Michel Gondry, a true mad-scientist filmmaker, is shooting his next film - Be Kind, Rewind - in Passaic, NJ. In this response to NYMag’s article picking on the locals or Gondry - I’m not sure which - he details the premise of the film:
This story portrays two clerks (Jack Black and Mos Def) who erase, by mistake, all the videos in the store, while their boss (Danny Glover) is away. To cover up the catastrophe, and continue the business, they re-shoot all the movies themselves, playing all the parts.
The store clerks have to construct period flat cars with historical re-creation, transform a washing machine into a space ship for the space odyssey, capture a wild cat with garland beam guns in a fridge for Ghostbusters, etc. They are assisted in these recreations by the locales of the neighborhood.
I almost spit my iced coffee all over myself reading the description of the Ghostbusters scene. GENIUS!
The following paragraph was also particulary interesting to me, knowing a little (really, just a little) about how Hollywood filmmaking operates:
To find realistic people from the neighborhood, we had the idea to turn to the real Passaic inhabitants. Nice people, going with their life that has not much to do with the film industry which makes them special in my eyes. That seems an obvious and easy idea. Well, it’s not. Let me explain why: the film industry is extremely protected by numerous circles and organizations whose only goal is make sure you won’t employ anyone out of those circles. In short, this makes it next to impossible to put a fresh face/voice in front of the camera and without a pre-conceived idea how to act. This pre-conceived idea ruins what I am trying to capture on film.
Being able to make a Hollywood film, and I’m talking about the really bad ones, is no small feat. Making an independent film and getting Hollywood to buy into it is a miracle. Making a film in Hollywood but doing it independently means, simply, that you’ve joined the ranks of badass filmmakers. Gondry is certainly among them.
Speaking of badass filmmakers, the best episode (so far) of Iconoclasts aired last week featuring Quentin Tarantino and Fiona Apple hanging out in Austin, TX. Fiona isn’t the crazy person she made everyone think she was and Quentin says something deeply profound:
I don’t really want to see movies from people that can’t get it up anymore, and I don’t really want to make movies if I can’t get it up anymore.
I was just listening to U2 - Bullet The Blue Sky