Michel Gondry Quotes
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When I saw The Matrix and other movies of this type, I wished I had been given the opportunity to express myself with all this technology and do something sort of big in scale, but the right material never really came my way.
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Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.
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I don't like vampire movies or zombie movies. I went to see 'I Am Legend' with an ex-girlfriend the other day, and I immediately realised it was a zombie movie! You know what I mean? There are certain rules, and those rules are things that you've seen many times.
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I want to see abstract art move. Especially in the '30s, you had animators doing innovative work, and I was entranced by that. It's basically what you see when you close your eyes, when you fall asleep.
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Misinterpretation leads me to inspiration and creativity because I think my brain is trying to figure out some information that I'm confused about.
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Every movie I do is challenging for me. There is some element of imaginative that you wouldn't have in a typical movie.
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People who get to express their voice are paid by the people who make profit from it. So they're going to make you believe you have to spend your money buying these products otherwise you won't be happy. This is really wrong. Especially the implication it carries.
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I think the tools were always available, for decades and decades, to make your own film and be creative. I don't think people had to wait for YouTube to do this type of small project. YouTube, I think it's great. I have this idiotic satisfaction. And I think there's a bit of that in YouTube. You share, true, but it's centralized, and it's already sort of controlled. I'm more for something that's not a centralized medium. Like doing your own film and screening it yourself. You cannot control people doing that.
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The MTV Video Awards were never about the video, but about the song. Most of the time it was just to glorify people for the wrong reason.
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It's a very American thing that everything has to be a business. Americans think... I like America, or I would not be here. There are great qualities to this country. But this sense that everything has to be a business is sometimes overwhelming.
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I read about some movie where they did everything on blue screen, and the actors were not even connecting to each other.
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It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.
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I find, surprisingly, that actors are liberated in their work if there's stuff going on around them, because they can't think too much about who they're supposed to be.
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Orange is an underrated color, it's the second most underrated color after yellow.
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I think always my interest in making movies is to have something really technical mixed with something that was not so formal...something free.
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I think the purpose of test screenings is different for the studio and for the filmmaker. For the studio, I think they want to know whether the film works or not.
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I don't like to put people in a competition to defeat the other.
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The problem is when you get forced to use ideas that aren't good. When I can filter the ideas and use the best of them, I am happy to collaborate.
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You don't watch home movie for the technique, you watch because it's reminiscing on good moments you spent with your friends. It reflects you. It belongs to you. So I was thinking people could, instead of spending their money to go and see a blockbuster, make their own movies. Collect the money and make a new one every week. I thought it would be nice to create a world that makes this construct possible.
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There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.
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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.
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When I shoot actors, I have that dilemma. I want the actor to be good, and sometimes I have to push them to a place that isn't pleasant. I always think: 'Is it worth doing for the sake of the movie?' But I have to remember the bigger picture.
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Sometimes it's interesting to see something that you're not used to seeing, which is the main ingredient of life, and it's removed from the usual entertainment. I think it's important to give the opportunity to people to witness the life of somebody who was not public.
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And I'm not a micromanagement guy. I prefer to spend my time doing other stuff than that.