Gondry, the creative genius and artificial intelligence

There are the conflicts between creative intuition and production needs, selfish genius as an antidote to failure, nature as a refuge – effectively Gondry, an Oscar winner born in Versailles before and after the global success of the video clip era, of collaborations with Bjork and duet with Kaufman in the cult Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, often took refuge in the belly of France as the protagonist of The Book of Solutions. Presented in Cannes and now in its Italian premiere at the Biografilm Festival in Bologna, The Book of Solutions tells the story of the creative obsessions and paranoia of those who have a creative project in their hands which, in the final phase, very hard and apparently dark, triggers surreal solutions and new ingenious ways of expression. “It doesn’t tell my way of making cinema but how ideas sprout from obstacles” says Gondry.

The film is littered with autobiographical clues and yet it is a critique, or self-critique. Is it an upside down self portrait?

It’s not a critique of the cinema system but it tells how I behaved in a certain phase of my existence, while working on Mood Indigo, in the months of post-production during which a succession of problems prompted me to act differently than I would have acted normally and explored tracks that deviate from my route. True, at the beginning there are producers who prevent the director-star from concluding his project. But apart from this detail it’s not a criticism of the film industry but of the protagonist’s way of behaving which is what I had. Working for oneself without thinking of others, creating only problems for others.

Making a film means tracing paths other than the pre-established ones but also tripping over obstacles, failures…how important is it to find unexpected ways or learn to fail?

This is effectively the essence of creative cinematographic production: we start from an initial idea and to complete the project we need to face obstacles, possible failures, find and always find new solutions…

By the way in an interview he spoke of an unexpected event during the filming of Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind…

At the end of the film there’s a scene where the protagonists (Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet) meet in a house, it’s one of the memories they’re erasing. The house was supposed to crumble filling up with sand and water but we actually decided to take part of the set up and immerse it in water waiting for the tide to rise to have a more realistic effect. At the last moment, however, the set designers refused to immerse the installations in the sea because they were afraid they would then disperse. Everyone, including me and the producer, worked in their place. It really wasn’t a real problem, we just did what someone else was supposed to do. I was extremely frustrated. In the end, a union representative also came to talk to me.

Did anything else ever happen between course changes and obstacles during filming?

Still in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I initially thought of a series, about forty transitions to be inserted when memories were erased. It was all very complex and sophisticated with not simple special effects. Fifteen days after shooting, the producer calls me and tells me there was no more budget so Charlie Kaufman (Oscar-winning screenwriter) and I decided to make the steps simpler so as to make the final result less technical and more visceral. It worked. Here, returning to the initial theme, one of the obstacles that can improve the final result.

Is it true that for a time you lived isolated in the heart of France? Is the house where you filmed The Book of Solutions the same one you woke up in every morning?

Yes there is a parallelism between reality and the film, the scenes shot in the house and in the rooms were mostly shot in places where I lived during the post-production of Mood Indigo. In reality things went a little differently but it is my aunt’s house or rather it was my aunt’s house – the one who used to be my aunt – where I spent almost every summer as a child. It was there that I witnessed my spirit being derailed with situations that ranged from the surreal to the ironic. They are the ones we recreated in The Book of Solutions.

Sacrifice, dedication, obsession. What happens when a work comes out of its shell? Can you disappear into a rabbit hole?

There comes a time when it is the public that has to decide. I think of a comic I read as a child, it’s the story of a dog prisoner of a structure, at a certain point he escapes by digging a tunnel in the ground in a very short time to escape from. It’s a somewhat surreal, ironic but also dark image. Maybe at the end of a film you haven’t changed so much…

You have become interested in artificial intelligence lately, why?

I don’t have a film on artificial intelligence in mind, but I can say that we are talking about AI as an entity that will lead to greater control. I don’t think it will be an abstract entity but one that will rather be used by people to exercise power over others. Just yesterday I was reading an article about a possible use by companies where employers already use AI to predict employee thoughts, to guess if they are focused or not. I’m afraid this is the most likely route. Not in the service of humanity but for one slice of humanity to tighten control over another.