Ah, Michel Gondry loves making thematic, creative, whimsical videos and he’s just directed another colorful, visually inventive and heavily choreographed clip for spritely L.A. musician Mia Doi Todd who’s known for collaborating with the Folk Implosion and her ersatz band Alaska! you can see the clip “Open Your Heart,” below, it’s amusing, clever, cute, what have you.
Gondry’s a big fan of her breezy, effervescent work. “I really fell in love with her music,” he told EW. “It’s incredibly fragile, personal, and very elevated.”
The always candid Gondry (maybe it’s a French thing or lost in translation) admits the concept for the video was something he’s wanted to use somewhere for a long time and had even suggested it to other musicians. “I have tons of ideas like that in the back of my head. [Other musicians] always wanted to add something to it, and I thought it would lose what I like in the idea, the simplicity…I was asked to maybe use [the concept] for a commercial, but I didn’t want to. I would rather pay myself and do it in a much lower budget than to ruin the idea and do it for a commercial.”
The director, an accomplished drummer who did play drums on Kanye West’s Late Registration produced by Jon Brion, will back Todd on the kit for a monthlong Tuesday residency at L.A.’s Spaceland club starting tonight.
Gondry also told EW about working with Seth Rogen on “The Green Hornet,” and it sounds like, despite being a pretty big project with lots of studio fingers inside the pie, he was able to do what he wanted with it sounds like, at least some degree of autonomy.
“It’s the first time I did such a big project, which is a very important movie for Sony,” Gondry told the magazine, noting he’s just moved to the editing stage now. “I know the pressure on me to deliver. But on the other hand, it seems that they let me do a lot of crazy things.” “I have to be careful of the words I use, because if the studio reads my comments and finds words that could alienate the broad audience, they will kill me. We had such a good relationship with Seth Rogen and [producer] Neal Moritz that it went well. There was no tension. They encouraged me to be myself, and encouraged Seth to be himself. I think we made a good team. There are a lot of explosions and stuff, which was not my specialty. On the other hand, the way the action unfolds is sort of geometrical…The main villain is played by Christoph Waltz who did an amazing performance. I think it took a very special direction.”
“The Green Hornet” hits theaters December 12. Watch Mia Doi Todd’s “Open Your Heart” below
