Dear Cinephiles,

“I can’t remember anything without you,” says Joel in the profound “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.” Since its release in March 2004, I have loved this film and have taught it to my students every semester. After watching it last night, I’m more passionate about its accomplishments than ever before. I will go as far as saying this is one of the best films of the 21st Century. Its script by Charlie Kaufman is one of the most structurally complex and very deep in its understanding of the human condition. The directing by Michel Gondry is intrepid and matches the intricacy of the screenplay – achieving most of its derring-do with ingenuity. The performances are terrific. Jim Carrey does very subtle and nuanced work– and Kate Winslet goes for broke in the very challenging role of Clementine. The latter is probably my favorite acting in the past 20 years and a defining moment in her illustrious career.

This is an unbelievable plot. Heading into Valentine’s Day, Joel finds out that the girl he’s in love with – Clementine – has gone to the Lacuna laboratories to undergo a procedure developed by Dr. Mierzwiak wherein the memories of a romantic relationship can be erased. Heartbroken and understanding that he will not be able to cope without her, he decides to undergo the same course of action. Stan and Patrick – bumbling lab technicians – start the treatment. While sedated in his own apartment and wired to a machine – Joel is able to see his memories while they’re wiping them out. We get glimpses in reverse chronological order of Joel and Clementine’s courtship – from their last fight until the day they met. Joel is an introvert who’s not been successful at dating in the past. Clementine is volatile and impulsive – dyes her hair in different colors and makes elaborate figures out of potatoes. Joel starts to realize he doesn’t want to let go of his remembrances of Clementine regardless of how painful it is to deal with their breakup. He also starts to suspect that Patrick (one of the technicians) may be stealing his recollections to seduce Clementine.

The narrative unfolds non-linearly. As confusing as this may all sound – the viewer is able to follow it all pretty quickly once the premise is established. Kaufman is that rare screenwriter whose work has its own stamp that surpasses the director’s. He’s responsible for writing “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” and “Anomalisa,” among others. In his narratives he will center on lonely and helpless characters dealing with existential situations. The writing is bathed in dry humor and very keen, philosophical observations along the way about memory and love. It’s very literary. His dialogue is not only erudite but very poetic. He also knows cinema really well – and blends the genre of a thriller into his tale that adds urgency. We become detectives sorting out all the information and the clues that are given to us – and the order in which they are presented. Trying to keep up with it all is part of the fun. The result is a very unique tale that has a bit of sci-fi, psychological thriller and lots of romance. You’re navigating the landscape of Joel’s mind.

Director Gondry accomplishes most of the effects with camera tricks – using forced perspectives, split focus and editing. His composition is extraordinary. Notice early in the film when Clementine and Joel go to the frozen Charles River and lay on the ice. The camera will be using a bird’s eye angle. They will be positioned in the right corner of the frame – their bodies touching – and to the left there will be a big symbolic crack in the ice. I tell my students that in great mise-en-scene you’re able to pause once in a while, analyze a particular shot- and get an understanding of the themes an author is dealing with. This is one of those cases. Color is used dramatically. When Clementine meets Joel, she talks about her constant change of hair color and that they all have names: blue ruin, red menace, yellow fever, green revolution and agent orange. Throughout the movie you will see her in those different colors. Each one represents a stage in their relationship and her mood as well. It is a great way to keep track of in which period of their relationship the scene is taking place. I mentioned that Clementine is unpredictable – some might say she has bipolar disorder.

Jim Carrey was cast against type – and the role contains him. I read somewhere that Gondry allowed all the actors to improvise but forbade Carrey to do so. It’s a mature, heartbreaking turn. Winslet is also cast against type. She’s playing the wild card instead of Carrey. She’s fearless, and never playing for sympathy.

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” deservedly won the Best Orginal Screenplay Oscar. It’s a film that deserves to be seen several times. At a time where we’re cherishing our memories, and our concept of time has been ruptured, it’s a perfect movie for the now.

Clementine: “I’m not a concept. Too many guys think I’m a concept or I complete them or I’m going to make them alive, but I’m just a fucked up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.”

Love,
Roger

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Available to stream on Netflix and DIRECTV and to rent on YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vudu, FandangoNOW, Redbox, Google Play, SUNDANCE NOW, Microsoft, iTunes and AMC Theatres on Demand.

Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
Story by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth
Directed by Michel Gondry
Starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Tom Wilkinson
108 minutes

Director of Photography Ellen Kuras on the Making of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
Eternal Sunshine was Kuras and Gondry’s first collaboration, and the cinematographer says that the first three weeks of production were devoted to developing a lighting strategy that would combine an extensive use of practicals with a handful of movie lights. “On the first day of shooting, I wasn’t allowed to use any real movie lights because Michel wanted me to light to eye,” she says. “For a night exterior, for example, I had to clip some sodium vapors onto telephone poles to augment the existing sodium vapors. On stage, Michel wanted to recreate the conditions we had encountered on location. After they’d built Joel’s apartment set, Dan [Leigh] pulled me aside and said, ‘All of the ceilings have been nailed down, so you won’t be able to light from above.’ That made me laugh – the last nail in my coffin!”

Complicating matters further was the fact that two handheld cameras were filming near-360-degree coverage most of the time. “There were no marks and very few rehearsals, so we didn’t have any kind of gauge for where the actors would be,” recalls Kuras. “Ultimately, that meant we were lighting the room, not the actors. Sometimes they were in the key light, and sometimes not. If I knew where the actors were going to be, I’d try to put something in, but it wasn’t as though we had electricians hanging around with Chimeras for beauty lights. Although I understood the kind of movie Michel wanted to make and tried to give him what he wanted, there were moments when the cinematographer in me just cringed, especially when the actors danced in each other’s key light. In one scene, when Clementine brings Joel to her apartment for the first time, we had two cameras covering the scene from start to finish, and because we were seeing the entire room, I had to use the practical lamps as the only source of key light; I couldn’t get any other kind of ancillary light low enough to look natural. We ended up cutting holes in the lampshades and hiding light bulbs around the set to illuminate the scene. Unfortunately, what happens in this situation – and what happened in this scene – is that one actor ends up shadowing the other.” Throughout the shoot, Kuras and her longtime gaffer, John Nadeau, strove to jerry-rig units that would provide ample illumination but would also fly under Gondry’s definition of a “film light.” Kuras explains, “We had different assortments of lightbulbs – refrigerator bulbs, or small bulbs on hand dimmers – that we’d hide behind furniture or lampshades in order to give ourselves some stop. In Joel’s apartment, we fabricated a light we jokingly called the ‘Mini-Musco,’ which was essentially a C-stand with four clip lights and blackwrap on it. We ended up lighting all the interiors with either available practicals or those clip lights, which had 150-, 250- or 500-watt bulbs. It was a game of hide-and-seek, determining how and where we could hide our little kit of light bulbs. (theasc.com)

Director Michel Gondry on Casting “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
At the time of filming, Carrey had already established himself as a comedian with real acting range, having starred in “The Truman Show” and “Man on the Moon.” Still, he may not initially have seemed like the right fit for self-loathing Joel Barrish, a character so quiet that Carrey had to be aggressively mic’d while speaking his lines. But Gondry—a huge Carrey fan who said he rewatches “Liar, Liar” every year—said he knew Carrey should play the part when he went to see him on the set of the comedy Bruce Almighty. When Carrey was in-between scenes, Gondry saw a different side of him: “It’s the exact feeling when you walk into a party and you feel everybody knows each other but you,” explained the French filmmaker. “I always saw Jim like that. Like he doesn’t belong.” So Carrey signed on for the film, excited to try something new. Gondry had one concern, though; his debut film, “Human Nature” (also written by Kaufman), was about to hit theaters, and he was pretty sure it was going to be a box-office flop, which could very well scare away the big movie star he had just hooked. “Michel and I sat in this restaurant, and he made me sign a napkin saying when Human Nature came out and was a bomb, I wouldn’t let him go,” Carrey recalled with a laugh. “Human Nature” ultimately made under $1 million, but that didn’t deter Carrey or Winslet from Eternal Sunshine. Gondry, for his part, remembered knowing Winslet was exactly right for the part of the kooky, bewigged Clementine because she was the only person unafraid to give notes on Kaufman’s script. “I was really surprised by her honesty,” Gondry said. “Then I believed her when she said it was a great project.” (vanityfair.com)

About Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
Charlie Kaufman was born in New York, New York. Kaufman earned a B.F.A. from the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at New York University in 1980. Prior to breaking into the film industry, he worked in the circulation department of a Minneapolis, Minnesota, newspaper. Eventually he moved to California and began writing for the quirky television situation comedy “Get a Life” (1990), which starred Chris Elliott as a 30-year-old paperboy. Kaufman continued to write television comedies throughout the early 1990s until he achieved sudden recognition for his screenplay for director Spike Jonze’s unexpectedly successful film “Being John Malkovich” (1999)…Kaufman’s screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award, and it won several other awards, including best original screenplay from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). His screenplay for “Adaptation” (2002), again directed by Jonze, was inspired by the difficulties that he had had in adapting journalist Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book “The Orchid Thief” for the screen. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, the film’s dual narrative weaves together scenes from Orlean’s book and from Kaufman’s own life, depicting his writer’s block and lampooning his initial resistance to rendering material flashy enough for Hollywood. Susan Orlean was played by Meryl Streep, while Nicolas Cage played both Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious twin brother, Donald Kaufman, who was given a co-writing credit on Adaptation’s screenplay; as a result, both Kaufman and his nonexistent brother were nominated in 2003 for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

Next Kaufman wrote the screenplay for the George Clooney-directed “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), which was based on the supposedly true story of the Central Intelligence Agency career of Chuck Barris, host of television’s “The Gong Show.” Kaufman’s screenplay for the genre-bending “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) employs a disjointed timeline to tell the story of onetime lovers (played by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet) who undergo a scientific process that erases their memories of the relationship. It earned Kaufman his first Academy Award for best original screenplay. In 2008 Kaufman made his directorial debut with the hugely ambitious “Synecdoche, New York,” an atmospheric exploration of mortality and art that is even more self-reflexive than Kaufman’s earlier work…Kaufman wrote and co-directed the stop-motion animated “Anomalisa” (2015). Based on his earlier play, the film centres on a customer-service guru (David Thewlis) and the unique young woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) he finds among the intentionally artificial, strangely similar figures populating a conference at a hotel. The film was remarked for its artful deployment of 3-D printed figurines and its eerie existentially significant use of the same actor (Tom Noonan) to voice all of the other characters. (britannica.com) Kaufman’s latest film is “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” (2020).

About Director Michel Gondry
Gondry was born and raised in Versailles, along with his two brothers (one of whom, Olivier, is also a film-maker). “At school I was very shy. I wasn’t funny really, but there was this one funny guy who made jokes about other people. There was a quality of bullying in his humour, a mocking aspect that I instantly disliked.” That aversion to cruelty has stayed with him…”I don’t mock things, which makes me more vulnerable to mockery myself. If you’re cynical, you’re protected from mockery. But I have to be nice. I don’t think I have irony. A sense of humour, yes, but not irony.” Gondry says that, as an adolescent, he was always arguing with his father, who branded him a communist because of his dreams of a society toiling together…In his first music promos in the late 1980s and early 1990s, made when he graduated from art school and joined the band Oui Oui, Gondry’s sensibility was already taking shape. “At that time, the fashion was to show people for more than who they were. You still see it in a lot of hip-hop. I was always against that. I wanted to show how they were when they met me. I did a video with IAM, a rap band in France, and they were a very warm bunch of guys. But once we started talking about the video, there was this attitude which came from gangsta rap, and I thought it wasn’t representing them. I tried to make sure the audience would see what I saw in them.” (theguardian.com)

After directing his feature film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Michel Gondry kept surprising himself with extraordinary ideas and looks forward to bring his latest dream to life. Originally known for commercial and music videos, Michel Gondry directed ‘Drugstore’ for Levi’s, one of the most awarded commercial of all time. His music video for Björk, ‘Human Behaviour’, won practically every existing music video award. He has collaborated with Daft Punk, The White Stripes, The Rolling Stones, Chemical Brothers, Kanye West, Paul McCartney, and so many more. Michel Gondry has directed deeply personal movies including “The Science of Sleep,” as well as a love letter to filmmaking: “Be Kind, Rewind.” With recent French productions “Moon Indigo” and “Microbe & Gasoline,” Michel Gondry continues to fascinate audiences with his unique craft. (partizan.com)