French film and music video director Michel Gondry is currently at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Texas to promote L’epine dans le coeur (“The Thorn In His Heart”) – the very personal documentary he made about his aunt Suzette Gondry and her relationship with her son, Jean-Yves, which looks like an intriguing insight the filmmaker’s heritage in rural Second War France.
Aside from the doco, Gondry has been speaking about various other projects he has been working on – and rumoured to have been working on.
RUMOURED COLLABORATION WITH BJORK
The Icelandic songstress and Gondry have shown their artistic kinship through the remarkable music videos that they’ve made together; but a while back we heard whispers of a more large-scale collaboration between the two. This week Gondry confirmed that there is a project in place. In an interview with The Playlist Gondry revealed their latest collaboration as “a very ambitious project, a sort of scientific musical… maybe more for museums. Like a 40 minute IMAX project in 3D.”
Beyond exciting.
THE GREEN HORNET
This highly anticipated superhero film is the director’s first “big” movie – large budget, young actor on a roll (Seth Rogen), expensive action sequences, caped men, dastardly villain (played by Christoph Waltz fresh from his Oscar win). It has all the right ingredients for your standard big-budget action flick – although with Gondry at the helm armed with his penchant for surrealism it should be anything but.
It’s in post-production at the moment and due for release at some point this year. The trailer – that has reportedly been cut – is yet to be released, but of late there are few film projects that have garnered more intrigue than this one. I wonder what he’ll do with the soundtrack…
MEGALOMANIA
Megalomania is an animated film that Gondry is co-directing with his teenage son Paul. The film’s voice cast is going to include Seth Rogen, Juliette Lewis and Steve Buscemi.
Gondry told The Playlist that the script, written by Dan Clowes (the writer behind graphic novel Ghost World), is “about three kids who discover how to create energy from hair. And they shave everyone on the planet. The rich people wear wigs and rule the world. So the rich people wear wigs and the poor people are just bald. And they want to make a better world, but the maker – which is sort of based on my son – is a horrible dictator…”
That sounds appropriately whack.
The animation will presumably be based on Paul Gondry’s illustration – which you can check out in the video he made for California band The Willowz:
TIME TRAVEL FLICK STARRING ELLEN PAGE
Gondry is also working on a time travel science-fiction film (think “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind” mixed with “Groundhog Day” maybe?) that is set to star Juno actress Ellen Page. Hopefully the ironic teenage barbs will be kept at a minimum.
He is certainly a busy man – not that we’re complaining.
Keep those creative pursuits coming, sil vous plait Michel.
Via The Playlist
