BEVERLY HILLS - Michel Gondry's new movie is a utopian manifesto. That may not be what one would expect from the French-born hipster director responsible for Björk and White Stripes videos - as well as the trippy, postmodern love story "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" - but with "Be Kind Rewind," Gondry is stepping deliberately into the tradition of art for politics' sake.
"As I am getting older, I think I ought to try to say something out there," he said in a Beverly Hills hotel suite just before taking his film to the Sundance Film Festival. "I mean, when [your thoughts] get more articulated a little bit, you can face political conversation. I think I can contribute to the world, maybe, because I have an idea of systems and the way they function."
"Be Kind Rewind," which opens Friday, is set in the disenfranchised-and-rapidly-gentrifying town of Passaic, N.J. Jerry (Jack Black) works in a junkyard and is best friends with Mike (Mos Def). Mike is the clerk in a video store owned by Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover), Mike's surrogate father and the unofficial town bard and historian. Jerry thinks the local power plant is melting his brain, so he sets out to shut it down, using just his bare hands and a tinfoil helmet. But his plan backfires: In almost Scooby-Doo fashion, the power conducted by the plant's protective fence magnetizes Jerry. When he goes to visit Mike in the video store, his presence erases all the VHS tapes, so the pair is forced to remake all the movie rentals on the shelves, using just their fuzzy recollections and an outdated video camera, with townspeople as actors and extras.
What starts as a desperate effort to please the store's number-one customer - a fragile lady played by Mia Farrow - turns out to be an art movement that unites a community. Everyone becomes involved in the process of "sweding" (a nonsense word meaning "re-making") the movies, then watching them together. This collaboration provides a formidable opponent to big-business villains like DVD-rental chains and community redevelopment committees.
Gondry repeatedly describes himself as "naive," and his casual, oddly teenage appearance (he is 44) supports this, as does his quiet, self-effacing manner of speaking. But his unassuming appearance masks an intellectual who makes guest stints at MIT and worships Noam Chomsky. Gondry is a multimedia populist.
"I'd like people to believe they can create their own entertainment. . . . I have done it to myself. My son does it to himself: He makes his own T-shirts, he makes films with his friends, he makes his own music. . . . I hope people don't go out and think, I want to be a big star . . . because that's the wrong way to see it. I think the right way would be, well, let's try it, and have a good time. It would be great if people would realize they don't have to buy into the corporate system to feel they have a meaningful life."
Despite the fact that Gondry wishes we'd all just make our own movies, there's a line of stars waiting to act in his. "I had taken a meeting or two with Michel before he talked about 'Be Kind Rewind,' just to tell him how big a fan I was of his and how I wanted to work with him," Jack Black said recently. "And then he called me and said, I have an idea for this movie, and I came over to his hotel. He had made this homemade comic book . . . with crayon drawings of the characters and the junkyard and the video store that he drew, and he wrote just a few lines of dialogue and a basic story. . . . No one had ever presented a movie to me like that before."
It's no wonder that Gondry chose musician Fats Waller - the genius jazz man - to be the inspiration behind "Be Kind Rewind." The community in the film is shaped by its connection to Waller, who, according to town lore, lived in Mr. Fletcher's ramshackle house (now the video store).
And it's not much of a leap to interpret Waller as a proxy for Gondry, a technical virtuoso with a renegade spirit and almost cartoonish sense of humor. "In jazz music, you have a lot of training, and then you overcome your training to become an individual," Gondry said of Waller. The same can be said about Gondry's filmmaking: He is known throughout the industry as a technical virtuoso, bringing impossible-seeming visual ideas to fruition. He made Legos dance in the White Stripes' "Fell in Love With a Girl," and put beds on beaches in "Eternal Sunshine." In a 1995 video for the Rolling Stones, he pioneered a technique called "bullet time," which later exploded as a visual signature of "The Matrix."
Gondry and his two brothers were raised by progressive parents, artists themselves. "This freedom that was expressed through the '70s lifestyle - rejecting the past was great for us." In a sense, Gondry was raised in the utopian environment he proposes in the film, a place where ideas are nourished. He is raising his 16-year-old son, Paul, in the same way, collaborating on an animated film taken from Paul's drawings, with contributions from the comic book artist Dan Klowes and actor Steve Buscemi.
Gondry is taking his ideas on creativity into the real world by setting up a sweding studio at the contemporary art gallery Deitch Projects in New York. It's a replica of the video store in the film, but with a back lot where gallery goers can make their own sweded films. Ultimately, though, Gondry hopes his creative directive reaches beyond the Deitch Projects's rarefied audience. "It's a great opportunity for me to use Deitch for this project, but it's not the place it should be . . . it should be a more literal place. It shouldn't be, necessarily, art-related."
One gets the sense, when watching any of Gondry's works, of inhabiting his mind. It seems he possesses the gift so many children long for, the ability to literally show other people what he sees when he closes his eyes. "When I watch my movies myself, I see . . . the process I have to go through to make it happen. . . . I don't see them like if I didn't make them. It doesn't make me go inside my head, it makes me go back in the memories of shooting the film. So it's difficult. . . . Something that interests me a lot is how the brain works and how emotions are connected with memories."
Explorations into Gondry's own memory are featured on a biopic on his music video compilation DVD, called "I've Been Twelve Forever," in which he reenacts moments from his past. Will he ever make a full-length film memoir? "I had this project with my brother . . . who is a director too. . . . The idea is we'd always try [as children] to make some plane fly - airplane, or glider, small-scale . . . and they never flew. It would be like 'The Right Stuff,' but it would be 'The Wrong Stuff' !"
