Director Michel Gondry re-invented the music video and challenged Hollywood with his playfully distinctive hand-made visual style. Intimately documented by his friend and long-time assistant, François Nemeta, in Michel Gondry, Do It Yourself, Gondry’s career receives overdue review, from his earliest clips for his own band Oui Oui, to his best-known music videos for Björk, Daft Punk, The White Stripes and The Chemical Brothers, to the invention of the “bullet time” effect made famous by The Matrix, to the bespoke shorts he now makes for just one spectator: his daughter Maya.
Inspired by the French magician and film pioneer Georges Méliès and his inventor grandfather, Gondry has created three decades of fascinating and poetic work. Here, his unusual creative process is on full display as he shares his ethos of “creating without caring what others think, learning while doing and taking pleasure while doing it."
From hand to eye, Michel Gondry has been offering us for thirty years to seize what surrounds us to create and tell the world. A work that is a constant praise of wonder through craftsmanship: whether we approach his relationship to music and his beginnings as a videographer; the notion of magic inherent in his conception of the image; its roots in childhood and the world of dreams; the paradox of his Hollywood career; and the humanist ambition of its craftsmanship... which is also a political act. Do it yourself.