French director Michel Gondry exorcises his demons through his complex, captivating films. It's better than therapy, he tells Donald Clarke.
When Michel Gondry, the director of such peculiar diversions as Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, first began travelling to the US, he had a very uncertain grasp of the English language. Previously the drummer in Oui Oui, a modestly successful rock band, the young Frenchman had begun to establish a reputation for startlingly original pop videos, for which, shunning the temptations of computer graphics, he knocked together unsettling new worlds from brown paper and duct tape.
The hippest figures in the music business - Björk, Radiohead and The Chemical Brothers - wanted a piece of the Gondry magic. There was just one problem: he could barely understand a word of the artists' lyrics.
"In life, when you don't understand something but try and make sense of things, that can be a very creative act," he explains. "When I have vague information, but don't quite understand, I force myself to imagine the original idea. Some of my most creative acts can come from misunderstandings."
More than a decade has passed since Gondry established his reputation as the most imaginative of video directors. He has, in that time, created an endlessly inventive array of commercials, documentaries and short films. The producers of The Matrix, eager to help Keanu Reeves dodge bullets, adapted an arresting visual effect he devised for a Smirnoff commercial and renamed it "bullet time".
He has won an Oscar for co-writing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But, for all that time spent among Anglophone superstars, his English remains stubbornly eccentric and he continues to bring the same creative approach to answering questions as he does to interpreting the lyrics of Beck or The White Stripes. Ask him something mundane and he will begin to address sensitive issues that you would never dare raise. Maybe he thinks he's answering an entirely different question.
For example, The Science of Sleep, Gondry's psychedelically perplexing new film, dissects a shy young man's passionate affection for the girl who lives across the hall. Taking place as much in the world of dreams as in the material universe, the picture is apparently based on the director's own experience. Can this really be so?
"Oh yes. A dream made me know that I was falling in love with this particular person," he says. "She worked on the film. She made many of the models. So I made this film really as a way of getting together with this person. When I cast Gael García Bernal in the main role, I realised he was super good-looking and I worried. It has to be realistic that she would not love him, so I asked this girl and she said: 'Make him be really mean to her'. I don't know what that means."
HOW ODD. SO Michel is in love with this woman and, to demonstrate that fondness and to bring him in closer contact with her, he makes a film about an obsessive named Stéphane lusting after a girl named Stéphanie. Couldn't he just have given the poor woman a bunch of flowers?
"We watched the film together and she liked it very much. She was very proud," he continues. "But it didn't help our relationship very much. In fact it may have made it worse. I think I scared her with my feelings. I just need to detach from her and maybe she will then come back to me. The problem, I realised, is she liked me for my work, rather than for myself. To me, the work and I are the same thing. But not for her."
Phew! A stringy character with tight curly hair, Gondry - as you will have gathered from the exchange above - likes nothing better than spreading peculiarity about the place. A glance at his biography suggests that he may have been this strange throughout his 43 years.
Born and raised in Versailles, with a computer programmer for a dad and a concert pianist for a mum, Michel developed an interest in photography while still a teenager. Rather than photographing aeroplanes or butterflies, he dedicated his days to grabbing furtive images of a female acquaintance (who would later go out with his brother).
When he wasn't stalking the locals, Gondry spent his time putting together household detritus to form elaborate structures. To this day, he is unsure if he was making machines or art.
"I always liked to construct things, whether it was from Lego or Meccano or cardboard. I would make cars that were driven by balloons, that sort of thing. I liked to be rewarded by having something tangible at the end of my work, but I always wanted to be an artist. That is for sure."
The key elements of the Gondry aesthetic came together in the 1980s. Early on in the decade, he went to art school to study weaving and tapestry. 1n 1988, he joined Oui Oui and began using those crafts in the creation of gorgeous, creepy little stop-motion videos.
EVENTUALLY, ONE OF his films came the way of Björk and, sensing a similar psyche, the Icelandic singer commissioned the Frenchman to make her next video. Gondry quite rapidly became one of the trendiest men in the world. Part of the pleasure of his work comes from its apparent home-made quality. Indeed, much of it looks as if it might have been flung together by the Blue Peter team. Whereas the pioneers of pop video focused on spaceships and explosions, Gondry used Lego to animate The White Stripes and dressed dancers in rudimentary skeleton costumes for a Daft Punk promo.
He could easily have spent the rest of his life directing videos and commercials, but a screening of a Björk video at the Electric Cinema in London suddenly woke him up to the possibilities of the big screen.
"I was suddenly filled with awe by how the film looked at that size," he explained. "I wanted to try to do a movie just so it is projected on a big screen. I like the idea that people have decided to buy a ticket and sit there for a while. That is the sole reason they are coming in there. You are not invading their space, like on television. They are volunteering."
Sadly, there were few volunteers for Gondry's first feature. Human Nature, in which a very hairy man fails to integrate into society, was every bit as wacky as one might expect, but failed to find a significant audience. By way of contrast, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which reunited Michel with Charlie Kaufman, writer of Human Nature, became a significant cult hit and won an Oscar for best original screenplay.
"Yes it was my story, so I got an Oscar as well as Charlie and my colleague Pierre Bismuth," he says, shaking his head. "It is amazing. It was strange, really, because my statue was the same size as Charlie's, but I don't think it had the same meaning. I stood at the back when we went up and was told I didn't have to speak."
Though Eternal Sunshine - a bizarre romance based on another of his own relationships - did not make a fortune, it confirmed Gondry as the most fashionable of contemporary film-makers. Having had a pad in London for a spell, he now lives with his 15-year-old son in New York, where such extreme modishness remains the most durable of currencies.
WORK IS NEVER in short supply. His name alone can attract stars to his films. For all that, The Science of Sleep does not play like the labours of a happy man. The fabulous recreations of dreams using cardboard cars and fabric horses are certainly charming, but the central relationship between Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg is characterised by impotence and frustration. The film is funny, but filled with dread.
"A lot of these dreams are my own dreams," he says. "Now I am not saying my dreams are made out of toilet paper rolls like those in the film. But dreams really affect me. I remember once I had this dream where I was the French actor Patrick Dewaere and I was trying to kill myself in a car. I woke up and I was really worried. Because Dewaere did kill himself and I thought maybe this meant I could kill myself."
Good grief.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Gondry is using his weird, captivating films as a way of exorcising various sexual and psychological hang-ups. The ease with which he opens up to strangers suggests that he doesn't spend much time bottling up his anxieties, but The Science of Sleep - delightful, frustrating, baffling - still looks very like an exercise in auto-psychoanalysis.
"I did go to an analyst once," he says. "But I stopped because he was going to charge me for the time it took to watch my videos. He said it would be crossing a line otherwise. Really though, making films is like therapy in one big way: it doesn't work. At least this way I am getting a movie out of it and I am getting paid."
The Science of Sleep opens in selected cinemas on Friday