An Interview with Gondry & Kaufman

Director Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman have been bounding around the country for press and presenting the movie on campuses and other venues with Q&As. It's the same manner of dog-and-pony the shy, reluctant-to-photographed Kaufman followed with Spike Jonze to get out the word about Adaptation. (Publicists for Focus Features had advised journos that any cameras might cause a bit of awkwardness.) The script for The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (with story credited to Gondry and French artist
Pierre Bismuth), has a creatively convoluted timeline, likely aided by a longer-than-usual period for editing (which Adaptation also benefited from). It's the bittersweet story of how two ordinary lovers, the repressed and seething Joel (Jim Carrey, less of an alien than on the Oscars) and the outgoing, impulsive Clementine (Kate Winslet, making a fine, whimsicalm American) try to rub out the memory of each other. The Kaufman twist is the invention of a technology that erases selected memories from the lobes of the brain. Handy, for instance, after a particularly pissy break-up. Your friends get a card in the mail, telling them they've been erased from your memories. Now step off!

A big chunk of the story's loopy comedy comes from the messy efforts to get the job done by technicians Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood, the doctor who invented the technology (Tom Wilkinson) and Kirsten Dunst, the emotionally willful office assistant who lives to impress herself on older man Wilkinson's memories. Yet the besorrowed passages of Joel trying to cling to his memories of Clementine, good or bad, are the heart of Spotless Mind, and in the end, of an emotional simplicity that rises above the movie's absurdist premise. And the straightforward, sometimes ragged visual style is more of a piece with Gondry's accomplished video work than with Human nature, the best-forgotten first collaboration between Gondry and
Kaufman. I caught up with the pair in Chicago: soft-spoken Kaufman with the intense gaze; the torturously accented but charming Gondry in a Tintin-worthy green-and-yellow striped sweater.

Ray Pride: Tell me a little bit about Pierre Bismuth. I feel remiss, not having done my research. Does he exist or not?

Michel Gondry: Oh, no, no. He is a friend of mine. You think it is like we are trying to be smart?

RP: I didn't want to presume in this case, but things like that have been done before. So what are the essential stages from idea to script to the movie we have here?

MG: What it says, basically. The idea there is a card that you would receive and then we wrote the storyline, that Charlie and I pitched--

Charlie Kaufman : --Just Michel and I, Pierre at that point, was not involved.

RP: There was a hiccup, you were on another project and came back to this?

CK: Well, it wasn't really... What happened was, we sold the pitch. We went out and pitched it, not really expecting it to sell. I had never done a pitch before, didn't really now how it worked. At the same time, I was trying to get another job and I got that job a few days before we sold this. So I had to do that script first. That was a long project. So, yeah, I couldn't start on this right away.

RP: Who'd you pitch it to?

CK: We pitched it all over the town. We sold it to Propaganda, which was Steve Golin, which was acquired by USA, which became Focus.

RP: How much experimentation was there in the cutting of the movie and the matching of the music? It's a sweet, but diverse score by Jon Brion.

MG: Not too much. I did a lot of experimenting in my head so I know what to do. Music is not a process for me that will allow a lot of experiment. It comes quite late in the process. I wish it could come earlier. I mostly like the musician. We did some really cool experiments, actually. In fact, when we recorded the big orchestra, we did some abstract sounds with all the strings, all the wooden instruments. I had this idea of one shot, very suspenseful, should give to each string player a Tic Tac box. And when they would go like "ehn-ehn-ehn," in an abstract way, it would go like maracas or something during that. Very tense. We did some abstract music with all the music together. It is very funny to present 60 very skilled musicians that play randomly but in a range you give them. It doesn't sound dissonant. There's always harmony with these very precise instrumentation. But if you put some
electronics or play randomly, it winds up being very intense. So sometime you hear the orchestra going "hrrrRUM!" sometimes you can really direct them to go higher and higher in pitch.

RP: Like the idea that only a very good actor should try to play the role of a very bad actor?

MG: Yeah. I think it is about the number. It is like if you have a choir? Like maybe one or two sing out of tune but overall it seems choreographed.

RP: Is the movie entirely scored? Or are there slivers of cues drawn from pre-existing pop songs?

MG: There is this song from the 80s, the song that they play, the song that signifies Clementine to Joel.

CK: But in terms of the score, was anything used in the score-

RP: Selecting something from an older song you liked.

CK: I don't think there's any of that in this movie. The only thing that's old and recognizable is that he does a version of "My Darling Clementine."

MG: It's a reference to the melody, but [Jon Brion] transforms it.

CK: He's amazingly skilled. Just watching him come up with things. Just watching the movie, he'd work with a scene, changing it.

MG: I think we are going to see him tonight in Seattle.

CK: Oh really? Is he going to come to the Q&A?

MG: I tried to get in touch with him. He is really a very nice person to share time with.

RP: You have a couple of very talented women working on this, Ellen Kuras is your cinematographer, and your editor is Valdis Oskarsdottir. Do you an affinity toward working with women

MG: Yes! I feel like Prince. Surrounded by perky women. No, I mean, there is a strong relationship with them. Valdis, we kept fighting. There was nearly blood! It is amazing how much we would argue. Then the producer would tell me, okay, we'll just replace her. But I would fight for her, because I knew she was right for the female [point of view]. I had to put my
guts [aside] but I wanted the movie to be good. I would defend her to death. I would come back to thee editing room [then], and she would be so rude to me! It was so amazing! But I had to put my ego in my pocket. She is a very difficult person. She is so uncompromising. It is amazing. For one shot, she wanted to kill me. I told her to add one shot, she didn't put it. So I guess I'm a wimp! In the end, it was very important to have someone who was more than a technician, who could understand all of it, the feminine aspect of the script. Clementine's character is a big part of the story. I guess I like to work with women. But it's not I chose them in favor over men, it's just certain personalities.

RP: Not speaking of lighting or composition, but many of the shots are very simple. There are simple things that are touching, such as when Joel and Clementine are on the ice of the frozen lake at night, and at an acute diagonal behind them, there is a line of traffic, oncoming white lights continuously both visually and aurally.

MG: Basically, we went to this frozen river or lake for real. And we had to put all these lights to see something.. It became a little artificial. Usually, in a scene like in Titanic, you'd put stars in the sky. And I noticed we did one shot of the POV, and we just see the trail of cars in the distance. And I thought it would be more effective, more poetic than to put in stars, which is a cliche, y'know. When we were recording the dialogue, we could hear the cars, humming. I really liked that. Sometime you forget a detail, but when you talk [about it later], it becomes clearer.

CK: [to Gondry] It's interesting because we had, you were at that test screening in L.A., someone at a focus group was talking about that specific thing, the cars and how it was such a memory-feeling thing. It's been brought up a few times.

RP: And it's so simple. There's a complex image I really liked that in fact is a very simple conceit, as the memories are fading and the yellow Volkswagen beetle strips away in a few seconds, but as pieces of the car. It's almost like watching things in Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast": reversing a shot can be as magical as something more fevered or involved. Were
there false steps, false starts, in coming up with images like that? Or does it come readily to you?

MG: It was not easy. There was a lot of back-and-forth on that shot. It is very reassuring to hear what you said, because that is really what we wanted to happen, this kind of simplicity and specific-tiveness [sic] without being too technical. The shot you mentioned is very technical but the idea in itself is a little na‹ve. You forget the car, you lose part by part. I have to come up with a different way of memory fading and I tried to follow a route that would be coherent but diverse as well. Not always the same. Charlie had found so many strong ways to describe it that I could just not reproduce. Because that is writing. He had this idea that the character should start to be more emotionless as the memories start to fade. But we tried that. It was very hard, the emotion when you really wanted to feel the emotion, it would not be there. It is difficult, to have both the direction of the story and the direction of the emotion. So we had to accommodate it differently.

RP: There's also a pronounced use of sound when those things are happening. Percussive sounds, backwards sound. It's particularly striking when Joel is walking out of the Barnes & Noble after being rebuffed by Clementine, one after one, the horizontal bars of light behind him are going out, accompanied by BOOM- BOOM -BOOM sounds and then he crumples and we find he is in his friends' apartment. Bold yet simple.

MG: It's like a theatrical device. In theater, you have to be simple but in a way that seems to represent something more complex.

RP: The coup de theatre. A sudden moment that is very bold and striking.

MG: Uh-huh.

RP: Did the quotation and the title come up early, or is that something you discovered in writing the story?

CK: It wasn't, no, it wasn't the title that I started with. I didn't really have a title to start with. I think was called "Untitled Memory Project" in the contract, but... Um. Y'know, I was looking for Mary's quotes, Mary (Kirsten Dunst) who is in love with Bartlett's [Quotations]. I found this and it was kind of beautiful and I just liked it so I used it.

RP: The young girl's fixation on Bartlett's, looking for mentors, the older man, that's
interesting, too: it's a way to impress him but it's also reverberates as how one gains from the shared experience of others.

[Kaufman says nothing.]

RP: What about the production design? Both Clementine's and Joel's apartments impressed me. Joel's is kind of depressive, like an old man's place on Staten Island, where someone's lived a long time. Clementine's you can see being more of a brighter, arty Williamsburg style place. Detailed without being overpowered.

MG: It was a very important part of the work for me.

RP: From the way Kate plays Clementine, the costumes and her hair colors, she walks into her place, you say, I know that woman, I've met that apartment.

MG: That's nice to hear. [laughs] I never had been to New York. I went there five months before we started to shoot. I went everywhere and I took millions of pictures. Turned out it was very scary. You come to a city and you have no idea how people live. It seemed they all disappear at night and they come back on the streets in the morning and you have
no idea how they live. I went to as many locations as we could. I put the pictures all in a book, to start to have a condensed grasp of how people live. And yes, details are so important. I could show a picture to the production designer. One picture I took, we didn't
use it, but the person had put aluminum on the bottom of the window. Because of the damp, I guess. All those details that you don't see in film, but you see in life, I tried to bring them. I remember in a movie that Peter Weir did, he said that he wanted to show the dust in the light and he put some metal powder falling from the window. Someone said, it's just like
visual. But I remember when I have been in places, bored, seeing the dust in flight, you don't see those things in movies. So I guess we understood each other, me and the production designer. The same thing with Ellen Kuras. She understood the character. Charlie had
written a lot of precise things. We had a good perception of who she was.

RP: The dialogue as Joel's memories slip away is supposed to indicate different levels of memory and invention, but it's interesting how much of what Joel and Clementine say to each other is archetypal, straight-ahead variations on how couples bicker or flatter each other. Really close to being on the nose, and yet good actors bring so much to the most commonplace utterance. Like "You have the whole human race pegged." I also like "Hide me under humiliation."

CK: [Correcting] "Hide me in your humiliation."

RP: That's better than what I wrote down! Do you have a good sense of that balance, what you can say that could seem banal but that with a particular actor or a particular take, it comes alive?

CK: I don't think that I'm... I, I think people say banal things. [laughs] So! It's not like I can have Joel say something banal. I'm not trying to elevate Joel into some other level. If Joel says something banal, that's...

MG: There is something that you find banal-

RP: I'm trying to say I admire how the characters are having these archetypal conflicts, these banal relationship moments, have you invented me, and so on. Things that can be annoying, but if you step back, they're part and parcel of the negotiation of defining any relationship, the dance. Coping with people.

CK: You should also sort of, um, keep in mind, those particular lines, the ones you pointed out, they're really not lines that people are saying to each other. They are lines in Joel's head, y'know. Both of those lines are memories, are reflections in Joel's head on a memory that he had of a conversation. "You have the whole human race pegged," it's really him, I mean at that point, he's not really talking to Clementine, he's talking to his projection of Clementine, y'know. So, I, I don't' know. I didn't look at those lines and say, "Oh my god, I hope omebody can fix this." When I wrote them, they seemed, they seemed right to me.

RP: They seemed right to me. I'm not disparaging them.

CK: Yeah.

RP: I'm saying there's a balance. I was interested in how you hear that, how you find or refine it. You could be a little banal or poetic. There are four or five exchanges I can't pull out of my memory where the apparent present or the memories before they become deteriorating memories where you're dealing with essential conflicts that comprise people coping with each other.

CK: I'm not sure. I don't write a draft in a sense that I write a draft, I type it up, then send it in.

RP: In layers instead of front to back?

CK: No, I mean, I work a lot of different ways at once. But I can write a scene on a computer and then go back and rewrite it 50 times with no trace of what is used to be, changing things here and there. "Oh, that sounds awkward for someone to have to say," and I fix it. When I turn a draft it, I've read through it and I've fixed it tot he point that I don't feel anything is a mouthful. I could be wrong, but by the time anybody sees it, in my head, it's okay. It's speakable lines, y'know.

RP: How involved were you on the set on this one?

CK: I was on the set a little bit but not a lot. There were a couple of occasions where we thought there might be a problem with a scene and Michel asked me to be around in case there needed to be rewrites. I, I lived in L.A. at the time and they were shooting in New York. I was more present in preproduction, discussing what the movie was going to be, and editing, stuff like that.

RP: Are you ready to direct?

CK: Yeah, I guess so.

RP: Anytime soon?

CK: Um. Maybe the project after the one I'mworking on now.

[Long pause.]

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