Michel Gondry

• 1. Introduction

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  Michel Gondry grew up in Versailles as the grandson of an inventor. That family connection to making things with your hands turns out to be the thread running through his entire creative life. He would go on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, pioneer a camera technique later made famous by a Hollywood blockbuster, and hold the Guinness World Record for the most awards won by a single television commercial. But the questions worth sitting with are these: how does a drummer from an art school band become one of cinema's most visually inventive directors? And what does a man whose debut feature received mixed reviews do to follow it up with one of the most acclaimed films of the year?

• 2. From Oui Oui to Björk

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  Gondry attended art school in Paris, and it was there that he formed a French rock band called Oui Oui, where he played drums. The music videos he made for the band were his first real experiments as a filmmaker, and those experiments caught an important ear. Björk saw the Oui Oui footage and asked Gondry to direct the video for her song "Human Behaviour." That single commission grew into a collaboration spanning eight music videos. In 1994, "Human Behaviour" earned him a Grammy Award nomination for Best Music Video. "Bachelorette" brought him another nomination in 1997. Beyond Björk, Gondry built a roster of repeat collaborators that included Daft Punk, the White Stripes, the Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, Beck, and the Vines. His video for Lucas Secon's "Lucas with the Lid Off" was nominated in the Best Music Video short form category at the 37th Grammy Awards. He also directed the music video for Paul McCartney's "Dance Tonight," in which Gondry himself makes a cameo appearance.

• 3. Advertising and Invention

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  Before Gondry made features, he was already reshaping what a television commercial could do. In 1996 he directed the "Smarienberg" ad for Smirnoff vodka, and in making it he pioneered the visual technique known as "bullet time" - the frozen-moment multi-angle effect that would later be adapted for The Matrix. He also directed a trio of holiday-themed advertisements for clothing retailer Gap. His Levi's 501 Jeans spot, titled "Drugstore," was cited in the 2004 Guinness World Records as the holder of the record for the most awards won by a TV commercial. In 2014, he produced the video for Metronomy's single "Love Letters," taken from the album of the same name, showing that the commercial and music video work never fully stopped even as feature films dominated his attention.

• 4. Eternal Sunshine and Charlie Kaufman

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  Gondry's feature debut came in 2001 with Human Nature, which drew mixed reviews. His second feature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released in 2004, was also his second collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, and the critical reception was a complete reversal - it became one of the most acclaimed films of that year. The screenplay was co-written with Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth, and all three men won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Gondry deliberately used Eternal Sunshine to transplant the image-manipulation techniques he had developed across years of music video work into a feature-length story. Much of his foundational inspiration, by his own account, came from the 1960 French family film Le voyage en ballon. The themes and techniques of that film shaped how he thought about emotion on screen, and emotion, he has said, was where his vision and his career began.

• 5. Surrealism, Tokyo, and Chomsky

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  The Science of Sleep, released in 2006, starred Mexican actor Gael García Bernal and returned Gondry to the fantastical visual mode he had explored in Eternal Sunshine. That same year he mounted his debut as an installation artist at Deitch Projects in New York City's SoHo gallery district. The show was called "The Science of Sleep: An Exhibition of Sculpture and Pathological Creepy Little Gifts," and it featured props from the film alongside gifts Gondry had given to women he was interested in, many of them former or current collaborators. He commissioned the painter Baptiste Ibar to draw images of natural and human disasters for a fictional calendar from the film called "Disastrology." For the 2008 anthology film Tokyo!, Gondry contributed Interior Design, based on the comic book "Cecil and Jordan in New York" by Gabrielle Bell, adapted from New York City to Tokyo. In February 2013, he released Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, a hand-drawn animated documentary about the linguist Noam Chomsky. Earlier that same year, on the 3rd of January 2013, he released an animated short called Haircut Mouse on his official Vimeo channel.

• 6. Block Parties and Family Portraits

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  Dave Chappelle's Block Party followed comedian Dave Chappelle as he worked to stage a large, free concert in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York. Gondry directed the documentary, which was released in 2005. Four years later, in 2009, he released The Thorn in the Heart, a documentary about his own aunt Suzette and her son Jean-Yves. That same year Gondry also stepped into television, directing "Unnatural Love," the fifth episode in season two of HBO's Flight of the Conchords. Between 2018 and 2020 he directed eight episodes of the Showtime series Kidding. The personal stakes of The Thorn in the Heart marked one of the more intimate pivots in his career, and that tendency to fold private material into public work would later surface again in his 2024 animated feature Maya, Give Me a Title, in which his daughter Maya Gondry voiced herself, with Pierre Niney voicing another character in the film.

• 7. The Green Hornet and After

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  In 2011, Gondry directed The Green Hornet for Sony, a superhero film starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, and Christoph Waltz, with Rogen also co-writing the script. That same year Gondry served as head of the jury for the short film competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. His 2012 film The We and the I was selected for the Directors' Fortnight section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Mood Indigo followed in April 2013, adapted from Boris Vian's 1947 novel Froth on the Daydream. Its production was troubled enough that Microbe & Gasoline, released in 2015, was deliberately conceived as a smaller-scale project. Mood Indigo also provided the seed for The Book of Solutions, which arrived in 2023. His brother Olivier Gondry - known as Olivier "Twist" Gondry - followed a parallel path, directing music videos and television commercials for bands including The Stills, Hot Hot Heat, Daft Punk, and The Vines. Michel Gondry was also an artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 and 2006, and in 2014 was selected as a jury member for the 64th Berlin International Film Festival.