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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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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All these gadgets, the phone and the computer, they expose the inside of your brain in a way that's bad.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Orange is an underrated color, it's the second most underrated color after yellow.
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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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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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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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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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I've always loved 3D. In fact, as a kid, I was exposed to 3D at an early age because my grandfather was a specialist of 3D in cinematheques. And then my cousin put it in 'Science of Sleep' with toilet paper tube cities. But he was a specialist and I always wanted to do something in 3D.
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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 don't want to compare myself to him - I don't want people to see me as this great genius - but when I see Charlie Chaplin's movies there is a combination of drama, naivety and social meaning that I can see in myself, at a different level.
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I always wanted to create this community that would come and tell their own story, shoot it - and watch them. The idea is to not have one entity who creates the work, the project, and another entity who consumes it; the idea is people create their own work, like somebody cultivating his garden.
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I was sort of lazy at school, but I realize I still have something to bring to the subject which is comforting. I feel I am not as stupid as I thought I was.