 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||
 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Production NotesYou can erase someone from your mind. Getting them out of your heart is another story.
Jim Carrey heads the cast of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by Michel Gondry from Academy Award nominee Charlie Kaufman’s (Adaptation) original screenplay.
The two-time Golden Globe Award winner is joined in the movie by three-time Academy Award nominee Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man), Tom Wilkinson (Academy Award nominee for In the Bedroom), Mark Ruffalo (You Can Count on Me), and Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings).
Joel (Jim Carrey) is stunned to discover that his girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has had her memories of their tumultuous relationship erased. Out of desperation, he contacts the inventor of the process, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), to have Clementine removed from his own memory.
But as Joel’s memories progressively disappear, he begins to rediscover his love for Clementine. From deep within the recesses of his brain, Joel attempts to escape the procedure. As Dr. Mierzwiak and his crew (Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood) chase him through the maze of his memories, it’s clear that Joel just can’t get Clementine out of his head.
About the Production
Several years ago, director Michel Gondry was having dinner with a friend, the artist Pierre Bismuth, in London. That night, Bismuth proposed a provocative idea: what if you received a card in the mail that stated you had been erased from someone’s memory, and that you should no longer attempt to contact them?
Around the same time, Gondry read Charlie Kaufman’s original screenplay for Being John Malkovich and sought to make a movie with the writer. Their work, whether it’s Gondry’s much-admired videos or Kaufman’s reality-bending screenplays, tends to turn convention inside out. “His writing inspires me,” says Gondry. “Soon, I had a completely different idea of how I should do this movie. It became about memories. How we are our memories, and how our memories affect our lives. Losing them – before you die – is tragic.”
“Michel came to me with this idea,” Kaufman remembers. “He asked me if I wanted to develop it into a screenplay and said, ‘Do you want to try to work on the pitch?’ I like Michel and I liked his videos.” To be titled Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (after a quotation from an Alexander Pope poem), the new work would combine romance, comedy, and emotion…
…but first it had to be written, which “took me three years,” admits Kaufman, explaining that “I knew I had to do this other script first [Adaptation], and then when I finally got to this one, I was like, ‘I have no idea how to do it.’
“I think I have a logical mind, but I’m not a particularly organized person. My work tends to have symmetry, but if you saw my office…It’s not like I write from nine to twelve and then have a lunch. I do a lot of stalling.”
While Kaufman endeavored to begin work on the screenplay, Gondry meanwhile chose another of the writer’s original screenplays, Human Nature, for his feature directorial debut. “So I got to work with him and we got to know each other better,” says Kaufman. “It’s a constant dialogue between Charlie and me,” adds Gondry.
Producer Steve Golin (who had earlier produced Being John Malkovich) comments that “the two complement each other. Michel is truly gifted at visualizing. But he also has a lot of soul, which I think is sometimes lacking from people who come from a more visual background. But with Michel, there’s a lot of humanity. Charlie is probably the most imaginative writer that I’ve had the opportunity to work with. He creates characters and situations that are relatable but very unusual – and he also has very visual ideas.”
Producer Anthony Bregman (who had earlier produced Human Nature) adds, “Charlie’s screenplays are always surprising and intellectually rigorous, and also very emotional. Michel’s work is characterized by stories within stories, unfolding within each other – Chinese boxes of complication. This was a project that had very strong elements of both the writer and the director from the beginning, on every page. The thrill of working with both of them is their incredible imaginations.”
Kaufman notes, “Our earliest, and our continual, conversations were about the level at which the camera might interfere with the personal reality. I’ve seen Michel’s videos, and there are some that show what it might be like in someone’s mind. We talked about imagery. I was thinking, ‘This is what Michel does, and it will be interesting what he does here.’ The imagery here is quiet, and a little bit fragile.”
Bregman notes that both Gondry and Kaufman “like to play with restrictions. They like to box themselves into parameters and then play within what they’ve boxed themselves into.” In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman and Gondry have created, explains Bregman, “a love story in reverse.”
When Lacuna’s memory-erasing process is initiated on Joel (Jim Carrey), the turbulent love affair he had with Clementine (Kate Winslet) begins to unfold – backwards. The first memories that replay are the most recent, and therefore the most volatile. However, as the more painful moments are washed away, the more tender and optimistic times together are revealed – and Joel falls in love with Clementine.
While it may seem like a very unusual way to tell a love story, Kaufman explains that it came from the desire to depict something more realistic: “I think I always have in mind that I want to do something that reflects what I think is true, or at least is true in my life.” The screenwriter adds that most depictions of relationships on film “don’t have anything to do with my life. Maybe they have something to do with the life of people who make those movies, but not mine. This comes with warts and all, and I refuse to put a moral on it.”
Kaufman decided not to talk to Michel about the pending project “until I turned in the first draft. It’s like, you have to let me do it and then once you see it we can talk. Because it took me so long, because of the other things I had to do, it was very frustrating for Michel.
“When I finished writing this, I was sort of aware that this was probably less of a comedy than anything I’ve written before.”
Bregman recalls that when he first read the finished script, “I sent Charlie an e-mail saying that I had finally read a love story which felt to me like the perfect telling of one, the love story I had always wanted to see. With warmth and emotion, it starts off at the point where two people are tired of each other. Then it moves backwards, telling how they got that way, to the beginning – that first blush of attraction. Then it wraps around itself and goes back to the end again, so that when these two characters get back into their relationship, they do it with the knowledge of what their relationship will become. That was the first time I had seen anything like that in a script.
“You see why people are attracted to each other, why people fall in love, why people fall out of love, why you get sucked into the mundaneness of a relationship after a long time. Some of this is hilarious, and some of it is painful; you see how frail and unstable relationships actually are.”
Golin states, “It’s a very honest movie in terms of what the difficulties in a relationship are. People will be able to relate to Joel and Clementine in this relationship – the good and the bad.”
Gondry’s take on the story extends well beyond relationships: “It’s about memories – how we are our memories, how our memories affect our life, and how losing memories is a tragedy.
“Each time one of the characters’ memory decays, it should reflect directly in the actors’ performances. So I needed actors who would be ready to be inventive – to surprise, and be surprised, on the set. To be flexible, and to adapt.”
A script that was both comedic and philosophical was bound to attract actors’, and industry, attention. By the time he finished the script, Charlie Kaufman had become an award-winning screenwriter, and the fact that the script had been in the works for so long only increased the curiosity and anticipation surrounding it. Steve Golin explains, “Frankly, a lot of people got hold of the script before we were ready to circulate it for casting. It was still being worked on and was an unofficial draft, in a sense. But the nature of Hollywood is that it’s hard to keep a secret, and the script got out.”
Among those who read the script was Jim Carrey, who called the producers to say that he wanted to play Joel. Golin notes, “That was a good situation, because our search was done immediately.”
|
|||||
Sitemaps, RSS Feeds & Social Networks
|
|||||||
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.