Director
Michel Gondry treats a film set the way a kid treats a box of cardboard and glue, as raw material for a trick nobody has tried yet. He came up directing music videos for Bjork and the White Stripes, and that education never left him, ideas built in camera through turntables, mirrors, and stop motion rather than a computer. His scripts with Charlie Kaufman turned memory into physical architecture, rooms that collapse and rebuild around a man trying to forget, or remember, a woman he loved. He is drawn to the seams. Where most directors hide the trick, Gondry lets you see the string and the cardboard and asks you to marvel at the honesty of it instead.
Signature Traits
Major Works
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
A memory erasure procedure rendered as a house disintegrating plank by plank around the man losing it. Won Gondry and Charlie Kaufman the Oscar for original screenplay.
Be Kind Rewind (2008)
A magnetized brain wipes every tape in a failing video store, so two clerks reshoot Hollywood's biggest films on a camcorder in an afternoon. Homemade remakes as an act of communal love.
Hyperballad (Bjork, 1997)
A woman drops household objects, and eventually a mannequin double of herself, off a cliff before waking her partner each morning. Regularly named among the greatest music videos ever made.
