The Science Of Sleep

[Chest Rockwell]

I came out of the theater feeling really...fuzzy. Sort of detached from my physical presence. Gondry had truly created the dream experience for me, that persisted for a few minutes after the movie ended. I think I genuinely like it more than Eternal Sunshine. While other movies have dealth with this same subject (dreaming, reality), Gondry has here finally made me aware of the experience, by actually making me feel like a participant in the dream. The romance itself was touching and depressing all at once, mainly because it's so accurate. The awkwardness, the sometimes childish emotions, the patheticness.

Perhaps it's a long indulgent demonstration of visual tricks, but I didn't see it like that at all. Gondry turns imagery into pathos so effortlessly, it truly feels like everything is in its right place, and moreover like I can't help but play along.

[MacGuffin]

WHV will release Science Of Sleep on February 6th, 2007. In both widescreen and full screen versions. No word on extras yet.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

WHV will release Science Of Sleep on February 6th, 2007. In both widescreen and full screen versions. No word on extras yet.

FINALLY. A date set & I'm happy.

[The Perineum Falcon]

I found this on CD WOW!, so if anyone has a better source (Mac??), please share!



Interactive Features:
Interactive Menus, Scene Selection, Theatrical Trailer, Making Of Feature


Review:
From director Michel Gondry The Science of Sleep is a playful romantic fantasy set inside the topsy-turvy brain of Stephane Miroux (Gael Garcia Bernal), an eccentric young man whose dreams constantly invade his waking life. Stephane pines for next-door neighbour, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), but she becomes confused by his childishness and shaky connection to reality. Unable to find the secret to Stephanie's heart while awake, Stephane searches for the answer in his dreams.

Special Features:

Audio commentary by writer/director Michel Gondry and cast
The Making of The Science of Sleep
Featurette on Lauri Faggioni, Creator of Animals and Accessories
Linda Serbu Music Video

[Mikey B]

A DVD I'm eagery awaiting...

[MacGuffin]

I found this on CD WOW!, so if anyone has a better source (Mac??), please share!

Not only that, I have a DVD review:
http://dvd.ign.com/articles/756/756860p1.html

[The Perineum Falcon]

Wonderfully perfect, Mac. You never let me down.

[MacGuffin]

Interview: Michel Gondry
The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine director discusses his 'dream' project and (re-) winds up for his next idiosyncratic odyssey.

It's almost strange to imagine that The Science of Sleep is the culmination of Michel Gondry's career thus far; following a successful career directing music videos, three feature films and an Oscar for best original screenplay, the oddball romantic comedy is something of an understated charmer. And yet, it is absolutely an extension of his work on those previous projects: without the Lego landscapes of his White Stripes work or the hand-crafted head trip of Eternal Sunshine, his erstwhile SoS alter ego Stephane might never have manufactured so many magical dream worlds.

IGN recently spoke to Gondry via phone about The Science of Sleep, which arrives on DVD this week. In addition to discussing the intensely personal nature of the project, the director describes the technical processes by which he brings Stephane's imagination to life, and looks forward to some of the ideas he hopes to explore in future films.

IGN DVD: Have you found that the reception to the movie was what you expected?

Michel Gondry: Well, I think the reception was very positive. People are connecting a lot with the characters and the story, which is what I was really hoping for. I mean, I was hoping it would be bigger, but we did much more business than the movie cost so I guess it's financially positive. But it was the first movie I wrote so it was very personal and it was like a new beginning for me. You know when bands record their first album, they put everything they grew up with basically in it because it's the first album since they were born. Like, say when they were in their 20s, they have 20 years of accumulation, and then when they do a second album two years later they have two years of accumulation. So generally it's more controlled and more organized, but the first album is very special; they don't even have a title, they just have the name of the band, which is interesting, and then for the second album they have to come up with a title which is very artificial, just to separate them. So I feel like this movie is like a first album.

IGN: What seems to connect this film to your others is that you created characters that are deeply sympathetic but not always likeable. Because this movie was so personal for you, was it difficult to create a character who is not always likeable?

Gondry: Well, I think he's likeable. I mean, I hope he is. He is a little bit racy at times but he's not a murderer; he just swears a lot. When the swearing becomes inappropriate his feelings are becoming too intense and he doesn't manage them very well. But I didn't want to make anything from him that would be too [seductive]. Already I had Gael Garcia Bernal who is very charming person, so I think that was enough. It was interesting to see him go all of the way into his unpredictable weakness.

IGN: Was it tough to relinquish control over Stephane once Gael came in and started developing him?

Gondry: Well, it was difficult in the sense - well, obviously this character is based on some of my friends and some of my personality, but it was difficult because physically we are different and we are not the same age. This difference becomes the fiction of the story, but what I do when I meet the actors is I talk a lot with them and I spend a lot of time getting acquainted to understand each other. So when we start shooting we are already on the same page, and I think we define the territory where we both feel welcome or at home. So when we start shooting I don't think there is much that I would ask him that he would feel is inappropriate or he would do that I don't feel is matching the character, because we know each other and we have a very strong friendship by then because we met many times over one year.

So for instance you have the scene where he presents his calendar and he is very forthcoming and like kind of over the top because he is really trying hard to sell his idea. This is not the way I saw it at first but I always leave my actor to come up with their own idea first, and his way was so much better than what I was expecting and that was great. I think it's important to try to get in tune with your actor and then you can give them enough freedom and they can really feel the character exists and they can feel the range of what the character is supposed to do.

IGN: One of the great bonus materials on the DVD is the making-of featurette, which talks about the low-tech approach you took to making the movie's effects. Generally speaking, if you had limitless budgets is that still the way you would prefer to work?

Gondry: I think you can see with some of the videos I've done that they are more sort of sophisticated in terms of the technology, but I think always I will try to experiment. The good thing about doing stuff in-camera is that you just take your chances and commit to one idea while you are shooting, which gives a sort of energy - like maybe if you would have actors on a stage where there is no safety. They have to carry on no matter what happens and cannot stop and just do an effect. I think that doing the special effects in-camera will put you in this position where everything is so impossible that when [it works] by some kind of miraculous success, you are rewarded. It's sort of an energy cycle that's very good for the whole project.

When you see Gael floating there or flying, we used a big tank filled up with water and projected the background, and my producer asked me maybe ten times if I wanted to do it blue screen. I said "no way;" to see somebody flying on a blue screen is like nothing special. But the complication of doing it through the tank and the projection and the cold water and the fact the actor is blind in the water makes it so awkward that it gives it something that you could never achieve [through CGI]. The idea of someone flying through the air is nothing special basically because everybody has experienced that in their dreams and seen it in movies many times. Sometimes it's great like in Crouching Tiger, a great scene with wires, but I wanted to do it my own way and I think when I dream and I'm trying to fly I feel the medium I'm floating in is very thick, and I thought water was perfect.

This is an example, but if I had more money I would still have the water [but] my prediction is that the tank would be bigger and we would have two weeks of time instead of two days to shoot. But I will do CGI for some other effect, and actually I have this project I am writing now that may happen in 90 countries and I've been there and I'm going to use all of their resources to create different special effects.

IGN: Having done this movie that's so personal, do you feel like it's easy or difficult to take on new projects that might be bigger or less personal? We know you have Be Kind Rewind coming up.

Gondry: Be Kind Rewind is finished nearly, and it's going to be really good. [But] I think you should mention the work I did with Dave Chappelle on Block Party because it was really important in my work; he made me think of different aspects of life. Basically I was more prone to talk about creativity and relationships and feelings, and I think in Be Kind Rewind I have the creativity effect, but it's more about coming together. This was brought to me by working with Dave Chappelle and creating this concept of this energy around him, and it really opened my eyes. And obviously I knew these things about community and coming together, but I didn't know I would be capable of talking about that, and after working with Dave Chappelle, I found myself in a place where I feel I could talk about it.

When you do movies or if you are an artist or a musician, you lead a life that is really interesting with the media - with television, with the creation of what you do. You sort of lose a sense of real life - which is that you do work that gives you money but you don't have this constant interaction with your art. So you have more sort of a reality in your personality and who you are that you are just more yourself basically. I'm getting a little bit complicated, but basically I realized how much I needed this type of person because you find yourself interacting with people who are interacting with the majority [of people], and their personality is constantly altered by that. So you have those who become like big-headed and talk about themselves all of the time and are super-confident and those who are more inside and they become very shy and withdrawn, but you don't have [many] people who are just simple, real people. So in Be Kind Rewind I'm going more into this world which is a reality, basically.

IGN: Professionally speaking, do you feel like you have the freedom to explore these ideas?

Gondry: To be honest, I am pretty safe in the sense that if I have an idea I want to do I will find a way to make it work financially. With the films I've done, they have always turned out to be financially in the positive. So I didn't make a movie that was a huge hit and create an empire for myself, but all of the things I've made turned out to - even my first film was not like a big hit but it had a positive financial result. I've always been more balanced so if tomorrow I do a movie that's weird or probably appeals to a small audience, I just have to make it for the money that they can recoup. But I don't [think] that I am cornered into having to do anything; I think I worked hard to be able to explore any film direction and I want to continue doing that.

[Pubrick]

I have this project I am writing now that may happen in 90 countries

best movie of next decade (so far).

[Alexandro]

Watched this yesterday. I was constantly in awe of the visual inventivness of this film. No scene was boring in that sense. But the way the story is told turned me off. I didn't find it funny, as another guy pointed out, some of it felt like reading poetry by a 12 year old. I didn't like Gael's performance at all. He seemed to be so self conscious about being in a Michel Gondry movie. A few times he actually surpassed that self consciousness and made his dialogues felt completely real instead of just half improvised real, but I guess someone like Jim Carrey, who can get away more easily with going from completely serious to completely crazy, is better suited for this kind of imaginary universe with cartoonish tones. I kept thinking another actor might had more fun with all of this and therefore made it funnier for us.

After half an hour I kind of stopped caring. It was pretty to look at but the love story didn't do it for me. I agree the girl was perfectly cast. The humor I didn't really liked. Someone said it reminded him of Godard and I agree, I also never found his movies funny.

Overall I'm dissapointed, but I'm sure in the future Gondry will find a way to make this kind of non linear and more dreamlike oriented movie more succesfully.

[MacGuffin]

'It's complexicated'
Michel Gondry, the maker of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, tells Xan Brooks about his weird dreams, why Carrey and Winslet aren't friends - and why he's finally gone solo
Source: The Guardian
 
I feel that I know Michel Gondry even before he steps through the door of his hotel suite. I have him pegged as ingenious and excitable, vibrant company but slightly batty; and I think all this because his new film, The Science of Sleep, is so brazenly autobiographical, and its chief protagonist so obviously an alter ego. Like Stéphane (the character played by Gael García Bernal), Gondry once held down a dead-end job at a Paris calendar publisher. Like Stéphane, he once nursed a forlorn crush on a casual female acquaintance. In real life, his love was not reciprocated. In the film, it sort of is, although during the production Gondry was not entirely certain of this and had to ask Charlotte Gainsbourg (the actor who plays the girl) for reassurance. Afterwards, he felt happy and relieved.

Like Stéphane, Gondry is also an avid fantasist. Typical artist, he claims to have developed the ability to "direct" his dreams, tweaking the sound levels and adjusting the focus. "I call it lucid dreaming," he says. "And when I have a lucid dream, I generally end up having sex with the first girl I can find." What, when he wakes up? "No, no. In the dream. Because you realise nobody is watching. So I just spend my time finding girls to have sex with." Three minutes in, the conversation has already taken a perplexing detour.
Gondry was raised in Versailles, a bourgeois Parisian suburb sandwiched between the forest and the city. In the past, he has speculated that it was this background that shaped his creative choices, defining his fascination with the blurry line that separates the world of magic from the world of men. Physically, too, Gondry cuts an exotic, storybook figure. With his wiry build, dapper dress and elfin features, he would have made a perfect Mr Tumnus, if only James McAvoy hadn't got there first.

At the age of 43, he has tried on various hats. That job at the calendar company was eventually subsumed by a more pleasurable stint banging drums in the pop band Oui Oui ("we were not very successful, but people liked us"). This in turn led to a golden age making trailblazing music videos for everyone from Björk to the Rolling Stones. The promos were his passport to features. He made Human Nature and the Oscar-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in tandem with the writer Charlie Kaufman. He collaborated with the comic Dave Chappelle on the eponymous Dave Chappelle's Block Party. The Science of Sleep is his first outing as both writer and director - the first one he can truly call his own.

Gondry pours some tea and explains why it took so long. At first, he lacked confidence in his own voice, he says. But when he watched his videos back-to-back, he realised his voice had actually been there all along. "It is not such a stretch moving from videos to narrative features," he says. "I always saw my videos as little stories, anyway. In one, the story is a palindrome. In one, it is a spiral." In fact, many of The Science of Sleep's ideas crop up, in embryonic form, in these promos. The giant hands that Bernal sports at one stage were first used in the Foo Fighters' Everlong video. Before that, they were a regular feature in Gondry's nocturnal ramblings. Perhaps he even had sex while wearing them.

I liked The Science of Sleep. While film lacks the pure emotional wallop of Eternal Sunshine, it remains a beguiling, sugar-frosted fantasy, utterly unlike anything else currently doing the rounds. It also boasts a lovely chemistry between Bernal and Gainsbourg as the mismatched playmates who may just become lovers.

Of course, movies have a knack of bamboozling the viewer. Previously, I had always imagined a similar connection between Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine. Off-screen, however, this turns out not to have been the case.

"Much more difficulty," Gondry says. "They were very different personalities and I think they are coming from such different backgrounds that they are having to stretch to meet. They did an amazing job, but it was a lot to ask for them to become friends."

This thorny relationship was reflected across the entire production. "We had two producers, one from New York and one from LA, so different backgrounds again. Then you had Charlie Kaufman and Jim Carrey, two strong personalities. And I was in the middle. I would talk to Jim Carrey and listen to his ideas. And I liked them, but they were -" he gestures across the room - "way over here." Like what? "Well, I remember he would go, 'Oh, maybe I'm eating a cake and my house is inside the cake.' Or, 'Maybe I suddenly lose my eye and I'm rotting and it's like a horror movie.' And I would never even dare to pass these ideas on to Charlie Kaufman. His views were very different."

Gondry insists he never feels resentful that Eternal Sunshine is generally viewed as a Kaufman film, with the director playing second fiddle. "People write these things in newspapers, so it's obvious they gravitate towards the writer," he shrugs. "Yet film is a visual language, not a written one. So when people say I can't tell a story because I'm coming from videos, it's very dismissive of what movies really are."

Talking of language, I'm fascinated by the choices made in The Science of Sleep, which veers from French to Spanish to English to a kind of backwards-looping dreamspeak. Partly this was done to accommodate Bernal, who is Mexican; partly, it is a reflection of the director's own stateless pedigree. "I moved to the UK and then to the US in 1996, and I work a lot in the English language," he explains. "So it would be difficult for me to do a purely French movie."

I ask if he sometimes dreams in English and he says he sometimes does, even though his accent is still rich and his vocabulary still occasionally scuffs its toes. He says "misleaded", for example, and "complexicated". Gondry blinks. "Yeah, yeah. I mean complicated."

Gondry tells me about his son, Paul, who is 15. Paul used to live with his mother in Paris but is now with his dad in New York. At school, Paul hangs out with the other ex-pats. When the conversation is chatty, the kids use English. When it turns more personal, they resort to French. "English is more direct, more confident," Gondry says. "I had an English girlfriend after breaking up with Paul's mother, who is French. I would never say 'I love you' in French. It is too definitive. If you say it once, that's it. It's like saying, 'I will die for you.' In England, you can say it casually."

We define ourselves by the language we speak, Gondry argues. We don't speak language; language speaks us. So when he was working in the calendar firm, he defined himself via his native tongue. And when he began shooting music videos, he shifted into English. "My professional life was developing at the same time. I became a little more confident by becoming a more successful director. I lost a little bit of my timidity. And I helped myself along by using English."

And this, surely, is the main difference between the director and his alter-ego. Where the character of Stephane is widely regarded a kooky loner, Gondry has found an outlet for his creativity. His wild inventions have been affirmed by the world at large. These days the girls must be falling at his feet.

Things have changed, admits Gondry - but only up to a point. "There was this girl recently who said that she had watched my DVD six times, and I was thinking, 'Oh, she must really like me.' So I asked her out to a screening and she said, 'It's a date.' " He shakes his head. "But she didn't mean it as a date-date. She just meant it as a date in her diary. Or maybe she did mean it as a date, but then she changed her mind."

He pauses to ponder this conundrum; this thicket of missed connections and language barriers, gaudy dreams and cold realities. Eventually he is forced to let it lie. "I wish there was an easy answer," he sighs. "It is very complexicated".

[©brad]

"Much more difficulty," Gondry says. "They were very different personalities and I think they are coming from such different backgrounds that they are having to stretch to meet. They did an amazing job, but it was a lot to ask for them to become friends."

i know it's really stupid but it always bugs me when you find stuff like this out. like, two actors you like who have such great chemistry on screen but really dislike eachother off, it almost spoils the movie a little.

[Pozer]

Watched this yesterday. I was constantly in awe of the visual inventivness of this film. No scene was boring in that sense. But the way the story is told turned me off. I didn't find it funny, as another guy pointed out, some of it felt like reading poetry by a 12 year old. I didn't like Gael's performance at all. He seemed to be so self conscious about being in a Michel Gondry movie. A few times he actually surpassed that self consciousness and made his dialogues felt completely real instead of just half improvised real, but I guess someone like Jim Carrey, who can get away more easily with going from completely serious to completely crazy, is better suited for this kind of imaginary universe with cartoonish tones. I kept thinking another actor might had more fun with all of this and therefore made it funnier for us.

After half an hour I kind of stopped caring. It was pretty to look at but the love story didn't do it for me. I agree the girl was perfectly cast. The humor I didn't really liked. Someone said it reminded him of Godard and I agree, I also never found his movies funny.

Overall I'm dissapointed, but I'm sure in the future Gondry will find a way to make this kind of non linear and more dreamlike oriented movie more succesfully.

you forgot to bring your towel

[Alexandro]

i did, i bring my towel to every movie...well, pretty much.

[squints]

my girlfriend said she thinks the movie would've been better had she brought a towel