The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

150 Michel Gondry
I think they have a different sense in their own world in their own way. I
think it’s interesting to work like that.
Lamorisse attempted to make the jump from short films to feature
films, but it didn’t work out and he had to go back to short films. From
your perspective, you’re one of the few directors who made that jump
successfully, from commercials and videos to features.
Gondry: Oh, well, I could still fail. It’s a very interesting point you’re bringing
up because I like a lot of directors like George Pal. He did one of my
favorite movies, The Time Machine. He’s really a technician and an immigrant
from Hungary. He invented this technique of taking shapes and just
replacing them when they animate. When they go into the future you see all
those models with all the time-lapse effects with the flower growing at full
speed. It’s just really charming.
The Time Machine included this very poetic view of the world by this kind
of humble technician. This kind of thing, I really like. There’s a movie done
by Saul Bass, who designed a lot of Hitchcock’s credit sequences. He did this
movie called Phase IV, which is like a horror movie with ants. It’s brilliant, sort
of halfway between commentary and fiction. These are the things I like.
Back to my question: historically, why do so many short filmmakers
have a hard time following up with longer forms?
Gondry: It takes a lot of guts. It’s scary and you’re not necessarily bound
to survive it. But I don’t know about this question; it’s hard for me to tell.
Obviously the form is different, too, but the form is defined, so you have to
match it and cope with all the difficulties.
It takes a lot more. It takes stubbornness to have any kind of success, I
guess. You have to be blindly stubborn, basically because that way you’d just
give up after the first preview. In fact, if you’re stubborn, you learn a lot from
failure—much more from failure than from success.
Seeing this as a young man, did it influence the way you thought
about cinema?
Gondry: It’s more like, “Oh that’s exciting! That’s interesting! That makes
me want to try something else with this adventurous thinking.” It’s more