What a genius! Michel Gondry is one of my absolute favourite directors. His creativity overwhelms me. There is just something to the way he approaches filmmaking as an art form. He believes in tricks on set, not made by computers. Filmmaking really is his life and it shows in everything he does.

All right, so Human Nature wasn’t the best start into his film career. The film tries to be too funny and quirky, but unfortunately fails. What with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s success with Being John Malcovich and Gondry’s sheer talent it should have worked out. But apparently they needed some time to get a feel for each others’ work. Three years later, in 2004, the Kaufman-Gondry duo brought out the marvellous Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This film just works. From beginning to end it’s perfect.

I am going to disregard Gondry’s 2005 Dave Chappelle’s Block Party since I have not seen it. (But ordered it on the Netflix of Europe LoveFilm as I am writing this, so look out for my review of it).

In 2006 Michel wrote his first feature screenplay La Science des rêves (The Science of Sleep) with Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg as the leading characters. This is a wonderful film; Gondry put a lot of his own character, thoughts and feelings into it. The 2008 Be Kind Rewind was a step back again. Similar to Human Nature, it is just trying too hard to be funny.

I am going to review all these films sooner or later, but what I really want to talk about today is a wonderful DVD  that every film fanatic should watch: The Work of Director Michel Gondry. This is a collection of Gondry’s short films, art experiments, music videos and commercials. It is absolutely fantastic.

Before Michel Gondry became a feature director, he did a lot of music videos for artists like Björk, The Foo Fighters, Massive Attack and The Rolling Stones. My personal favourites are the videos he did for The White Stripes. There is one which is an animation made of Lego stones. This must have been an incredible amount of work but it looks amazing. In a Kylie Minogue video she walks in a circle along a street and each time she has completed a circle another Kylie steps out of a door. They walk together until there are about four of her. Gondry uses quite simple ideas that need a lot of rehearsal time and have to be carefully planned. The ideas are so simple that they work amazingly well and nobody else seems to have thought of them before. His commercials use a similar technique to his music videos. Quirky ideas that make watching them a lot of fun.

What I really love about these DVDs are Gondry’s short films. This is one of my favourites:

It is such a random assembly of stories. Some are animated, some filmed, some have a narrative, some are just thoughts made into a film. A great one is called Pecan Pie where Jim Carrey is driving a bed along the motor way in his pyjamas.

Another great feature on the The Work of Director Michel Gondry is a rather long documentary about Michel by Michel. It gives a real insight into his mentality, how he thinks and how he does things. And how he comes up with all his creative, surreal ideas. It is really worth watching if you like Michel Gondry or are interested in art and filmmaking.

Michel Gondry receives the MovieCat Award for being one of the most unusual filmmakers with incredibly interesting ideas.