"I always hated pretentious commercials and videos before I started directing, not following the typical and saying that people are all fashion. It has always been my goal to make people feel alright when they watch my work."
Michel Gondry is a French director that specialises on music videos but has also done feature and short films as well as commercials; he has worked with many of the worlds top recording artists including Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones and more recently Kanye West. He has often been credited for saving and reviving music videos in the 1990’s. He was an artist in Residence at the Massachusetts institute of technology in 2005 and 2006 before directing the video for Paul McCartney’s song ‘Dance Tonight’ in which he makes a cameo appearance, he makes similar sized appearances in other music videos he has directed.
He was born may 8th, 1963 in Versailles in France and grew up there; he is the grandson of Constant Martin and has a teenage son Paul who is also an artist.
He works as though he has a child like perspective and tells stories about people and life through his work often asking questions. Through his work he shows the connection and between our world and nature and society we live in. He uses a lot of special effects and animation to create a surreal environment.
“He is an artist, a musician, a filmmaker all in one”.
Gondry has done a total of seventy music videos since he began directing them in 1988, the first videos he shot were French, before he had made a huge name for himself. He did fourteen French music videos before he did his first non-French video which was by Mark Curry. He had been doing a lot of work with the French rock band Qui Qui when he was recognised by music artist Bjork who asked him to direct the song ‘Human Behaviour’ for her and then went on to do a total of seven videos with her. He has worked with other artists more than once including Daft Punk, Beck, The Chemical Brothers, The Vines, Steriogram, Radiohead and The White Stripes. The style of his music videos often rely on videography and camera tricks with frames of reference. He directed a musical documentary called ‘Dave Chappelle’s Block Party’ which was about Chappelle as attempted to have a large concert in a neighborhood of Brooklyn for free. According to the Guniness world record books of 2004, his advert for Levi’s jeans holds the record for most awards won by a TV commercial.
“He is the Picasse of our times! Using clever ideas and not just copying everything.”
Gondry has been able to inspire in many ways and is a pioneer for all music videos, one of his most well known techniques is the famous “bullet time” move in a Smirnoff Vodka commercial that was later used in the Matrix films. He is part of the group of directors to make the leap from music video to feature film along with other top directors, Spike Jonze and David Fincher making his feature film debut in 2001 in Human Nature but got mixed reviews. However he came back to direct Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2004 which was a big success.
“That’s the thing about Gondry, even when he doesn’t have anything to tell, he tells it like nobody else”.
He has directed many successful music videos including The White Stripes - Fell in Love with a Girl, Radiohead - Knives Out, Bjork - Declare Independence and Foo Fighters – Everlong. In most of his music videos there was an influence of abstract childhood mainly through toys which he spoke about in a biography quoting he played with and was interested in opening up Lego and Meccano.
"As a child I was interested in the possibilities that Lego and Meccano opened up, to create and invent new discoveries. My cousin and I used Meccano to build a prototype cartoon machine, quite similar to the zoetrope. It was a black circle with a gap to look at the little drawings. One of the stories we drew was about a journey in which you fractal zoom from a larger infinity to a smaller infinity. It started in space, with the planets, and then closed in on the Earth, then the continents, the countries and cities, the streets and the houses, down through a chimney, deep into the wood and right into the little atoms. Then it zoomed back out to the planets again. It was about a minute long, and we were 12 years old.”
This shows he has always had a similarly creative and imaginative mind which has led to the success he has had today with his unique and animated music videos, in particularly shown in the White Stripes video for Fell In Love With A Girl which features a lot of Lego and special effects to create the Lego into a moving animation which he gained a lot of praise for.
“Michel Gondry’s work is so simple, yet so incredible”
Gondry aims for an audience from late teens on wards as he is very technical in his videos and it is his animations and effects with which he creates a story within his videos that he gets a lot of his praise for, it is people who are old enough to understand the story behind his music videos that he aims them too. The animations are interesting to look at and this appeals to the younger generation but for them it is no more than just interesting visuals and it is the story and message that he is trying to put across that makes his music videos what they are. Audience often associate Michel Gondry with his colourful and effective videos and he often gets credit for it when people respond online to his work, for example one person saying “Quirky and colourful, must be a new Michel Gondry Video” as they can recognise his work because of his individual and unique style. People also appreciate his ability to make something out of nothing, one person for example saying on YouTube, “Again, proof that creativity doesn’t hinge on big budgets or heavy editing”. On a review of ‘The Work of Director Michel Gondry’ on imdb.com, one person talks about his child like inspiration saying “The centre of Gondry’s solipsistic solar system is childhood (dreams, puppy loves and memories of school dances)” stating that it radiates creativity. In the same review the person talks about how Gondry will and does challenge himself more and more and that’s its fortunate he’s got big hands even though he’s so small because he can and always seems to find a way to surprise people and pull a new trick out of the bag. The same website has a lot of responses for Gondry’s work with one person saying that “He is the perfect blend of French Naivety and the American just do it mentality, he gets things done which other would dismiss as stupid or impossible before even starting”. Somebody else talk about a more structured and organised side of Gondry’s work saying “No matter how absurd, his work is logically constructed and thought through”. It is clear people like his very creative and unique style of work calling him “A magician and a genius”, but on the negative side one person states “I hope he’ll find a new field or inspiration other than dream analysis” as they believe he needs to add more to his repertoire if he is to gain even more success. But overall people do appreciate his self inspiration and his unique way of staying away from common and already done styles of video, one person says “He skips cliché of rules of Hollywood and does what he wants in his own style and vision”.
Gondry has spoken in an interview on www.collider.com with a fan about his film ‘Science Of Sheep’ and inspirations in his life and career and he says that he tries to avoid influences, but one director that does help him for motivation is Georges Melies and how he reminds him of the person who started the in-camera trick called prestidigitation, the sleight of hand. He says that he was the first person to think of the camera as an extension of tricks, making him somewhat of a role model. However he also states how he doesn’t like to make tribute videos to other directors as he sees it as “a genetic copy than a tribute” and that his opinion of other directors tributes are “a lazy way of getting inspiration” saying that he is a director that sticks to his own original ideas and inspiration. He speaks of working with actors and getting everybody on the same page when it comes to entering the world of the video so it allows them to adjust the tone and communicate it directly; he says there is always a positive energy that comes out of it. He always try to make the effects not look lazy and dislikes it when directors use a green screen to show a city as a location because they can not be bothered to go the location saying it “disconnects the actor from the reality trying to be created around them. He likes to make videos that are personal to him interacting real life and fiction using himself as an “initial laboratory”, this got a lot of good responses including the interviewer who said they loved it and said “it got at the truth of this character” also saying that they can relate to it from their own life. He has spoken of a film that he recently watched, ‘God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of Lost Boys Sudan’ which is about refugees who come to live in America, saying that it has changed his mind and that it has made him realise there is a lot to learn and that we take so much from their culture but don’t give enough back.
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