The maker of indelible music videos (and one-time Kanye West percussionist) showed his long-form filmmaking chops four years ago with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His new film Be Kind Rewind (see review page 22) showcases Gondry’s twin affinities for lovable naïfs — Jack Black and Mos Def play two New Jersey goofs who produce shoestring remakes of an entire video store’s worth of VHS titles — and inventive, hand-crafted aesthetics. The director spoke with EYE WEEKLY during a recent visit to Toronto.

There’s a communal vibe in this movie that feels carried over from your work on Dave Chappelle’s Block Party (2005). Did the setting for Be Kind Rewind come out of that project?
Yes, a lot of it came from spending time with Dave Chappelle, and it’s how I met Mos Def. I don’t think that I would have the guts, starting from scratch, to talk about an interracial community as a subject. I don’t go really deep into it anyway, but it’s there. I know Passaic, New Jersey through my mechanic, who plays a mechanic in the film. It was a perfect place for this story.

You say you don’t go deep, but the bit where Mia Farrow’s character expresses her love for Driving Miss Daisy to Mos Def addresses a certain naïveté about racial politics in film.
I think that movie won an Academy Award. Dave Chappelle was interested in this project, and some of the jokes came from him. He always wanted to mock [Driving Miss Daisy] because he disliked it. I think it’s impossible to feel the offence an African-American person might feel if you’re not part of that community… there is a mark, living in America, where slavery happened for hundreds of years, and a lot of time white people won’t understand why black people get offended.
The remakes in Be Kind Rewind are light on plot and heavy on physical, textural things. Do you think we tend towards the tactile when remembering a film?

I’m very interested in what you remember and what you forget from a film. The characters in Be Kind Rewind are not film buffs. So when they’re trying to reproduce a film, it comes down to who they are. It’s very personal — one person will specifically remember one thing, one person might remember another thing. It’s rooted deep inside, and it says something about who they are.

So what do the films featured in Be Kind Rewind say about you? Do you really love Ghostbusters and RoboCop?
I do like those movies, very much. I like movies where science fiction is rooted in real life, and the effects are not digital. I wanted to do Back to the Future, but I couldn’t get the rights. There’s a sweetness to that film that you don’t see much these days.

How hard was it to get the rights to the other films?
The main problem was to shoot the box artwork. When you’re just spoofing a movie, you don’t have to get the rights, but I wanted to show the video boxes because the characters work for them. Initially, we couldn’t use the song from Ghostbusters, so we invented a new one…

One last thing about Ghostbusters: it seems rather pointed and absurd that you have a cameo in your film from Sigourney Weaver…

Yes and no. It was a nice coincidence. It could have been somebody else, but it was her and we’d already shot the Ghostbusters bit. We showed it to her, and she was really moved… she was tearing up a bit. 

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