Res
April 2002
In Michel Gondry's feature debut, Human Nature, Patricia Arquette sports a sparse coat of light brown fur that warms her voluptuous, naked body as she frolics in the forest, Tim Robbins teaches table manners to white mice, and Rhys Ifans violently transforms from wild beast to Hugh Hefner look-alike, complete with smoking jacket and honed libido. There are painful bouts with electrolysis, some shock therapy, a make-over or two, a fake but sexy French lab assistant, plenty of unctuous intercourse and an ongoing rumination regarding the blurry divide separating nature and culture.
Anyone familiar with the genesis of Human Nature will of course not find these elements the least bit surprising. The film, after all, began in the warped mind of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, whose previous project was the celebrated and strange Being John Malkovich. Then Michel Gondry, grandly proclaimed the most innovative visual stylist working in commercials and music video today, stepped in to direct. Producing duties fell to Spike Jonze, an icon himself in the worlds of film, music video and commercials, who joined Good Machine's Ted Hope and Anthony Bregman whose producing credits together include films such as Storytelling, In the Bedroom and The Ice Storm. And, as if all of these innovative minds were not enough, the film stars Patricia Arquette, an actress who has bolstered the independent film world by often choosing daring roles and working with creative directors. Any one of these artists alone would have produced something interesting; working together, however, they've created a decidedly strange and original contemporary fable.
Human Nature took shape on the page during the hiatus that results when a TV show is canceled mid-season. Kaufman, who had attended film school and figured that writing would be his ticket into the industry, started his career working on a number of TV shows. "Most of them were quite bad," he admits, "and all of them were canceled after their first seasons and sometimes even half way through. Consequently I had time off—so I wrote some screenplays. I wrote Being John Malkovich in one of those periods, then Human Nature in the next. Then they spent a long time in a drawer."
The script for Human Nature was eventually sent to Good Machine by Kaufman's agent, where it sat for a while longer. "It was unique enough to end up on my shelf as something to look at with puppy dog eyes," says Ted Hope. "But the script was known as an unmakeable movie." It came back again a year later, this time sent by Spike Jonze, who said not only that he wanted to produce the film, but that he wanted Michel Gondry to direct. "It was the best script that I'd read in years," comments Gondry. "The characters were original and real, not fake as in most of the scripts that I've read. Everyone is unique, but there is still a lot to identify with."
Next, Gondry sent his reel to Good Machine. "As hip as I like to think we are, we didn't know his work," says Hope. "But it was completely inspiring. He seems to have a whole other part of his brain working. He has this punk, D-I-Y aesthetic, but he's a visionary at the same time. Patricia Arquette was also attached to the project, and we were very eager to get involved. We wondered what it would be like to work on a script that's undirectable and to work with a director who's reputedly uncontrollable. On a low budget!"
Twelve days later, the deal closed, and pre-production began. While shooting was supposed to begin in October of 1999, it didn't actually start until May, 2000. Gondry thus had six months to spend on the storyboard and to cast. "The most important thing to me was to make the right decision for the casting," comments Gondry, and this attention surprised his producers. "Coming out of music videos, the attention to actors or to story is generally what's lacking," notes Bregman, who continues: "I think that there is a new species of director who comes from music videos and commercials who at the same time is not making a 90-minute music video. But that said, when you have directors whose vocabulary is made up of all these amazing visual techniques and you give them a feature, they often want to concentrate on telling the story through these fantastic tools. That becomes the focus. The shock of shooting this film with Michel was that the world's biggest camera geek was obsessed with acting."
"Michel, from the beginning, approached the material with a reverence to the script that's very rare in directors in general but definitely for music video directors," agrees Hope. "He wanted to treat the script like the text of a play, to be really true to it."
Kaufman agrees with this assessment, but adds that Being John Malkovich and Human Nature called for different emphases. "The thing that Michel and Spike have in common is that they have these distinct visual styles, and I think they both put them in the back seat rather than creating show-off directorial debuts," he says. "They made movies about characters and stories. And there's a lightness to Human Nature—for Being John Malkovich, it was really important for the film to feel as grounded in the mundane as possible so that it could have these supernatural elements. But for Human Nature, the characters don't require something so grounded. Human Nature has a lighter, sillier feel to it—and the acting does, too."
Part of the film's lightness comes through its humor. "I like comedy," admits Kaufman. "If something is funny, it's worthwhile to me. One of the draws of humor is that you know if it's working or not in a very clean way." That said, Kaufman disdains most American comedies. "Movies that are presented as comedy aren't interesting to me," he says. "I don't think they're funny. But a lot of things that I think are funny aren't necessarily comic—instead, the humor is in the dialogue." Kaufman cites several comedic influences, including "the usual guys: Woody Allen, the Marx Brothers, Monty Python." He adds that Catch-22 was an important book for him, as was the larger absurdist tradition and the work of Eugene Ionesco, Beckett and Kafka. "Philip K. Dick is an example to me of someone whose books are really funny because of the way the dialogue is written, the way it turns."
Kaufman attempts to create humor in the dialogue of his own work. "I think there's a theatricality to my dialogue, especially in these two movies," he says. "The characters don't talk like real people. I find it fun. I also have an interest in reminding people that they're watching movies. There's always this sense that my scripts force you out of the story, and Michel consciously directed that way. The movie is very theatrical—it's lit brightly and the 'natural' scenes are very Disney-esque."
In describing Gondry's treatment of the script, Kaufman notes that the director very much wanted to capture its feel. "He felt that the script had a certain rhythm," he says. "He wanted scenes to play to as close to the time as they would on the page, for example, and he was really fastidious about timing. There's a sequence in the movie where Puff (Rhys Ifans) is being conditioned through a slide show, and I don't remember exactly the dialogue but he goes up and attacks the screen and gets shocked. And this happens seven more times. This scene is very funny on the page, but Michel was concerned with getting as close to that on screen. He worked very hard on that, getting the timing, so that you could have this series of shocks work in the same way."
Perhaps one of the reasons the film's humor works so well is that Patricia Arquette's Lila Jute is both down-to-earth and entirely likable, despite her strange antics. "She was brought onto the movie because we loved her," explains Kaufman, "and we loved her presence." He continues: "The biggest concern that we had about Lila, though, was that we didn't want her to be an object of ridicule. We didn't want the audience to laugh at her. We wanted the audience to be with Lila because that's where we were. And Patricia has this natural warmth, especially in contrast to the other characters who have an almost clinical quality. She feels completely different, and I'm so impressed with her courage in doing this, and being completely there and available, which I'm sure must have been difficult." (Kaufman may be referencing the prosthetics Arquette wore, which were reputedly uncomfortable.)
For his part, Gondry found the melding of each actor's personality with the character fascinating. "It's strange," he says. "You can't tell after a while how much they are putting in and how much is just them; they become the characters." And while the film does focus on character and story, that didn't stop Gondry from playing with his filmmaking tools. "I used a quite a lot of my own style and experimentation as I do with my music videos," he explains. "We did a lot of rear projection, and many scenes are shot on set. We were trying to create a particular context. We also shot some of the film with high def and 24P, and the goal was to make it as realistic as possible, but still somehow strange." The result is a film in which nature—both in terms of the forest where Lila and Puff cavort, and in terms of the carnal urges that drive all of the characters to make bad choices—is made hyper-real, a strangely fake, mythical place that really only exists in some nostalgic fantasy.
So what's up next for these inventive filmmakers? First off, Kaufman remains a central figure in several upcoming films. He collaborated for a second time with Spike Jonze on a film titled Adaptation, which has a circuitous, self-reflexive story about a screenwriter who sets out to write an adaptation of Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief. "I wanted to write something about passion and what that is and what it means to me," comments Kaufman, who adds that the film is currently in post with the goal of getting it to Cannes.
Kaufman also has Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, based on Chuck Barris, who claims he was an assassin for the CIA, in the works, and he and Gondry are now busy working on another project. "It's a movie about memory and relationships and takes place mainly inside this guy's head," explains Kaufman. "He's discovered that his girlfriend has had him erased from her memory, and because he doesn't want to be alone with the memory, he's having the memory erased, too. So you get to see the relationship from backwards moving forward. It was hard to write, figuring out the technical things. But that might shoot very soon. Right now we're casting." Gondry, who continues to amaze with his music videos—his new White Stripes video for "Fell in Love With a Girl" was made using Legos and stop-motion animation, for example—has made the transition to feature filmmaking with aplomb. Summing up his feelings about Human Nature, he's characteristically succinct. "It's great to do a movie," he says, and you can tell that he means it.
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