Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
I continue to love the times I've spent with Michel Gondry over the last couple of year. When we met up at Comic-Con last year, it was the fourth time I've interviewed him, and it probably helps the whole process that I think the man is a visionary genius.
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.
As GREEN HORNET co-screenwriter Evan Goldberg reminded me, when Gondry was first brought over to Hollywood from France in 1997, the film he was asked to take a crack at was THE GREEN HORNET, albeit a radically different take on the material as scripted by himself and ROBOCOP screenwriter Edward Neumeier. Gondry wanted Vince Vaughn to play Britt Reid; the studio wanted Mark Wahlberg. Both agreed on Jason Scott Lee as Kato. "Creative differences" killed the project. According to Goldberg, Gondry brought a few of the ideas he'd had for his version of that story to the current film, and the result is another visually inventive, fun as hell superhero story about a guy trying to find a way to help people without appearing to do so. Trust me, you'll dig it.
Anyway, here's my brief interview with the always-enjoyable director of THE GREEN HORNET, Michel Gondry…
Capone: How are you sir?
Michel Gondry: Hi, Steve, how are you? Good to see you again.
Capone: The last time was in Austin, with your documentary, right? But now you have actually finished the movie.
MG: Well, not completely finished. We're still editing.
Capone: But you’ve shot it and actually I guess in March you were done shooting, correct?
MG: Yeah, then we were just beginning to edit and now we are in a much stronger place.
Capone: Right. So [co-screenwriter] Evan [Goldberg] was telling me that he and Seth had always wanted to do this movie in 3D and that they are kind of glad that they didn’t shoot it that way, because there were some interesting visual elements that were made possible by not shooting that way. What do you think of having it converted?
MG: Well, we just worked on a sequence and it just emerges you in the story. And I just showed it to my sister, who is like 22 or something, and she was blown away. I mean there is no doubt you see a 3D movie. It doesn’t look like a 3D conversion, in my opinion and their opinion. What's more, as I said the 3D helped to get through the story. There’s an element of how Kato envisioned the fight, we are popping out into the 3D and we play with that, and the fight that we shot 2D and converted to 3D… I mean in some occasions, you wish you had done it with two cameras, but a lot of times, it would have slowed down the process of shooting, so we would have maybe had less good performances. And you can really control what element you put in the foreground, how you separate the image. It’s pretty awesome.
Capone: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, the "Katovision." Can you explain that a little bit?
MG: Well, there are two stages with this vision. One is he sort of stops time with things going very slow, and we go inside his eye and we see things how he sees them. I have to be honest with it, it doesn’t occur a million times in the movie, it occurs maybe two times, and so I think sometime I’m overselling it, and people ask me a lot about it. So taking it proportionally, I’m not exactly reflecting the film. I don’t want people to feel cheated. But for those instances, you see the fight, he accesses the position of everybody and there is this sort of videogame outline projected onto every object. Then when he fights, he gets faster than everybody, so we change the speed of the film--different speeds for different characters--one is moving faster and the other is going slow, and the camera is still moving, so it gives a sort of time-stretch feeling. It’s hard to explain, and I don’t want to sound like it’s something entirely pretentious, it’s just a different way to show the action. It’s not the typical slow motion, where everybody is slowed down. There is a different show between the different characters.
Capone: Is that something that you came up?
MG: I came up with it.
Capone: That sounds like something you would come up with.
MG: To be honest, when THE MATRIX came out, I was a little pissed off, because I had developed some techniques that I couldn’t do anymore at the time, which was very much something I developed for a video I did for The Rolling Stones years before.
Capone: That’s right. I remember that video. It’s on one of your collections, right?
MG: Yeah and so I was a little upset. And the fact that I had never really had a big budget to use all of these techniques that I had learned over the years through the videos was frustrating. So when I got the opportunity to do THE GREEN HORNET, I said “Okay, I’m going to use my specialty and my techniques and my secrets to do the fighting.”
Capone: Right, so you didn’t have to use it on a music video.
MG: No, no, I'm careful now. When I did THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP, I decided to shoot the main actor swimming in a tank full of water with a back projection behind. This idea I had for ten years, and I had never seen anyone do that and I refrained from using it in a video, because I wanted to save it for a film.
Capone: Tell me a little bit about having Christoph Waltz in the film, because he was sort of a later addition and to be the first one to get him after INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS had to be a really great feeling.
MG: Yeah. He’s awesome, and that was great. He came on board and he brought an edge to the bad guy. Yeah, he definitely is not your normal guy, and it's pretty interesting how we use him.
Capone: By also pushing the release date to January now… I know people get nervous when they hear about the conversion process, because it’s rarely done right, but you are giving it a lot more time than a lot of other people have given themselves.
MG: I think we did a pretty good job on this first clip.
Capone: So we are going to see something today?
MG: Yeah. We want to make it right. We really love the 3D effect. It’s not something that the studio put upon us; it’s us who put it upon us to do. Seth, Evan, and I, we have been bugging them from the beginning to do it in 3D.
Capone: I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got for us. Thanks a lot, Michel. Good to see you again.
MG: Thank you.
-- Capone capone@aintitcool.com
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