The Science of Sleep
by Chi Tung | 00.00.0000

To my knowledge, the impossibility of platonic love between boy and girl was first introduced in When Harry Met Sally. Boy meets girl. Boy is attracted to girl. Girl finds boy not the least bit appealing. Boy befriends girl. Girl becomes attracted to boy. Boy freaks out on girl. Girl freaks out on boy. Boy learns the error of his ways. Boy and girl live happily ever after. The lives of hormonal teenagers and Kevin Smith would never be the same.


But what exactly did we learn from said film? That boys are, in fact, wholly incapable of platonic love? Or that girls are too? Music-video-auteur-cum-filmmaker Michel Gondry hasn't the foggiest idea, and moviemaking in the new millennium is all the better for it. Don't believe that's the case? Then chances are you haven't seen Gondry's masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or if you have, you simply tried to banish it from your memory, in the same way that Jim Carrey's character tries to exercise Kate Winslet's from that pesky consciousness of his. In that film, it's not just that platonic love is impossible; it's that love, in all its myriad forms, is inexhaustible, inexplicable, and finally, inconquerable.

And yet, it can also be inscrutable and a little bit pathological as well, as evidenced by the boy and girl (played respectively by Spanish heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Gondry's The Science of Sleep, the summer's first magnifique rom-dram, both directed and written by Gondry. True to its title, there is science (some stuff about random connectedness) and also sleep (the lead character spends a significant portion of the film dreaming), but those are hardly the film's raisons d'etres. What begins as a sort of idyllic, whimsical fantasy soon turns into an enigmatic, ephemeral meditation on broken promises, fleeting desires, and love in need of, well, friendship. Or is it the other way around?
The beauty of The Science of Sleep is that you never really know--and Gondry does his darnedest to make sure it stays that way. But expecting the unexpected is a foregone conclusion with Gondry, whose credits as music video director include building lifesize legos for the White Stripes, out-Bjoerking Bjoerk, and making the world an easier place for Kylie Minogue to wreak havoc. Here, it's the blossoming of Gondry the storyteller, sans screenwriting maverick Charlie Kaufman (his creative partner in both Eternal Sunshine as well as the callow, campy Human Nature), that warrants closer examination. Consider The Science of Sleep his, err, awakening.



I think the casual moviegoer might be surprised by how emotionally direct The Science of Sleep is, as opposed to just visually striking. How different was your creative process for this film??


MG: It's completely different. I had less money, and a lot of doubts. I was coming from a movie, Eternal Sunshine, that wasn't so financially successful, so I had to prove myself. But I thought as long as I was sincere--even if I went in every which direction--that it would end up making some sort of sense. Because it was all coming from, and going to, the same place--the heart.



There's a school of thought that says screenwriting is just a construct, and that ultimately a film's artistic merit lies inits overarching vision rather than its individual parts. Do you agree?

MG: I think it should be equally creative at every stage, from the writing to the shooting to the editing to the music to the mixing. I think you ought to try to make a difference, to put your own print on every stage of the process. I certainly tried to write the best script possible, but I wanted to leave it open for when I would shoot it, to keep the need to improvise.


You often return to certain themes: repetition, subconscious, memory, dream life versus waking life. How does a filmmaker tap into such abstractions and make them relatable to a casual moviegoer?

MG: I grew my own language as I was making short films and videos. I try to think in different layers at the same time. For instance, I'm very in tune and receptive to all the thoughts I have, whether or not they're necessarily connected to what's going on around me. One thought might go through my mind, and it might be very simple, but I'll immediately think of where it came from and why it came to my mind. Over the years, I've gotten more in tune with that part of thinking--and I've gotten in tune with people's secondary thoughts as well. So I'm more into that than the usual person.


You have a flair for pacing and rhythm that carries over nicely from your music videos to your movies. And, of course, great films have great music in them. How symbiotic are these two mediums? Do you envision your scenes through music?

MG: Coming from my background, I try not to overload the scene with music. I don't wish to expose myself to the cliche. In general, if a scene works without music, you don't try to add music; you want to feel it working on its own. You also don't want to use music too early in the process or dub out the emotion. For instance, if there's a scene where the character is sad, there doesn't need to be a cue for the music to be sad. That's taking your audience for idiots, and you don't want that.


The idea that your dream life can be as powerful as your waking life is certainly an oft-explored theme in film, but in Th> Science of Sleep it's also a form of paralysis. Can an alternate reality be a reality at all?

MG: Well no, it's happening in your head, and the real world is made up of atoms. And in the movie, there's this sense of pathology: that this guy is not well, and that goes a little beyond normal life. Although I think it's very possible to confuse your memory of waking life and dreaming life, and the continuation of a dream happens to me all the time. So it's the idea that you always come back to the same places in your head, whether you like it or not.


Along with directors like Richard Linklater, you seem to speak to the experience of the twenty-something--the inarticulate urges that love elicits. There's something paradoxical about that period in one's life: you're an adult, but you're also more in touch with your inner child. Is that innocence something you're particularly interested in?

MG:In the fiction that I remember from when I was younger, the world was more precise, and more detailed. As I grew older, things became less sharp, because your brain is different, and you're loading it with these new sensations. I kept wanting to go back to those feelings and memories, for some reason.


I'm especially struck by the way you express the circuitousness of love. It seems tempting, especially given your background, to present this strictly using visuals and style. How do you strike this balance between form and feeling?

MG:I try to find actors with whom I could connect, with whom I could communicate--really, people I could be friends with. So then we have a common ground from which we both can explore outward. You can't start with someone that's a stranger. Honestly, with the visuals, I'm just trying to use whatever technique I can afford to tell the story. The story has some visual moments in it, but in most instances, that's just me redigesting and recomputing the brain.

At the same time, the emotional growth of your characters seems to be stunted by channeling this inner child. Is there something simultaneously dangerous and exhilarating about that?


MG:Yes. It's not really mature, but maturity is boring--it's not very romantic. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that, and I'm still a beginner, but I don't see myself as articulate enough to do a married-couple-with-children story.


Your characters make a lot of mistakes and a have a lot of neuroses, yet you seem to believe in humanity and human interaction. There are those filmmakers who have contempt for their characters and want the audience to feel the same way. Is it possible for a filmmaker to love or shelter his or her characters too much?

MG: I don't think so. It can go both ways. With what you're describing, you put the camera above the people, and the audience above the characters, and you bring the characters down and enjoy their misery, which I really don't like. It's hard because I've worked with actors who didn't like their characters and I don't know how you can work like that.


This is meant as a compliment, but your films are so emotionally draining. Is it difficult to sustain such emotional breadth throughout the course of an entire film?

MG:It's hard when it's purely creative, but when you're directing, which is more execution mode, you have so many other problems to sort out. It's funny because I didn't think I could possibly watch The Science of Sleep once it was done, but I've watched it many times, and I actually enjoy it. I really like what the characters have become through the actors, and there is no meanness to it. I would feel the pain of my experiences either way, even if I weren't making the movie. So I might as well make the movie I want to make.


Considering that the film is trilingual, what is The Science of Sleep's nationality?

MG:For me, it was more about someone being misplaced, a stranger in a country, and how you develop a relationship in a foreign language, which I have done half of my adult life. The idea that you are not exactly the same person in a different language makes it more acceptable to me, because it's not completely reality. I wanted to show that this isn't exactly how they are in their real lives, they're still acting.


Memory and the subconscious tend to play tricks on the characters in your films. You could say film does the same thing to the audience. Is there a point you're trying to make about the filmmaking process itself?

MG:Recently, I was thinking about what I like in film. I came to the conclusion that everyone is trying to tell a story, and the action of trying to make it happen is the filmmaking, and all the rest is overwhelmed by that. I'd like to go back to that feeling of the early days of cinema with just a film crew, a cameraman, a director, a policeman, a villain and a hero, and at the end of the day, you have a movie. I think every time a shooting happens, it should feel the same way. Meaning you have to recreate the old process at every stage; you have to reinvent the craft.


Prior to Eternal Sunshine, people knew you as the guy who revolutionized the art of the music video, but you started off an aspiring painter. In your videos is it more about channeling the frustrated artist or telling a distinctive story?

MG:I try to combine those elements. Initially, I thought I would be a painter or artist. Then I found that I wasn't so special in what I was doing. I didn't think I could make a difference in the medium. Then I did some short films and really started to like animation because it crossed many mediums that I enjoyed. This started to be what was really exciting to me, how I would go from A to B in this limited space and time. So in each video, I tried to meet those expectations.


In the intro for your Director's Label DVD, you say that you've worked with all of your favorite musicians except Michael Jackson. If he ever got around to making his next career comeback, would you want to direct a video?

MG: Despite all that's happened--which I think is a reflection of American society and exaggeration and caricature--I think he's still the strongest musician of the end of the 20th Century. The basslines and the rhythms he used are still way more modern than anyone else around. So yeah, I would do a video for him.