By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Noting Gondry: Sleep's traces
A feverish chat with Michel Gondry at Zoom-In with Reid Rosefelt: “I don’t want to mix my current work with my blog, but in this case I’ll make an exception. I recently wrote the production notes for Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep… I met with Gondry for an hour. Since then, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about our conversation… Gondry has often said that he gets his ideas from his dreams. But I was fascinated to learn more about Gondry’s idiosyncratic approach to interpreting dreams. When you wake up from a dream, you can write it down and look it up in a dream interpretation book… If you are a Freudian you can use his symbolic language; if you’re a religious person, you can make connections to the Bible or the Koran, etc. … Gondry doesn’t see why everyone can’t have their own mythology. He believes you can find the secrets of your dream life by exploring your memory… [I]f you have a dream about a snake, why is the only interpretation the obvious Freudian interpretation? In this case, he suggests you search for the answer in all your memories of snakes, not in communal symbols. More to the point, by probing your mental landscape, he believes you can find out who you are… One dream that regularly turns up in Gondry’s work is some kind of “misplacement”: the bed on the beach in Eternal Sunshine…, the bathtub in the office in The Science of Sleep… Gondry thinks our brains are normally in a passive state, where everything makes sense. But when we see something that’s incongruous, we have to work to reconstruct it. As it isn’t something normally see, you question your reality. And he call this “a very creative moment.” [Further ado at the link.]