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"I always hated pretentious commercials and videos before I started directing,
not following the typical and saying that people are all fashion. It has
always been my goal to make people feel alright when they watch my work."
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credit
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Michel Gondry was born and raised in Versailles, France. Now in his early forties,
his repertoire of short films is astounding. He has scripted
inspiring imagery in the form of commercials, music videos, short films, two
feature films, and other work. He is at least partially credited with reviving the music-video format in the 1990's. He has been named a
genius by many: from many of his collaborators, coworkers, and from
other directors like Spike Jonze, Joseph Kahn ("Gondry does it first and
best. Always."), and Roman Coppola; even Moltar likes Gondry.
Michel Gondry's age is deceiving, however: his works are marked with a
child-like explorative eye. Both fun and adventurous, like old-school hip-hop
Gondry's works are his playground. He tells stories about people and their
lives, while questioning our definitions of reality. His characters reflect
us. And his worlds playfully reflect the interaction between the worlds we
live in: nature, society, and the mind.
The turning point of his career was Björk. As the story goes, the
Icelandic woman saw a few of his videos, including his sixth video for
his band Oui Oui,
La Ville
. After some exchanging of ideas, they created
her debut solo video,
Human Behaviour,
a video which is unforgettable. Not
only did it pique people's interest of Gondry, it revived interest in the
then-stuttering music video industry.
That was 1993. Between then and now he has persistently kept viewers' lips
pursed. As each of his works (most of which he doesn't even own) is released,
one finds him completely rearranging old techniques into new patterns,
finding new ways to tell stories, and just having fun.
Since the release of Gondry's first feature film
Human Nature
, and
much more successful second feature
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
, he produced a film he wrote called
The Science of Sleep
. In the meantime, besides more video and commercial work, he's found time to work on
Dave Chappelle's Block Party
. His first attempt at feature film, an adaptation of the comic-book The Green Hornet, was benched and looks to be forgotten.
Oh, wait. Before we leave, perhaps we should let the man speak for himself.
The following text comes courtesy the mini-biography of Gondry found in
Björk's book Post. The interview was conducted by Sjón
Sigurdsson.
"As a child I was interested in the possibilities that Lego and Meccano
opened up, to create and invent new discoveries. My cousin and I used Meccano
to build a prototype cartoon machine, quite similar to the zoetrope. It
was a black circle with a gap to look at the little drawings. One of the
stories we drew was about a journey in which you fractal zoom from a larger
infinity to a smaller infinity. It started in space, with the planets,
and then closed in on the Earth, then the continents, the countries and
cities, the streets and the houses, down through a chimney, deep into the
wood and right into the little atoms. Then it zoomed back out to the planets
again. It was about a minute long, and we were 12 years old.
"These days my cousin is an architect, but he is still interested in inventions.
He loves the idea of visual stereo and he's discovered a machine that draws
in 3D. As you can imagine it's quite complicated. You draw into the air
with a cursor that's connected to two small arms, and each arm holds a
pen. If you trace over someone's face with the cursor, each pen draws it
from a slightly different angle. You can see the portrait in stereo when
you look at it with 3D glasses.
"As well as the cartoon machine, we used to make a lot of flip books. You
know, the ones where you draw a sequence of pictures and flip them fast
so they seem to move. We did one with a story about a man who goes to the
toilet. This hand comes up out of the toilet and grabs his penis and then
drags it through all the pipes.
"At the time we were very interested in horrific images, gore; when you're
young there's stuff you have to shit out and you like horror. Later you
progress to other things but it's important at that age.
"I was drawing from a very young age. I liked it. When people know you
can draw they ask you to draw different things, so it's as though you're
already part of society. If you're good at drawing you have a social role,
however young you are. And you produce something tangible at the same time
as being creative.
"Drawing also increases your status at school. I was the best draughtsman
in my class, and I was able to teach the other boys how to draw naked women.
It was a very simple picture made out of three lines and they soon picked
it up.
"You could say I came from a musical family. My grandfather, Constant Martin,
invented one of the first keyboards. It was a little synthesizer called
a Clavioline and I think 100,000 were sold in the UK alone. You'd stick
it next to the piano and if you wanted to play the trumpet it would imitate
one, in a shitty but charming kind of a way. My grandfather had an electronic
church organ shop, which also did very well. Soon all the old pipe organs
were replaced by electronic ones.
"Then my father took over the shop. Of course my father was much more into
pop culture. He started selling electric guitars and was very cool. But
pretty soon he was bankrupt because he'd just give the instruments away.
If a young hippie really wanted one of his guitars or keyboards, but couldn't
afford it, my father would practically let them have it.
"My family was a little bit like Pop family -- you know, like the families
you could see in progressive sex education books at the end of the Sixties.
On the first page you'd see the whole family out in the woods in flared
blue jeans and then you'd turn the page and they'd all be standing naked,
to let you know how good they were feeling together.
"We listened a lot to pop music, rhythm and blues, and my father was a
big Duke Ellington fan. So I never got into music as some sort of reaction
to my parents. I didn't have to use music to throw shit back at my parents.
They gave me lots of freedom in thinking. I just listened to the music
I had always liked.
"Before he lost the shop my father gave me a drum kit and my brother a
bass guitar. We formed a couple of bands together, that played punk rock...or
maybe it was more like New Wave...and that's how I got into music. Then
when I left Versailles to go to art college in Paris I formed the band
Oui Oui with some friends from college."
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