Michel Gondry
Michel Gondry
Michel Gondryis a French independent film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is noted for his inventive visual style and distinctive manipulation of mise en scène. He won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as one of the writers of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is often ranked one of the greatest films of the 2000s...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth8 May 1963
CityVersailles, France
CountryUnited States of America
My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks.
It's very hard to say I'm surrealist. It's like saying I'm poetic. It's not something you want necessarily to be aware of.
I don't like those shows where people get eliminated every week, and then they have to get meaner to survive.
I don't like the idea of competition - maybe because I kept losing them when I was a kid. Maybe it's better to be the one who loses?
Perhaps my favourite story is 'Le Passe-Muraille' by Marcel Ayme. It's about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He's a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.
I've dreamed a lot, but i'm not a very good sleeper.
There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.
I had a lot of encouragement and tolerance from my parents, but I also have many friends who didn't get that from their parents and in a way they have more strength from spending years where nobody believed in them.
I learned to drive when I was 35. I'm driving like an old lady and very close to the wheel. I don't take many risks, and when people yell at me I say 'sorry, sorry, sorry!' I don't have road rage yet.
The beauty of doing # film is that you construct whatever you do block by block and you can build something that will stay.
Sometimes, when people use too much blue screen in movies, the actors don't look credible, because they have their own opinion of what the thing will look like, and each person has a different opinion.
When people are very original, sometimes they are original as a way to resist the mainstream.
At school I was very shy. I wasn't funny really.
The problem is, with a lot of children's films, they are very commercial.