Your favorite musicians, filmmakers, and other creative minds one-on-one. No moderator, no script, no typical questions. The Talkhouse Podcast offers unique insights into creative work from all genres and generations. Subscribe now, and explore more illuminating shows on the Talkhouse Podcast Network.
Each episode, I talk to a filmmaker, musician or writer, and aim to ask them questions they’ve never heard before in an interview, in an effort to discover a different side of them and understand them better.
The format of the show is, inherently, um … a little experimental. The aim is to go to new places in these conversations, to follow my curiosity in an attempt to explore inner lives of artists whose work I love. My ground rules here are that I don’t ask questions I wouldn’t myself be comfortable answering, and I let guests know that if they don’t want to answer a question, that’s totally fine.
The guest on today’s episode is Michel Gondry, arguably one of the most creative and original filmmakers working today. A visionary who first showcased his imagination in a series of dazzling music videos, Gondry blossomed into a Hollywood filmmaker with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and has since dotted between studio movies and indie features, working both in the U.S. and in his native France.
I’m a huge fan of Gondry’s work, so when he was doing press for his latest film, Maya, Give Me a Title, I jumped at the chance to talk with him. This film is a real curiosity: just an hour long, it’s a home movie of sorts: a collection of hand-made animations created by Gondry for his young daughter Maya, who he sees only infrequently due to his work, based on prompts for stories that she gives him. Gondry never intended the project to be seen by anyone but Maya and her mother, but realized that what he’d made might coalesce nicely into something he could share with the world at large.
Maya, Give Me a Title is a true delight, bearing the hallmarks of Gondry’s best work, a playfulness and childlike innocence paired with a nimbly imaginative approach to storytelling.
My conversation with Gondry was prompted by this movie, but also took place in the shadow of another film, Golden, a big budget studio movie produced by Pharrell which – shortly before we spoke – Universal had decided to scrap, after it had been shot.
A condition of my talking to Gondry was that I steer clear of this project, which I dutifully did … but there was still a moment of awkwardness at one point.
Gondry was, however, game to answer almost all questions, and our conversation was a very illuminating one, in which we talked about him learning a sense of play from cats, the pivotal moment when he decided to work only on his own terms, his earliest childhood memories, taking David Lynch’s advice for his 2015 movie Microbe and Gasoline, watching that same movie alone a plane, why people’s fixation on the Bermuda triangle is nonsense … and much more. — N.D.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan, and the Talkhouse theme is composed and performed by the Range.
