Interview: Michel Gondry
After wide acclaim—and a Best Screenplay Oscar®—for his second feature-length film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, director Michel Gondry went back to his musical roots with Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Chappelle had the idea to organize and chronicle performances by a once-in-a-lifetime line-up of musicians, many of whom he'd previously hosted on his television show. Those artists who performed last September on a Brooklyn street corner for several hundred very lucky attendees included The Roots, Fugees, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Jill Scott, Dead Prez, and Kanye West.

Gondry was a musician himself (drummer for the band Oui Oui) in his native France before breaking through as a music video director for the likes of Thomas Dolby, Donald Fagen, Lenny Kravitz, and Bjórk, with whom he's had a long-time collaboration and racked up significant recognition. It is this kind of background that made Gondry a natural fit for documenting Block Party. From his home in New York, where he is putting the final touches on his latest feature The Science of Sleep (which premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival), Gondry discussed the unusual yet fruitful collaboration between him and Chappelle.

Tell me how you got involved in the project; did Dave approach you or did you go to him?
We had the same agent at the time. Dave had this idea of doing a concert celebration with a number of artists that he was friends with and I think he'd seen my videos and liked them and saw Eternal Sunshine and liked it. He wanted to meet me and that's how it started. His idea for the concept was not very different; he just wanted to bring together people who had something to say when they use music and mostly people who had been on his show over the two years.

How long between your first meeting and the time that you actually went into production?
It was not super long, like six months.

Oh, that's not long at all!
No, not at all.

So did he have a lot of it already in place, like the location?
No—in fact, his project was really at the beginning when we met. He said to me that he wanted do a big concert in Central Park and I think my first contribution was to explain that this concert should take place where people live that really care for this music. I mean, everybody cares for this music, but this should happen where it would mean more for people who live there. So we talked about different places; Brooklyn is the place where he grew up and a lot of the artists in the line-up had grown up. People who live there were really excited; it was interesting to put the spotlight on this area instead of Central Park.

You've spoken before about how you use your background as a musician and a music video director to infuse your work with more soulfulness rather than just capturing a two-dimensional façade. That idea really seems to get to the heart of the music and the artists who make it.
Yeah, what I've learned is that I don't want to show just the face of people and things. A lot of time even if you do a documentary, especially in music, people put on a certain look or a certain attitude and I wanted to go beyond that. It mostly takes time to get that. Even though we didn't have many days to shoot, I wanted to spend as much time with people for them to forget about the camera and become more natural, more themselves, and start to talk about things that reflect them more. I wanted to get more feeling of people I could identify with and the audience could identify with. I guess the fact that that I was myself in a band in the past helped that.

You talked about bringing this type of music where it would be more appreciated and getting to the essence of these musicians as people. Both are ways of bridging gaps in culture and geography to prove that these artists do have things in common with a larger, moviegoing audience. It's crucial in keeping both the film and the music from being ghettoized.
Well, every time I shoot somebody in a film or in a video, I always try to find what we have in common to focus it a bit more on that. I have to choose people with whom I have this common ground. It's not necessarily in our backgrounds; it could be just a little place somewhere in the heart. I need to find this and if I don't find it, it's going to be very hard for me to do good work with them.

A lot of people might wonder how you, this avant-garde French artist, were drawn to do a project that would be categorized as more "urban." Everyone wants to box people in.
Dave works with people from all over the place if he thinks they are interesting. I think with Dave we had some ideal in common. He also shows something artistic even in such an irreverential way; he has something that I think is about exploring. For instance, I talked about David Cross and Mr. Show with Dave and he said that was one of his favorite shows ever. I could see, even though the cultural background is completely different, there's something in common in their show—it's about creativity and freedom.

Freedom is a good word to explain a lot of this, definitely the careers that you and Dave have
both cultivated, not to mention this project. How constrictive was the production and how much
were you challenged by it? Or was it pretty easy compared to the films that you've done so far?
It's different. The shooting is much shorter, obviously. At first, the production and financing approach was to do a concert, one that would be meaningful but also impactful. My take on it was I wanted to do more than just capturing a concert; I wanted to shoot a movie, even if it's documentary or apparently not narrative. I wanted it to be for the big screen; I didn't want it to be for only the TV screen. My second input, after convincing Dave to go to a place like Brooklyn and do something more intimate, was to shoot on film. It was not obvious at first because people never really shoot concerts on film these days. I was not necessarily trying to be nostalgic; more so, it's that when you shoot on film, you have more commitment at the moment when you shoot because film is more expensive in terms of the time you spend with the camera. You have to know where you're going; I like this sense that you have to think of what you're shooting when you shoot it.

And my other input was about an idea Dave had, which was to go to his hometown in Ohio and walk around talking to people he sees every day there without really knowing them and invite them to the concert—going to a lot of different types of people, maybe people who were not really supposed to go to this type of concert.

So we decided to go with the crew and shoot this; I have to say the producers were not really interested in that but they let us do it because it was not money-consuming. And it turned out to be the spine of the film in some ways, those people from Ohio that we follow from the beginning to the end of the concert. We didn't know at first what we would find there and in the beginning it was very quiet and we could hardly find anybody in the street including people who would be interested in taking a bus trip to Brooklyn. But then we found this marching band and Dave started to interact with them. I knew that something interesting was happening because all of a sudden they really wanted to go to the concert and then had this idea that they would play there and there was big suspense in the time we had to organize it. In the meantime, the principal of the school was not sure he wanted to let them go because they had a previous engagement. We shot all of them together when they found out it would actually happen; they were all overjoyed—you can see it in the film! I thought, okay, that's the story we are following! It was very exciting to find the story while we were shooting. You can't really afford that when you do a fiction film.

You took a risk and it paid off.
Yeah! And it can be really interesting at the time because you could be there with your crew and even if it's a little one, you still have to deliver something, but you see the time passing by and not much going on, especially on film—you never have the notion of what actually happens on the camera before you see your dailies. You really feel that you've wasted the day and the time of people at the end of the day when nothing really has happened. Actually, when you look at your dailies you see a lot of subtlety and little moments that happened that were great that you were not aware of. But this moment, when you see this band overwhelmed with joy and jumping over Dave thanking him, I had no idea we'd get it. Up to then I was thinking, "Okay, we'll see, maybe there is nothing we can use here." In fact, a lot of moments before that—of Dave interacting with people—were really interesting.

It provides another connection between the audience and Dave because it could have been anyone watching the film that he approached on the street.
Yes, yes. I think it's something I try to do when I shoot feature films, to not have a preconceived idea of what the final result should be, even as I'm starting the shooting. Obviously, you need some plan, especially when you tell a story, but the idea of finding the truth from your experience of shooting it is really exciting and I try to do that with the actor. They find the character along as they shoot it and you find the tone of the story. You can even find the outcome of the story, which is the case in The Science of Sleep, when I didn't know the ending as I was shooting and I had to find it while I was shooting and while I was editing. Obviously, shooting a documentary, it's very important that you have this freedom of direction in order to leave room for people in front of the camera to make the truth, to give the direction of the story.

Again, it's such a risk, but I suppose you've gotten used to it by now.
I'm used to it but I'm still always very scared. It's true that I like being displaced but I find that I give more of myself when I am not more secure.

You've also spoken before of not wanting to use references and not having, like you said, preconceived notions in mind, saying, "I want my film to look like this other film." You want to go more for a feeling. But I know that Dave was modeling this idea on the 70's documentary Wattstax. Did he want you to rely on that?
Actually, I didn't really want to. Obviously, if you try just to emulate, you're not going to make your story at all. I guess I'm super-ambitious and I hope that I will make something that resonates more than something that's just influenced by. I watched Woodstock, I watched Monterey Pop, I watched documentaries on concerts that still are important today and I tried to understand why they were different from just a concert documentation, because some of them just relate the concert and others go beyond. The use of film was one of the things I took from them. You could say, "It's because he wanted it to look old," but I thought it was more. I'm a big fan of Janis Joplin; I look at Monterey Pop or Woodstock and you see her performance and you realize there are not many cameras shooting it. So the guy who holds the camera is just going to stay on her and move to the guitar if there is something happening there, then he would move to the audience and hold it there and you would see somebody in the audience who eventually would mean something to the concert. He doesn't have millions of options. To use film was limiting in the sense that it was cutting out the bad stuff, like having too many options, not committing, multiplying the angle, and accelerating the pacing of the editing—all of the artificial techniques that I didn't want to have to use to cover a lack of interest or a lack of depth in the shooting. But my influence was also this concert shot by Jonathan Demme and the Talking Heads, where they start with just one member on stage and then two and then three; each song adds more characters on stage. It's called Stop Making Sense. It's genius! This was as much my inspiration as Wattstax or whatever because I wanted to see how you could shoot a concert and make it still interesting in the filmmaking, as well be meaningful for the people who watch it as much as the people who participated in it.

Do you think that being a musician yourself helped to contribute to the end result?
Oh, yeah, completely! Obviously I knew it coming in from the first conference call we had among all the artists—it was this very funny phone call where nobody could understand what I was saying because of my accent, especially the artists who talk in their own way and me who has my very special own way. It was hard to communicate but they knew my videos, which gave them a nice thing—it gave them trust in me, otherwise it would have been very difficult.

My next contribution was to convince them, or most of them, to work with the same back-up band, which was The Roots. I had in mind Booker T & the MGs and all those line-ups they used to do for Atlantic Records and Stax Records with Otis Redding and Wilson Picket and Aretha Franklin. I really liked those guys; they had the same guitar sound and the same drum sound and it was really wild and I found it weird that the backer on the record would have such an influence on the sound. They were session guys but they created the sound on the record and I wanted to have that. So we had The Roots that were the common part for most of this film.

But I had to convince all the artists because it meant that they would not necessarily have the precise sound of their record, and that was my other important point: I didn't want them to reproduce their album, which a lot of artists do these days. They go on stage to reproduce a sound or a spirit that they have on an album, which I understand. But it doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be alive, and actually full of mistakes would be even better.

My musician background was also helpful when we started to organize the location. The place where I had chosen was this little corner in Bed-Stuy [in Brooklyn] and they were not allowing us to have a huge stage. I wanted it to be smaller than everybody else wanted and I pushed it to go to smaller proportions because I knew that they would have to be more themselves or be more spontaneous if they didn't have all the comforts that they are usually demanding. They said, "Oh, we can't do it on the small stage, and I want these lights, and this and that," and I said, "Wait a second—we're doing a concert for the people in the street and you have to share it with them and with the other bands." People finally understood it. In fact, at the end of the concert they admitted they had one of their best performances, all of them, including the Fugees, who hadn't played together in six years and from that moment on restarted the band. It was a pretty good experience for everybody.

That's great because it boils it down to what art should be about—that deep connection between the artist and the audience, whether it's a viewer or a listener. Some artists just lose that when they start to become celebrities and there's more and more distance between them and their audience. That's when their art starts to lose its soul, I think.
Yeah, and Dave was aware of that, the way he mixed up people as famous as the Fugees or Kanye West with people like Dead Prez, who don't get much airplay and are more unrecognized in a way. He didn't mind whether they were famous or not famous; what meant more to him was that they had something to say with their music.

This combination you have going on between music and cinema seems to keep your work spontaneous and full.
Yeah—I'm trying to! At first it was maybe a drawback in people's opinion, because they would say, "Oh, he's coming from video directing; it must be shallow." Instead of hiding this side of me, the musician background of myself, because obviously I wanted to be accepted in the filmmaking community as well, I decided to push it even further. When I put out this DVD I have with all my videos, it actually ended up being very helpful for my filmmaking business because film critics looked at this work with a different respect, basically focusing on what was behind the idea of the videos and the artistic aspect of it. Instead of seeing me just as a video director, they saw me as a director, as somebody who has ideas and something to say. So I didn't have to deny my background to be accepted in filmmaking; I had more to express and to show.