Articles

Madblast Exclusive – The Making of 'Human Nature'

Mad Blast
April 12 2002
by Fred Topel

Human Nature is writer Charlie Kaufman’s second script and the feature film debut of commercial and music video director Michel Gondry. It’s the story of a woman (Patricia Arquette) with abnormal hair growth all over her body, a scientist (Tim Robbins) obsessed with manners and a man (Rhys Ifans) raised as an ape who the scientist wants to civilize. Though his second script after Being John Malkovich is equally bizarre, Kaufman said he’s not trying to be weird.

“I think I set out to do things that I find funny or interesting and that I haven’t seen before,” Kaufman said in a phone interview with Madblast.com. “Maybe that makes them come out weird, but I also feel like I’m setting out to deal with real issues or issues that are real to me. They’re not just floating in the weirdosphere. They’re human beings.”

Kaufman added that if his movies don’t adhere to standard Hollywood formulas, it’s because he takes issue with some of those conventions. “I guess in a way my work is a reaction to that because I feel like that stuff is kind of dangerous,” Kaufman said. “It’s sort of destructive and I don’t want to participate in that. It’s seductive and untrue, so I end up feeling ‘less than’ because my life doesn’t in any way resemble the characters or lives that I see in movies. Not all movies, but a lot of movies. So, I’m trying to deal with what I understand about relationships or what I don’t understand about relationships or how things aren’t clear to me. Confusion is a big part of my existence and Hollywood movies veer away from the notion of confusion. It’s like ‘This is the lesson that we’re now teaching you about life’ and all of it seems kind of trite to me.”

Gondry felt Kaufman’s character-centered script was perfect for his feature debut. As a commercial and video director, he always tried to tell stories, rather than the bang-bang style of some directors. “I don’t care for surface, for the look,” Gondry said. “[However,] I don’t want my movie to look like sh*t. I wanted it to look in a certain way, to be magical at times or sometimes artificial, but I think all my work so far was really dealing with character and storytelling.”

With a heroine who has a physical attribute our culture would consider unattractive, Gondry had to be careful not to make his star look too disgusting, lest the audience reject her before they can receive the film’s positive message about natural beauty.

“People [needed to] feel how hard it must be for her but on the other hand, not too removed from her that they would not care for her story,” Gondry said. “It was interesting to play the fine line of being attracted and repulsed by her. We had a long series of tests with the light and her hair and the makeup and everything to still make her acceptable with the hair, although we knew the idea itself could be repelling.”

In the film, Arquette appears nude in scenes where her character lives in the forest as a wild creature. Even though she has hair covering her body, Gondry said Arquette totally bared herself.

“She’s naked under the hair,” Gondry said. “The hair was hiding her a little bit. We had some tissue with hair, fabric nets with hair but a lot of hair was stuck one by one. She felt pretty naked even with the hair. I was as shy as she was, so in a way that made her feel better.”

Gondry also had to work with animals, as many of the scenes called for mice and birds to perform actions both in the wild and in the science lab. Gondry said, “With animals it’s always a big difficulty to get what you want, so we had to train them. The mice, especially on that, we get very little from them so we had to use other tricks to make them do what we wanted them to do, visual tricks and editing tricks.”

Computer generated visual effects were employed in some scenes where animals simply could not perform the actions required. Gondry continued, “Sometimes it would just be a little bit of the shot, like we moved one arm or did a morph between two different mice positions because they would not do the two actions in the same shot.”

Ultimately, the film may still suffer from comparisons to Kaufman’s previous work, but Kaufman has prepared himself to deal with that.

“I don’t want to do the same thing over and over again,” the writer said. “I wouldn’t want to do another Being John Malkovich. I have no interest in that. I know that they’re going to be prepared and I know they already have. I wish that they wouldn’t be, but there’s nothing I can do about it so I’m just trying to keep my head in my work.”

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