Hornet stars Seth Rogen as Britt Reid, a newspaper mogul's son who inherits a fortune and decides to use that fortune to fight crime in Los Angeles with his sidekick Kato (Jay Chou). Movieline spoke to Gondry about why he thought The Green Hornet could be converted into a comedy, the tricks he used to help the audience understand Chou's English, the secret to getting a good performance out of Jim Carrey, his love for Mr. Show and why he will never consciously try to make an Oscar movie.
Congratulations on finally getting this movie made after all of these years.
I know, that's an achievement, yes?
Did you ever think that it would actually ever happen?
The thing is you trick your brain into making it believe that's it's going to happen. It's one chance in a million with all the obstacles that we had. But if you had not tricked your brain, you would have given up a million times. So you have to keep tricking yourself.
Is The Green Hornet your Chinese Democracy?
Yeah, yeah... Well, maybe it's a good sign then? It's like when you see the making of Jaws. This movie was never going to see the light of day, maybe it's a good omen.
Considering a lot of your past work, it was still surprising to see you name attached when it was announced.
Well, but, you can think of it the other way around. I came into Hollywood trying to do this movie. Now I make a different type of movie, so now you define me by different types of movies. But, in reality, I want to do this movie because I was not successful in trying to do the more commercial type. I have nothing against each kind of film; you do movies for many, many reasons and it's hard to explain. Some of them are just rejected or being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Would your 1997 version of The Green Hornet differ a lot from this version?
Yes, very different.
In what ways?
It was much more futuristic and science fiction and crazy. I was very much influenced by movies like Chinese Ghost Story. This [current] movie is based very much on character: the relationship between the hero and the sidekick. And then I had this action sequence to show my technical skills. But, to me, the most important part was that it was character-driven, not plot- or effects-driven.
As a side note, I've never seen a movie where so many people were killed by something falling on them.
It's true! It's funny, I never really thought of that. We had so many people die, at the end we couldn't find anybody to be alive. So we would have to bring back some guys with a wig or a mustache to make them look different. Some people died three times in the movie.
Jack Black tried to make a comedy Green Lantern film but the idea was scraped after all of the backlash. Why do you feel this can work with The Green Hornet as opposed to other superheroes?
Well, the history of the Green Hornet is very complex and uniform: the radio show turned into a comic book, into a mini-movie series, into another comic book, into a TV series with Bruce Lee. So it's hard to say, "OK, don't touch my superhero." What should we not touch? This is hard to define. I don't think we are trying to spoof the genre; we're really making an action movie. An example would be '80s buddy movies, it was just before post-production started to define the film. The film had to exist and rely on the shooting and the stars, because you couldn't do all of the work in blue screen or green screen in post-production. So you had to have humor within the action. And I think this was a genre that was a little bit forgotten. We brought that back to life in some way because I didn't want to rely so heavily on post-production. Seth [Rogen] is a good comedian but he's a very sullen actor. He doesn't fake the sadness; he's just acting in a real way when he talks about how he f*cked up in the newspapers. There's no joke about that. So we didn't make fun of the character, but there are funny moments.
Wasn't Nicholas Cage at one point going to play the villain?
Not originally, but at some point he was attached to it. We were trying to attach him, but he never really was attached.
Is this one of those happy, lucky things to wind up getting Christoph Waltz instead?
It's always a happy thing because it's the thing that we do. And then we like what we do, so we always consider it better. But, to be perfectly honest, maybe if we had Nicholas Cage it would have been awesome. You never know. But we were really excited when Christoph came because he was like the ultimate villain we could dream of.
With Jay Chou as Kato, were you concerned at all with the language barrier considering that he spoke no English whatsoever?
We were very concerned. I remember having this meeting where we had another choice. I remember the night before we went to Amy Pascal at Sony to propose the guy we liked, I saw him in a movie and I didn't like him anymore. I thought he was boring. So Amy said, "You have to have a second choice; you can't just propose one guy." So we proposed Jay, who we all liked, but we were so concerned about his English. She looked at both guys and said, "No, I want Jay. I don't want to see three movies with this guy, he's boring." So we all freaked out and thought, OK, this movie is not going to happen. But Amy's instinct was perfectly right because his language problem became endearing because he had to put so much into his character. Except from fighting, he didn't have anything else to thrive on. Which made him super cool. I think the English limitation made this character special, and I think we made the right choice. It's been liked so much since the movie has been screened; it's just been crazy.
It's obvious that English is not his first language. But it's surprising to hear that he didn't know any English at all.
Well, I know from being very hard to be understood because of my accent that there are tricks you can use. I use one trick that's very simple: I ask all the actors that are playing with him to repeat what he said after him. You know when you're doing an interview and you say, "Can you repeat the question and the answer?" I asked my actors to do that. And you don't even realize it, but they constantly repeated after him what he said so, in your mind, you feel you understood him the first time because you have been helped by the other actors. If you watch the movie a second time you're going to see that they keep repeating what he says, that's how we made the trick work. It's good because, on one hand, you have Seth who is very confident with his words and expressions and he's very under confident in terms of his looks. For Kato, for Jay, it's the other way around. He's super confident about his looks and is always very cool, but he's very lost in terms of the dialogue. It's very important for me for my actors to feel a little unsettled; it makes them act really in the moment because they keep being surprised.
Speaking of getting performances out of your actors, I still think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is Jim Carrey's best performance. How did you get that fairly understated performance out of someone who seems like a complicated fellow?
Because the first two takes he was giving me were always perfect. He learned his lines very well. You know, some actors, they are very precise and amazing but they don't even learn their lines. Jim Carrey always knows his lines. So he would come on stage or location and would say his lines perfectly on the first two takes. Then he would start to add stuff and add stuff and we would go up to 40 takes sometimes. And the two first takes were always the best ones -- except sometimes he would come up with something so amazing that we would use it. But most of the time he was perfect in the beginning while he didn't really grasp what was going on; he was just saying his lines. And I think that's what I need from my actors: Say the line!
It was lucky because with some actors, before they will do a different take, you have to go through 10 takes before they remember their lines. So by the time you reach the 10th take, this actor is not really skilled in maintaining a low-key performance -- they go over the top. So what was great about Jim is that he knew his lines so well, right away it was great. Then, after, he was starting to become over the top. Peter Weir, who got a great performance from Jim in The Truman Show, told me that Jim was always great in the first few takes, so we always shot right away. We didn't rehearse.
With a movie like Eternal Sunshine, was that a difficult movie to try and explain each individual scene on set? Is that why it's better to, as you said, "just say the lines"?
Yeah, it was very hard. It requires some trust from people, and it's required that they get to be... It's not "manipulated," because I love trying to trick them. But I can't tell them what I need from them because they would interpret it and they would give me what they think that I want to see. It's way too complicated. When I tried that it always feels like I'm behind a window for some reason, that's the best way to describe it. I just have to find another way to communicate to get the actor to be at a place. I need them to... I don't know. It's like with kids: You try to be a good father. It's hard to explain, but you have to trick them a little bit and be on their side at the same time. And you can't trick all of the kids in the same way.
What are the chances you could throw some of your influence around and get us another season of Flight of the Conchords?
Oh, they don't want to do it anymore. They got too burned out. It was so much work for them, they don't want to do it anymore. But I had a great time. I promised to do that before I promised to do The Green Hornet. It was a type of system where the writer and the producer are really the creator of the story, and I was not used to that. It was hard for me to put my head around this way of working.
I'm very familiar with the episode you directed. And, yes, it was such a unique show that it's hard for me to accept that it is gone.
My favorite show of all time is Mr. Show with David Cross and Bob Odenkirk. And they only did three seasons; it was the two of them, but they were canceled. I've been watching those three seasons a million times. And it doesn't matter if it's only three seasons; it's better to do three awesome seasons than 10 great seasons.
With the delay to January for the completion of the 3-D for The Green Hornet, does the release date matter to you? It was originally a summer film, then it was supposed to be a holiday film.
I have no idea what it means, to be honest. I use my brain on stuff that I can really help with. On the release date, I don't think I can bring anything. All that I know is that while doing trendy movies they always come out before Oscar season. All of my movies always come out in the middle of the summer or the middle of January or March where it's the low season where people say that they dump bad movies. So, fine: I'm the director of trash movies. I don't care because I think it's very self important to think of yourself as a director for the Oscar. If it comes to you, that's great. But to work on it is like an actor reciting Shakespeare in front of the mirror... that's not exactly my style.