On Friday evening we revealed that Michel Gondry’s former bandmate in the French pop group, Oui Oui, guitarist/singer Étienne Charry, composed the score for the directors’ “Interior Design” segment in the triptych vignettes film “Tôkyô!”
We found something on Rotten Tomatoes that said the film was coming out November 30 and asked, could this be true? We hoped someone would write us and tell us more and our wish came true. A publicist for “Tôkyô!” saw our post and wrote us, turns out the film is coming out March 6, 2009 in the U.S. now. Apparently Liberation Entertainment had originally planned to release the film on December 6, but concerns about the crowded holiday rush and prestige film season pushed it back to ’09.
“Tôkyô!” consists of three shorts, one by Gondry, and the other two directors on the project are South Korean filmmaker Joon-ho Bong and French director Leos Carax who hasn’t made a film since 1999’s “Pola X” (and Scott Walker scored).
“Interior Design” is based off of the comic book “Cecil and Jordan in New York” by alternative cartoonist Gabrielle Bell about a young woman turns herself into a chair so as not to be too much of a bother to those around her. Bell and Gondry also collaborated on “Kuruma Tohrimasu”, a collection of drawings and photographs made during the production of the short film.
Gondry spoke to Pingmag earlier this year in August about working with Japanese actors and his impressions of the city of Tokyo. “I didn’t ask them to improvise at all, I asked them to be spontaneous. The reason I avoid doing tests is because I’m superstitious and I believe if the test is great it gets worse afterwards. Also, I don’t give actors any direction for the first take in general in case someone comes up with a good idea which is different from mine. If I give them direction first we never try someone else’s idea and I would miss out a very interesting take. As a result, we could collaborate well on taking directions.”