One of cinema’s premiere dreamers, Michel Gondry is also a fascinating conversationalist, and at the recent Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (which screened his latest “Mood Indigo“), he participated in a master class, exposing the labyrinthine twists of his brain to a receptive audience. And over the course of the next 50 minutes, he talked about almost every subject under the sun, including the already much discussed troubled production on “The Green Hornet” (an experience star Seth Rogen recently called “a fucking nightmare“).
Gondry makes it pretty clear that he was badly burned by the Hollywood project, and backs up Rogen’s assertions that the amount of money being thrown around left them creatively limited. “Too much money is dangerous. On a movie it depends on the budget. I did ‘The Green Hornet’ and I don’t think I had much artistic freedom. Obviously it was a huge budget, so you feel the pressure of the studio where they have this huge investment. And sometimes you feel it’s too bad because sometimes you think you could do the same thing for half or a third of the money,” Gondry said.
This is the kind of obvious statement that will have many Gondry fans wondering why this didn’t occur to the maestro before he decided to make a $120 million movie, given that so much of his brilliant work in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and the like came from the trickery and enchantment necessitated by small budgets, something he hilariously made into an actual theme in “Be Kind Rewind.” Well, he did make an attempt to try and bring his usual aesthetic into the mix, but was shut down.
But Gondry at least seems to now be headed back to pastures more affordable and quirky: an animated collaboration with Noam Chomsky, “Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?” (trailer here), is completed, while he continues to putter along with his Philip K. Dick adaptation “Ubik.” “We are still at the very beginning,” he said. “It’s an amazing story. It’s a very complicated story from a very prominent book so I am taking it slow.”
In the meantime, Gondry’s “Mood Indigo” with Audrey Tautou, Romain Duris and Gad Elmaleh, is still without a U.S. distributor or date, but hopefully that will change soon (you can read our review of the film from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival here). Watch the full master class below.
"Oh poor me, they gave us TOO MUCH MONEY…"
In what occupation do workers whine about too much money??
Gondry squeals about studio interference. What? Was that
new to them? What did they expect when handed 125 mil??
It sounds like Gondry and especially Rogan (-who wrote this steaming turd) were "the fucking nightmare".
srsly what's wrong with people nowadays? TGH is a fun movie to watch. It's not an unbearable movie like Transformers 2 or Twilight. Why does everybody say it's "bad"? Even its own actor and director.