Gondry Talks MIT, DIY, and the Art of 'Sweding'

When French director Michel Gondry arrived at MIT to screen his latest film, “Be Kind Rewind,” the very first thing he wanted to do was meet a girl named Star Simpson. Simpson was arrested on Sept. 21, 2007 at the airport for wearing a circuit board with LED lights, which airport employees mistook for a bomb. To law enforcement, “she seemed out of her mind,” Gondry said in an interview at MIT on Feb. 4, “and I can really relate to her craziness.”

MIT has long been known for its irreverent techie idiosyncrasies. “Hacks,” or large-scale pranks, are an MIT tradition. Gondry’s own fascination with the inventive side of MIT springs from his childlike affinity for problem-solving and engineer’s love for hands-on tinkering, which he cultivated as an artist-in-residence at MIT in 2005.

These traits, joined with his utopian hope for community and self-expression through film and gadgets, characterize the latest effort from Gondry’s fertile imagination. As a result, “Be Kind Rewind” is a uniquely Gondry creation. Jack Black and Mos Def star as two video store clerks, Jerry and Mike. When Jerry accidentally erases the contents of all the videotapes, they resort to “Sweding,” or re-enacting and recording, each of the videos that their customers want to rent. The films are said to be Sweded after Jerry’s claim that customers must wait longer and pay extra money for them because the videos come from Sweden. The movies include “Ghostbusters,” “Robocop,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Boyz in Da Hood,” “The Lion King” and “Driving Miss Daisy.”

To Gondry, both his films and the Sweded videotapes express the particular identities of their creators. When making a movie, the director faces a million thematic and technical problems. “And each way, each time you solve a problem, you’re gonna solve it with who you are,” he says. “The problems you have to solve when you do movies are so vast and diverse, I think you have to build your sort of own philosophy.”

Gondry’s method is based in the do-it-yourself ethic of Sweding. “I have this old philosophy about bringing people to their own film and watch[ing] it together,” he says. If Sweding a film can improve on the original, it’s because of its creators.

“First of all, they just make them from memory...they don’t watch the film and compare and imitate them, it’s just a sort of collective, vague memory that they’re all sharing,” he says. “And then the fact that they recycle all the junk, the location that surrounds them, they recycle themselves in a way, and their friends.”

In creating a locally-inspired style that was coherent for the film, Gondry recycled the environs of Passaic, N.J., where the movie takes place. He instructed the cast and crew to use only those elements that Jerry and Mike might have been able to access by restricting his costume designers to shopping at Passaic stores, telling his actors not to re-watch the movies they were Sweding in the film, and casting about 300 Passaic residents. In the movie, Jerry and Mike replicate the proton beams in Ghostbusters by using fishing rods and tinsel, and imitate a blood splatter with a pizza pie.

As a result of this sort of organic, spontaneous creativity, Gondry says that critics lump him in with the “quirkies” who make eclectic films and whom they criticize because, in Gondry’s words, “we don’t care what’s real or bad, we just want to do what makes us happy, and it’s very selfish.” But Gondry points out the contradiction in their critique. “A lot of people consider if you do something personal, you’re selfish,” he says. “And if you do something that’s completely broad to make a lot of money, you’re generous.”

Gondry cultivated the tastes that made him less appealing to mainstream critics during his residency at MIT. The Institute embodies the do-it-yourself ethic that Gondry embodies. “A lot of people are making projects here on the side that are scientific in spirit, but in execution they feel like a bunch of wires mixed together,” he says. He finds the place so inspiring that he is currently writing a movie about two MIT students who discover a type of water that makes them hear musical notes.

Gondry returned to MIT on Feb. 4 in part because he enjoys the creative freedom that abounds there. “[At MIT,] you can try something, and even if it don’t work, you can try something else,” he says. “And I really like that.”

—Staff writer Elsa S. Kim can be reached at elsakim@fas.harvard.edu.