Michel Gondry has been doing press for his newest self-released music video DVD collection, “Michel Gondry 2: More Videos Before & After DVD 1,” which is basically a sequel to his Director’s Label series music video disc (the Director’s Label series seems to be dead now).
This second DVD contains Gondry-directed music videos by Radiohead and collaborators he hadn’t worked with for almost a decade like Björk and Beck.
But did Beck have to pout, scream and shout and almost threaten to not invite Gondry to his birthday party to get him to direct another video? Ain’t It Cool News asked about his break from working with Björk, but the ever-candid Gondry went into a whole story about Beck (Gondry directed “Deadweight” in 1997, but it wasn’t until 2006’s “Cellphone’s Dead” that they finally collaborated on a music video again). From a transcript of an interview over at AICN:
“I think it’s just that many times [Björk and I] missed each other [when it came to schedule]. I had the same situation with Beck, where we meet each other many times and at some point he slammed his fist on the table and said, ‘If you want to work with me, say it! Or if you don’t want to work with me, say it!’ And I said, ‘No, I want to do it!’ And then we figured it out. I was being carried away by other stuff; he’d asked me a couple of times, and we’d just missed each other. So he said, ‘If we are friends, we should find a situation to make it work.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, I don’t want to lose that friendship.’ I really wanted to keep working with him, so I made the necessary effort for us to work together.”
The Green Hornet: Extremely Commercial?
Gee, friends really blackmail each other emotionally, huh? Is that in the Scientology bible? Bad form! Gondry is also troubled by why his movies don’t seem to have mainstream appeal, but he insists, “The Green Hornet” is going to be “extremely commercial.”
“I don’t know why my movies are not more commercial,” he said. “Maybe it’s a question of pacing. But… I think [‘Green Hornet’] will be extremely commercial.” Wait, an extremely commercial Green Hornet with Seth Rogen? Is that a good thing? Didn’t they hire him because he’s not commercial, or is it all just relatively speaking especially from Gondry’s skewed perspective? (i.e. “extremely commercial” coming from him just means, “not as opaque.”) Then again, it is a tentpole movie. Cue concern.