The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

148 Michel Gondry
You’re right. In fact, when it came to America it was renamed Stowaway
in the Sky and narrated by Jack Lemmon. Who narrated the action
in France?
Gondry: The guy who was following on the ground with the car! His name
was Maurice Baquet, and he was a figure from the ’60s. He was a musician
and kind of a mime. He was an artist and part of a guild, and he was appearing
in movies like that, a little bit surreal.
He has some of the best shots. He’s the mechanic, the guy who can’t keep
his car on the road. He keeps like letting go of the steering wheel. . . .
Gondry: That’s the very best of Buster Keaton.
There seem to be a lot of silent film moments—and accidents. There’s
a shot where a horse actually throws a rider and a farmer falls off his
wagon, and then one of the balloons blows up. For you, what is the
importance of incorporating accidents into filming?
Gondry: It may be something that you talk about, but maybe the director
didn’t even think of it, maybe because he’s watching a lot of things. To him,
it’s a very simple storyline so he needs to create accidents and impose meaning,
literal and nonliteral. Or maybe because you observe a lot and you see
these things happening. He actually died in a helicopter accident.
Yes, Lamorisse’s last film was called The Lovers’ Wind, and he died in a
helicopter crash while filming it in Tehran in 1970.
Gondry: He probably had that in the back of his head, flying all the time.
The thing is: When you fly with the camera you don’t have any sense of danger
because you’re focused on what you’re doing. Like when I did a video for
Björk in the Icelandic landscape, “Joga.” We had small planes and a helicopter,
and I was hanging out of the helicopter.
Ordinarily, I would never do that. I’m really scared when I fly, and I
had just a safety rope with a little hook. If I forgot to put the hook on, I
would just be dead, basically. When I was shooting, I was never afraid
of anything. But when the film would start to run out, I would realize,
“Whoa! What’s happening here?” and panic. A lot of accidents occur like