“I had this utopian concept well before I was a video director, I was imagining a system where people make their own films, and then watch them together.”
I’m speaking with Academy Awardwinning writer and director Michel Gondry about his new film. A native of Versailles, France, Gondry has a reputation for producing fiercely imaginative work with a surreal look and feel. In person he’s relaxed, affable, and speaks in an unapologetically-thick French accent.
Your parents probably know Gondry as the guy who co-wrote and directed 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but he is best known to us kids for his arty music videos for Daft Punk (“Around the World”), Foo Fighters (“Everlong”), Radiohead (“Knives Out”), and The White Stripes (“The Hardest Button to Button”) among many others.
He’s eager to discuss his new project, Be Kind Rewind, a movie that advocates his own brand of DIY creativity in opposition to the lazy detachment of mass-media corporate consumption.
“I took the principle that people could create their own entertainment instead. Imagine someone who works all the week and on the weekend they don’t know what to do except to go and see a movie. This is giving the money they earned from one corporation to another.”
Gondry would rather see people take creative control themselves, and discover that engaging in a cooperative art project can be more rewarding than just passively enjoying a finished product.
Be Kind Rewind, which hits theatres on Feb. 22, hits on this theme in an inventive way. It tells the story of a local, independent, VHS-only video shop in Passaic, New Jersey. Mike (Mos Def) is left in charge of the store but his spacecadet best friend Jerry (Jack Black) accidentally becomes magnetized and inadvertently erases the store’s entire catalogue. The duo are then forced to frantically remake the erased films on the fly using only a decades-old shoulder- mount video camera and debris scavenged from Jerry’s junkyard. In doing so they both become local celebrities, and copyright criminals.
The plot is standard “save the store” formula, but what makes it better than Empire Records is that Gondry infuses it with his trippy, trademark style and a strong political message about community consciousness and participation in the arts.
For Gondry, amateur filmmaking should be more about connection and satisfaction rather than quality, “I truly believe that it doesn’t matter if the movie is good or bad. That’s not the point. Nobody can argue with me. I’m not saying ‘this movie is better than a movie in Hollywood.’ I’m saying ‘if you’re in the movie you’re going to enjoy it better.’”
To this end, Gondry soaked up as much locality as possible into the film. “We really put our faith in Passaic and we really tried to incorporate as many people from the neighbourhood as possible, and that was a great experience.”
Still, Be Kind Rewind is certainly not the amateur film-club project that Gondry is demonstrating in the script. Unlike the characters in his film, he had to be a realist and make certain concessions to the big business of movie-making.
“I wish we could shoot every scene in chronological order, so we don’t have to group scenes with the same actor,” he says. “It would be great because then the actors would understand their characters much better.”
At the heart of Be Kind, of course, are the clever remakes, which play up Gondry’s knack for finding creative lo-fi ways to simulate special effects. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Boyz n the Hood, Men in Black, The Lion King, among many other blockbusters, all get the Gondry treatment here.
“Some of the films I chose were ones I really like, Robocop or Ghostbusters, and some of the movies were inspired by Dave Chappelle. He said ‘Oh you should do Driving Miss Daisy because it’s so racist, and you should do Rush Hour 2 because it will be hilarious.’”
Interestingly enough, the selection ultimately hinged on Gondry ability to secure the rights to reproduce each film, which is specifically what the characters in Be Kind Rewind do not do. In fact, Gondry tells me that he was unable to attain the rights to include a remake of Back to the Future, which was in the original script, but had to be cut due to its upcoming remount as a Broadway musical.
This is unfortunate for two reasons: seeing Jack Black play Marty McFly would have been amazing, and secondly, Gondry would have been able to dabble with his pet interest: time travel.
“Yesterday I was at MIT talking to a physicist about time travel,” he says enthusiastically, “and he said you could travel into the future if you put your vessel in orbit around a black hole—obviously you don’t want to go too close because if you go across the event horizon you will be screwed— but there is a place that you will be going so fast that if you stay in orbit, and then return to earth, you will be thousands of years in the future.”
Gondry then reveals that he is working on a new time-travel themed story. “It’s about two kids at MIT who make this discovery of this water that when you drink it you can hear music. They are enemies with this guy who works in quantums and he has this project on time travel, and he denounces what they are doing. So they go one night to sabotage his lab but they get sucked into the future.”
Looking into his own future, Gondry says he has plans to debut a short film he just shot in Tokyo, and then shoot music videos for both Mos Def and Bjork (who he’s worked with many times before). I ask him if there’s anyone he hasn’t made a music video for, who he really wants to work with. “Yes, Serge Gainsbourg, but he’s dead, or Michael Jackson, but he’s out of his mind.”
I press him for a more realistic answer.
“I want to make a video for Peaches,” he says, “she’s from Toronto, and I had an idea where a guy with a suitcase comes out of a suitcase with another suitcase and then somebody comes out of that suitcase with another suitcase, and another suitcase, you know, forever.”
This infinite digression is something Gondry loves to feature in his work, even in Be Kind. For this movie about low-budget movie remakes, he’s shot a low-budget remake of the trailer where he plays every part.
Since Be Kind Rewind fetishizes the now-archaic VHS tape, I ask him if he still owns a VHS player.
With a laugh he replies, “Yeah, but I’m too lazy to use it.”
