding horrible truths or finding truths that are difficult, but you decide to… you understand. By being a film director, I had this chance to use a camera as a tool for me to take control of those feelings and those questions I had, so ultimately I decided to share it with the world, but in the beginning I really wanted to put light on some shade in some parts of this part of the family that I was really attached to. People didn’t really understand why I was so attached to this part of my family.
Capone: I think it’s pretty clear after watching this film. It’s interesting to also turn it into a walk through your aunt’s life and the different place that she taught. The segment I particularly like was the one where she talked about the Arab students joining her class and the reaction in the community. That’s not something people outside of France will quite understand, I don’t think, but I’ve heard about those times, and to hear it first hand from her perspective was really fascinating.
MG: Yeah, it’s the story of when Algeria was a colony of France, like a lot of countries in Africa and North Africa and Indochina. France, like England and all of those countries, misbehaved terribly with the world. So in the end they harmed people of Algeria, and the people felt dominated by foreigners, so they fought for their freedom and some of the people fought against their own people on the side of the French.
So when the French lost this sort of war, they had to do something with those people. They were not French, but they were not Algerian anymore, and they went France and lived in a camp, not a concentration camp, but still a camp. We are talking about their children, who were kids completely misplaced and some of them, like the one we see, enjoyed it, because its in their spirits. We talked to one who was very bitter about it, but we couldn’t show it, because we had to make a choice. This reminds me, I should put that in one of the DVD bonuses, there was an aspect of some of those people who were really up and done by France, and this guy really enjoyed it and he has a good life. He has in him this adaptation, like he remembers the flowers and the snow as something magical, and the other guy, when we were talking with him he was complaining about how cold it was and how misplaced he was and both were existing. It’s how your own nature makes you adapt or not to certain situations.
Capone: Does working on these documentaries, because you’ve done a few short ones as well, does that sort of cleanse the pallet between the bigger more involved feature films that you do?
MG: Well, I am more involved in the documentaries, I would say. Even if they are usually smaller and obviously less expensive. They involve me in a more profound way, because I’m exploring who I am or where I come from. I think especially after putting my focus on people who are already in the light of the audience and the public, and therefore their life has been taped. So they aren’t part of real life in my sense and so going away from that and going back to people who are really emerging in real life, it’s not necessarily reassuring, but you need to look at those people to understand who you are if only to see how life is. It’s nice going back and forth between them both, because when I do fiction with an actor who is sort of separated from real life, I need to give them direction and tell them how regular people would behave. Then I need to remember sometimes, I have my memory of my behavior of myself to give them direction to understand, because I try to keep in touch with the reality of things. But as well as looking at my auntie and my cousin and see their real life problems allows me to sort of reload my batteries, to go into an artificial world and try to give it a sense of existence.
Capone: Are you worried that 20 or 30 years from now your son might make a film that looks back on his experience with you and reveals the truth?
MG: [laughs] No, he already does. He’s 18 and he makes drawings that reveals who I am or he tells me anyways. I’m not worried. I know what to expect and it’s going to be terrible.
Capone: Before they close us down here, you now have an Oscar-winning actor in GREEN HORNET, which is very exciting. Obviously, I haven’t seen anything from the film, certainly not where Christoph Waltz is concerned. What did he add to the movie?
MG: I think in this type of movie, the villain has to correspond to a certain criteria to fulfill an expectation. I think he pushes this boundary a little further or at least on the side of creating a character. It’s really funny, because one time the villain was a little stereotypical and one time we were having a party with Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, his writing partner, and our girlfriends. They were playing a videogame, and I drank tequila and revealed the part of the villain and they didn’t like it, but there was one sentence that was saved, and Christopher, when he read the sentence, he didn’t know it was coming from me, but my broken English was becoming my friend and he really liked the fact that his character, Chudnofsky, couldn’t really express himself in a normal way, and then they rewrote some of his part based on my broken English, so that created a really strange character, to say the least.
Capone: He rewrote it?
MG: With the writers of course, but they were very… That’s a great thing about Evan and Seth Rogen is that they really are not control freaks. They are two kids who have become extremely successful by just being themselves and they don’t have the baggage of struggling to become a star. They are very open minded, so they didn’t mind that.
Capone: A lot of the talk for a while was about casting Kato, because when I saw you at Comic Con, you still weren’t there yet. But not long after Jay Chou became your guy, who I have seen in one film before and he’s a gifted actor… This is the film that’s probably going to open up a lot of doors for him I think it’s safe to say.
MG: Hopefully, yes. He was excellent. He barely spoke English, but everything he does has so much coolness. It’s funny, because with Seth, who is also a producer, I'd got to him and say “What should I tell him?” And he would tell me ,“Don’t tell him anything, because he’s going to come up with the coolest thing ever.”
[Both Laugh]
Capone: Was Seth willing to let him be the cool one?
MG: Yeah. It was interesting, because Seth is very fit for the movie, so he's not just a funny guy, he's like a normal super hero in some way, but of course he’s Seth Rogen, so he has this sweet charisma and humor, but he’s very very human, which I like. But then when all of the costumes were done we started to do the camera tests, I could feel he was a little complexed by it, the awesomeness of Jay Chou, and I would feel his insecurities. I thought that was a good thing for the role, because their relationship, which is at the core of the film, is about Seth first sort of… not being condescending toward Kato. Kato is a very poor character, and Seth is very rich, so he gave him a home and is generous in this way, but at the same time, he is very perplexed by Kato who has so many qualities that he might doubt about himself, so this dynamic was there already, and it was very interesting.
Capone: That’s terrific. I cannot wait to see it. I know that when they moved the release date to December, Seth seemed excited, because he could now… I might see you at Comic Con again, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
MG: Yeah, one more Comic-Con!
Capone: He wants to show footage. Is that terrifying to show something that far out from when it’s released?
MG: No. I knew the world of comic books from the independent comic books, which have nothing to do with the superhero thing, and the superhero comic books are interesting, because it’s people who are very much like they claim the right to own their character and even like the Green Hornet, which is barely known as a comic book doesn’t really exist at all. I read in blogs how upset people are that I am directing. “How dare I!” “How dare I direct that! It’s not my style.” And “Seth Rogen is going to be goofy!” It’s funny, because to start with there is not a real entity. There was a radio show that was around in the '40s and then a TV show in the '60s with Bruce Lee, which is what led to most his going into films. It was what helped Bruce Lee become who he was from this character of Kato, who had so little to do in the story, so they claim that we are going to ruin it. What is to be ruined? I find that funny, so we have to live with it and hopefully they will be convinced of that. I think we respected the characters and give them a good story.
Capone: It’s difficult to ruin something that a lot of people aren’t that familiar with to begin with.
MG: I know, but the few that are familiar are even more possessive of it.
[We are given a sign to wrap up.]
Capone: In watching THE THORN IN THE HEART, it made me realize that it’s always good to make a point to go and speak to the older members of my family and dig for those stories. That’s what I got out of the film and that I think is so important. Thank you for reminding of that.
MG: I’m glad you're saying that. It’s true, because in the way society is organized in the western countries is that you sort of get rid of the elderly, because they are a burden, unlike before when you would keep them in the family, you would support them and, in return, they would give you their wisdom. We lost that a little bit, and I always as a kid was interested, like my grandfather was an inventor and I would listen to his story and my auntie was a teacher. I remember my grandmother and I was the only child to really appreciate that and I don’t know why. It made me more curious and more knowledgeable in my laziness to avoid reading about it, as I didn’t read much. But I was listening to my family and I learned a lot.
Capone: There are many ways to pick up stories. Reading is one of them, but listening is another. As always, it’s good to see you, and hopefully we will see you at Comic-Con.
MG: Thank you so much.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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