Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Were Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman star-crossed lovers or creatively cursed? This week, Chris & Lizzie plumb the memories of all involved in the 2004 sci-fi hit, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a movie Charlie Kaufman tried endlessly to break up with. Plus, Gondry and Jim Carrey's loveless marriage, how Kate Winslet set the tone, and Mark Ruffalo and Tom Wilkinson's wildly different reactions to the on set vibes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 2:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a visually revolutionary metaphysical exploration into the core of relationships, sadness, and love. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with my co-host, Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, what do you have for us today?

• 2:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Today, we are discussing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the cinematic equivalent of that SNL sketch Wells for Sad Boys. If you haven't seen it, this was, as you mentioned, I would argue, an unexpected high point of independent cinema of the early to mid 2000s. And it's a movie that I think I misunderstood for nearly 20 years, kind of like Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character with The Graduate in 500 Days of Summer. And so I'm really excited to talk about it today. Lizzie, had you seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast?

• 3:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, of course, I've seen this. This came out when we were, what, like 14, 15?

• 3:12Chris Winterbauer?

  15, yeah.

• 3:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I saw this when it came out. I don't think I saw it in theaters, but we had it on DVD, and I watched it quite a lot. And then, you know, in college, obviously, kept watching it. But I probably haven't seen this movie in close to 20 years. It's one that I thought I knew back to front, and I really thought I knew what I was getting into when I sat down to watch it for the podcast. And I will tell you, and I texted you this, but as it started, I did feel a creeping sense of dread, because I was like, oh, no.

• 3:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no.

• 3:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh-oh. The manic pixie dream is very alive in this movie.

• 3:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Eternal Sunshine said, Garden State, whole town fear.

• 3:52Lizzie Bassett?

  It really did. It really did. So I was very worried. I was like, this is the most 2004 movie that's ever been made. And does this not hold up in the way that I thought it would? And what I'll say is, it does. I think by the end of the movie, I was weeping like a baby when, spoiler alert, they choose to give each other... A second chance, even knowing the mistakes that they've made and will repeat. They choose to repeat their own mistakes. But boy, is her dialogue tough. I think she works really well. Clementine Krasinski, played by Kate Winslet, works really, really well in the more heightened dream sequences with Joel. I found her very tough to watch outside of the memories.

• 4:37Lizzie Bassett?

  And that's no shade on Kate Winslet. I love Kate Winslet. I think she's wonderful and she's wonderful in this in many moments. It's just the way that the dialogue is written and I think the way that it's directed. It doesn't really work super well in the real world spaces because no one talks like that. Like, no one has ever had a conversation the way that you see her and Joel having the conversations. And it works okay in the memories because it's kind of coming from his perspective. You know, visually, it's not super grounded in reality. But when you're just talking to each other as two humans and she's talking the way that she does. And frankly, he's talking the way that he does. I was like, I gotta get out of here.

• 5:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Like, this is not, it's such a weird slice of time where I think that this is how romantic interactions were portrayed. Where both people just kind of suck, but you're supposed to really like them. And that for me was a bit of cognitive dissonance with this. But visually, I think it's incredible. I found myself honestly, at times, more engaged in the Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson storyline this time around. And I had forgotten the twist with Kirsten Dunst and Tom Wilkinson. And that really hit me hard upon watching it this time. I also just think that they pull off the dialogue a little bit better than Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet do.

• 6:00Lizzie Bassett?

  The last thing I'll say is that, Chris, you told me to do a little bit of homework before watching this and to watch adaptation. And I think Charlie Kaufman's dialogue is very different in different directors' hands. It works really well in adaptation in a way that I'm not sure it works quite as well here. But that being said, I still really loved it. I think it still has important things to teach us about love and the importance of messing up and making mistakes. But, Chris, what did you think?

• 6:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I generally similar feelings to you. I also saw this back in high school and have seen it, you know, multiple times since then. I agree. Adaptation is remains my favorite. Charlie Kaufman. I love being John Malkovich, but. I do too. I actually being John Malkovich for me would be third after Eternal Sunshine, which is probably a controversial choice. But regardless, I agree. I think great score, great editing. Yes. Great production design. I do think great performances, generally speaking, across the board. I agree. I think this is a high point for Carrie over The Truman Show, in my opinion, but we'll leave that for another day. Lizzie disagrees. I agree. I very much oscillate when I watch this movie, feeling like Clementine is a real person

• 7:17Chris Winterbauer?

  as opposed to a fantasy or a projection. And I tried, I really tried to figure out what's the intention. And I do think there are a couple of things that are important to remember. Number one, as you mentioned, Lizzie, she exists as a memory or a projection, or really just an aspect of Joel for most of the movie. Right. Which we know is inaccurate. Right. That's where it works. That's where it's okay. Okay. So how about the other scenes, the real life scenes? Yes, the, I think the speech patterns are a little wonky. I agree. Twee is the word that I. Twee. Big time twee. So it's interesting. I do think it's important to remember they are both brain damaged, recently brain damaged. Yes. And she is being actively gaslit by another character at this time,

• 8:01Chris Winterbauer?

  which is making her manic and feel insane, I think, through a lot of these scenes. And so, for example, like the way that she approaches Joel on the train always felt so aggressive to me. Yes. But I think it's because, I think she is feeling like she is losing her mind because there is somebody who doesn't fit into her memories, who is recreating her memories with her in a cosplay sort of way. And I think that that is wreaking havoc on her mind, but we are not given any sort of first person entry point into that storyline. And so when we're just dropped into this world, she feels, again, aggressively manic pixie, out of nowhere, I'm just going to come on to this guy sort of way. That's the only way I can justify it.

• 8:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and I think that's right, but she also does like, there's a speech that she repeats multiple times across this movie that like clearly is a speech that she repeats in reality as well. She repeats it both in memories and in the present timeline. And that speech to me, it was very like, you know, I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's pretty classic manic pixie.

• 9:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Too many guys think I'm a concept. I'm just a fucked up girl looking for my own peace of mind.

• 9:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, exactly.

• 9:07Chris Winterbauer?

  More or less paraphrase. Yeah.

• 9:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is like, it's so funny because it is the actual criticism of a manic pixie dream girl. But it being spoken by her in this context makes it like peak manic pixie dream girl. Yeah, I don't know. My gut reaction immediately was no woman has ever spoken like this ever. But it's funny because I actually think he writes women pretty well in other movies. So maybe you're right. I don't know.

• 9:36Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I'm not saying I'm right. I agree with you. It bumps a lot of moments bump in this movie. And there's another example I can give you that feels too cutesy when they're pretending to murder each other, for example, as like an activity. That to me feels like, let's do something that people would find really quirky and charming and offbeat. And I just thought nobody's, I mean, people have murdered each other like that, but nobody's really pretended to do it. But then when the movie is grounded, like I found when they sneak into the house and Montauk in the memory at the end, that I totally bought Clementine saying like, let's pretend to be this couple. Let's do something, you know, wild and risky and sneak into this house. I think we've all had experiences like that when we're in the thrall of a new relationship or something feels like it's about to start.

• 10:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And we are unwilling to take that leap as Joel is at the end of that scene. That scene really works for me. And I do think there is some evidence in the movie that Joel actually sees Clementine as more intelligent than he is, or is very smart or creative. Despite the like very disparaging magazine person comments that he makes at the end. And in the end, the example that came to mind was the fact that in his memories, as they're trying to erase them, it's her idea.

• 10:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Chris Winterbauer?

  To hide her within the memories. And to me, I thought that was an interesting choice.

• 10:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Because she is at that point a figment of.

• 10:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Of him. Of him. And so I definitely agree with all of your criticism. And it brings me back to Charlie Kaufman. And the reason I wanted you to watch Adaptation, it will come up a lot in this episode. But also, as we see in Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman is very obsessed with this idea that he can only really understand himself. And there's even that line in Adaptation where he says, "I have no understanding of anything outside my own panic and self-loathing." Yeah. And I think that the idea I like most in Eternal Sunshine is that we are all ultimately the sum of our memories. And therefore, over time, we actually do become, at least in part, the people we remember, even if it's not conscious. And we may not know why we take the train to Montauk,

• 11:34Chris Winterbauer?

  but we do, because we've been changed by somebody that we know. And I think that that's an interesting phenomenon, thesis, that Kaufman has stumbled onto, because he is somebody who is very, very, very much into a navel-gazing cynicism, I would say. And as you mentioned, Michel Gondry is very, very, very twee Yeah. in a lot of his movies and his visual style. And so I think that the reason ultimately for me this movie works, and that it did find a lot of success, is that the movie transcends both of their excesses in each of those directions, because they overall balance one another out enough. Yeah. Despite the fact that I totally agree with you, there are moments where I just feel like, eh, this doesn't work. I want to be clear, I still love this movie.

• 12:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, no, but I think it's a very interesting, I would call it, you know, another flawed masterpiece at the end of the day, where some of the flaws are glaring and yet the sum total of the parts exceeds all of those low points. So, let's get into it, Lizzie, because this is a, this is a good one. It's meandering, it's fun. All right. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a 2004 romantic, dramatic, science fiction film, directed by Michel Gondry. It was written by Charlie Kaufman, although a story credit is shared by Kaufman, Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth. It stars Jim Carrey as Joel Berish, Kate Winslet as Clementine Krasinski, Elijah Wood as OG incel Patrick. Yeah. Great. Really fun that he took this role after playing Frodo. He's great, yeah. Mark Ruffalo as Stan.

• 13:03Chris Winterbauer?

  My sister would like everyone to know this is, we're close to Mark Ruffalo, peak hotness, according to her.

• 13:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 13:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Wilkinson as Dr. Mirzak, Kirsten Dunst as Mary, Jane Adams and David Cross as Carrie and Rob in very fun turn as the friends. It was released on March 19th, 2004, and as always, the IMDb logline reads, "When their relationship turns sour, a couple undergoes a medical procedure to have each other erased from their memories forever." So, sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the shooting script, a book by Charlie Kaufman, published in 2004, behind the scenes footage and interviews from the DVD special features, From Script to Screen, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, from the March-April 2004 issue of Script Magazine, and many, many, many more retrospectives, articles and interviews with those involved in the film.

• 13:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, despite some assertions that this is a romantic comedy by some people, Charlie Kaufman has been very clear, it was never his intention to write a romantic comedy. And yet, this movie begins with a central trope of every on-screen love story. What does every romance start with at the end of the day?

• 14:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Boy meets girl, a meet cute.

• 14:13Chris Winterbauer?

  A meet cute. It could be boy meets boy, it could be girl meets girl.

• 14:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of course. In this case, it is boy meets girl.

• 14:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Our story, Lizzie, begins with a young man desperate to fall in love with a story. So, let's go back to 1998. Michel Gondry is 35 years old. He's a music video director, a commercial director, and he desperately wants to make movies. He's tired of the flings. He wants a grand romance, but the scripts he's reading are uninteresting. And he worries, are all screenplays just boring? Is sand just tiny rocks? If only he could meet someone new, find something fresh and exciting, and then he did. So, one day, he found himself at a concert for a band that he'd shot a music video for called Chibomato. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, Lizzie?

• 15:00Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 15:00Chris Winterbauer?

  They are a New York band, very fun. A lot of their songs are references to food. They're an interesting group. He'd shot a music video for them, and his friends said, "Hey, there's somebody here who wants to meet you." And they say, "It's, you know, Chibomato." Bus driver. And he's like, OK, the bus driver? And they say, yeah, he's a huge fan of your work. And he says, the bus driver? He's like, OK. So he sits down. And this bus driver pesters Gondry with questions about. And you've seen all of his music videos. And he's asking him all these questions about his work. And he's like, hey, you know, let's get lunch. I'd love to talk more and pick your brain. And that's when Michel Gondry realized they had not said bus driver. They'd said director. And that director's name was Spike Jones. Oh. Who was about to direct his first movie. And he let Michel Gondry read the script.

• 15:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Do you know what movie that was, Lizzie? You've already mentioned it. Being John Malkovich. Being John Malkovich. So Being John Malkovich. I forgot that's his first feature. That's crazy. That's right. It was written by a 40 year old introverted TV writer named Charlie Kaufman, who also wanted to direct movies. In fact, he'd gone to NYU Film School, Tisch Film School, for that reason. And he would eventually do that. But there were a lot of left turns along the way. He worked for a newspaper in Minneapolis. He worked at the Art Institute. He was actually the person who made the announcement, the museum will close in 15 minutes. Which if you've ever heard Charlie Kaufman speak, would be amazing. Eventually, he gets an agent. He moves to LA. He writes for television for years. And he writes a lot of spec scripts.

• 16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And people read them, but they're impossible to make. They are wild and out there. Until Spike Jones comes along and he falls in love with Being John Malkovich. And so does Michel Gondry. It was surreal, bizarre, totally unique. And it was completely different from the last story that broke his heart. So, Lizzie, do you know anything about Michel Gondry? He's French, is that right? He is French. That's as far as I go. And tweet, French and tweet. It's about what I knew coming into this. But he's not like Joel Bearish. He's like Clementine. He is impulsive. So he was born in 1963 in Versailles, France. He came from a very musical family. His mother and father played piano. And his grandfather, who lived next door,

• 17:10Chris Winterbauer?

  had this house full of radios and all these different electronic instruments that he patented, including the clavioline, which was a monophonic analog keyboard and predecessor to the synthesizer. And Lizzie John Lennon famously played it. On the 1967 Beatles track Baby, You're a Rich Man, and it's rumored that he played it using an orange.

• 17:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 17:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Although I like to think it was a clementine. Now, if he wasn't playing music, Michel Gondry was taking photos. He loved taking photos, and he seems to have had a bit of an obsessive personality. When he was around 12, he took, quote, "pictures of one girl over and over. I was not even dating her, although I wished I was dating her. She ended up dating my older brother," end quote. So, women as a concept, maybe a little bit of a root there.

• 17:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 17:51Chris Winterbauer?

  If he wasn't taking photos, he was drawing. He made flip books, he'd borrow his dad's Super 8 camera. He made basic animations. At 17, he leaves home, he goes to art school in Paris. He specializes in weaving and tapestry. He gets kicked out, we don't know why. In his 20s, he works as a calendar printer for a couple of years, and then he takes a job designing ad graphics. He lasts 30 minutes, gets up, quits, leaves, goes home, climbs into bed. He said it was 10 a.m. "I remember this feeling of freedom, and I decided I would never take orders again." And Lizzie, he had an important, incredibly well-thought-out backup plan. He was gonna play drums in a band with his friends. So.

• 18:27Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great.

• 18:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Wee Wee, as they were called, played pop rock, released a couple albums, but most importantly, Michel Gondry directed their music videos. They didn't have any money, so they're incredibly imaginative, super DIY, colorful, filled with surreal stop-motion animation. And not a lot of people know Wee Wee, but someone in Iceland saw these videos. Which Icelandic artist could you think of in the 90s of importance who may have seen these videos?

• 18:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Could it be Bjork?

• 18:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I'm so glad you did the impression. Like the Bjork.

• 19:02Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Bjork.

• 19:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Our currency is rainbows and clouds. There's a, I don't know where that's from.

• 19:07Lizzie Bassett?

  The thing is, everybody always does, everyone always does Bjork like this, but they're forgetting about this part of Bjork.

• 19:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, her like amazing voice that can just go everywhere.

• 19:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 19:18Chris Winterbauer?

  She's got a volcanic voice. So, she saw his video work, and of course, knew he was the perfect fit for her first music video, Human Behavior.

• 19:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 19:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It gets a Grammy nomination. If you guys haven't seen it, it's all of these animals. Some of them are in costumes, some are puppets that are, you know, should be fleeing humans because humans are, you know, dangerous in the woods. And it really reminds me the way it's shot and lit. And even the opening shot of the stars pulling down of this music video that I love, Bat for Lashes. Are you familiar with Bat for Lashes, the UK artist? She has a song, What's a Girl to Do? That music video is amazing. It's her on a bicycle, driving down a dark forested road. Anyway, you can see his influences everywhere. And suddenly, Gondry has a career. For years, he has been toiling away like Clementine with her potato dolls by himself. And now, all these big names want to work with him. And he directs some of the most memorable music videos of the 90s. And I'll just name a few that I'm sure you've seen, Lizzie.

• 20:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Protection by Massive Attack, Sugar Water by Chibomato, Everlong by the Foo Fighters. That's the one where Dave Grohl has the giant hands. Yeah. And then, my personal favorite, Around the World by Daft Punk. Yeah. Which I think is one of the best music videos ever. Let Forever Be, The Chemical Brothers, Bachelorette by Bjork. All of those, he had five, I think, that were on the top 50 list put out by Pitchfork a few years ago. And all of this, Lizzie, despite the fact that he had not mastered English, in fact, he didn't understand most of the lyrics of the videos that he was making. So here's the quote, "I understood one word out of 10. So I would recreate whatever was said based on those few words. I looked at the rhythms and I replicated an abstraction, which made my videos closer to what the musicians usually meant in the beginning. I could never be exact in my work, and that was a good thing."

• 20:54Chris Winterbauer?

  So I think it's really important for us to understand that Gondry has a very freewheeling, inventive, ideas will come on the day kind of style. So in the mid 90s, he moves to London. He expands into commercials. And this was a very established pipeline. Big brands look to MTV for inspiration and talent for their ads. And there are two ads that really put Gondry on the map. The first is this Levi's ad from 1994 called Drugstore. Very stylized, black and white ad. Basically, it takes place years and years and years ago. This good-looking young man goes to the drugstore, buys a condom. It's very stylized. He drives this old car, you know, out to this country house to pick up the girl he's gonna see that night. And who answers but the man who sold him the condom at the drugstore, who tries to stop his daughter from going with him?

• 21:39Chris Winterbauer?

  And then they leave together and it's about the little teeny pocket in the ...front of Levi's jeans that apparently for decades, uh, people have been putting condoms in, unbeknownst to me.

• 21:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It holds the Guinness World Record for the most awards won for a television commercial to this day.

• 21:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 21:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he also made this spot for Smirnoff called Smarianberg, which includes a moment that looks like Neo dodging bullets in The Matrix. And in fact, John Gata, the VFX supervisor for The Matrix cites Gondry as an inspiration for bullet time.

• 22:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 22:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Gondry's inspiring people, including feature filmmakers, but he didn't have a desire to make feature films. He didn't get into music videos to jump into feature films, unlike a lot of directors. And then one night, he screens the video for Bjork's Isabel in a movie theater, and he realizes how magical it is to see the work big, on a big screen. But the problem was, Michelle Gondry, like Joel Barish, lacked confidence. Confidence in his writing. So he moved to LA to fall in love with a script. And he did, but it wasn't being John Malkovich. It was The Green Hornet.

• 22:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 22:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Of all things. It's an adaptation of a 1966 TV series, Lizzie. He eventually would make this movie with Seth Rogen in 2011.

• 22:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 22:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm not sure if you ever saw it.

• 22:57Lizzie Bassett?

  No, not many did.

• 22:59Chris Winterbauer?

  No. He was hired to rewrite this Rich Wilks version of the script, and I believe he worked with Ed Neumeier, who had written Robocop, and we discussed him in Starship Troopers. And they toil for 18 months, and of course, it ends in Hollywood heartbreak because the studio pulls the plug. And Michelle Gondry needs to meet someone new.

• 23:21Lizzie Bassett?

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• 24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Did I mention their socks are great, too? Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was what went wrong. It's the best way to support the show.

• 24:30Chris Winterbauer?

  So he goes out to lunch with his friend, artist Pierre Bismuth. And Bismuth pitches him an idea for a new art project. And this is wild. He wants to mail out official looking cards to inform people that someone that they knew had erased them from their memory and then study their reactions to the news.

• 24:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, sorry. He wants to mail out cards that someone they knew has erased them from their memory?

• 24:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, that has someone they know has erased them from their memory. To learn, as Joel does, that you have been erased. According to Gondry, Bismuth was inspired by one of his best friends, who quote, "was always complaining about her boyfriend." And he was tired of her whining about it. So one day he asked her, "Listen, if you have the opportunity to erase him from your memory, would you?" And she said, "Yes." And suddenly Gondry is overwhelmed by the possibilities. But the movie he has in mind doesn't sound a lot like the finished film Eternal Sunshine. Let me just describe a couple of things that Gondry was inspired to do. Memories being nuked by scientists, virtual hitmen being sent into the protagonist's head to kill everyone, laser beams, explosions, vertical dimensions to explore time, specifically 158 vertically compiled identical rooms,

• 25:39Chris Winterbauer?

  like a time skyscraper to represent 158 memories in the same location. It was basically Inception meets The Climax of Interstellar.

• 25:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm realizing.

• 25:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Chris Winterbauer?

  It was also impossible. It was undoable. Gondry couldn't bring it to life. But he knew a writer who might be able to pull it off. The guy who had written Being John Malkovich. So Kaufman was helping Spike Jonze cross over from music. Videos to movies, maybe he could save Michelle Gondry too. So Gondry brings the idea to Kaufman and they toss it back and forth. And Kaufman says, look, I don't want to make it a thriller. I don't want the sci fi element to get in the way of the relationship. Just like an adaptation, yes. Exactly. He basically says like, what if you want to make a movie about nothing? About flowers, like where nothing really happens and characters don't learn anything. Yeah. It's exactly the conversation. It becomes a relationship movie. The story's going to take place mostly in the hero's mind. And at a certain point, he's going to want the erasing to stop. Yeah.

• 26:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So, you know, they have beginning inciting incident, the midpoint, the resolution. They put together a five minute pitch and they share it with Kaufman's agent, Marty Bowen, who, Lizzie, I would like to imagine for these purposes as Ron Livingston from Adaptation. Sure. In this scene. And Marty Bowen tells them, oh my God, oh my God, you've got gold here. But Kaufman wasn't convinced. Lizzie, he didn't want to be Gondry's savior. He was just a fucked up guy looking for his own peace of mind. He had his own stuff going on. He had this script, Human Nature, that he wanted to direct. And he was trying to help Jones get beating John Malkovich going. So Kaufman says, look, I'll pitch it as a favor to Michelle. It's never going to get bought. I'm never going to have to write this. He'd never even pitched anything before. And nobody'd really wanted to make any of his wild ideas anyway.

• 27:18Chris Winterbauer?

  So they take it around town, Warner Brothers, New Line, Fox. Kaufman is going through the motions. It's like he's going on a series of dates with the intention of breaking up with him after a month. Oh. And all of a sudden, offers come pouring in. A bidding war breaks out. According to Variety, it involves as many as nine studios and production houses. And one major studio authorized to bid $500,000, another $750,000. Basically, the irony is that Kaufman's pitch was a concept that people thought could save them. Some people saw it as a new way to do a romantic comedy or a new way to tell a love story, which was not his intention. He hated rom coms.

• 28:01Chris Winterbauer?

  He said that they gave me expectations in life that were never met. He wanted to write a grown up relationship movie. Again, Lizzie, here's the full quote. As Charlie Kaufman says in Adaptation, "A story where nothing much happens, where people don't change, they don't have any epiphanies, they struggle and get frustrated and nothing is resolved." So some people really locked in on the sci fi angle, even though Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry agreed it was just a means to an end. It's just a way of exploring memory. And it seems like there was only really one person who actually understood the movie that they wanted to make, or at least Michel Gondry wanted to make. And that was Steve Golin, the co-founder and CEO of Propaganda Films.

• 28:38Lizzie Bassett?

  And eventually Anonymous Content. Yeah.

• 28:40Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right, where you worked when you first moved to Los Angeles.

• 28:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I did.

• 28:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Did you ever run into Steve Golin?

• 28:47Lizzie Bassett?

  I did. Yeah, he was very nice. He was a very interesting, he has passed away. But yeah, he was a very interesting and I think very talented producer.

• 28:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he was a very shrewd tastemaker, very shrewd witness of talent. He could see talent in places that other people couldn't. And that's, let's get into the founding of Propaganda. So Steve Golin, Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry believed was going to, quote, "Let the movie be made the way it should be." And they had good reason to trust him because a couple of months prior, he was the crazy bastard that somehow got financing for Being John Malkovich. And Lizzie, could you briefly describe Being John Malkovich? Which is maybe one of the wildest pitches for a movie in the history of Hollywood.

• 29:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It's incredible. John Cusack and Cameron Diaz, and actually one of my favorite, maybe my favorite Cameron Diaz performance of all time. They discover a portal on a half floor in a building that enters you into the mind of actual real actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes at a time and then kicks you out on the side of a highway.

• 29:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Onto like a New Jersey Turnpike.

• 29:49Lizzie Bassett?

  So yeah, they start using the portal into Malkovich's mind to, you know, crazy results.

• 29:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. And to be clear, John Cusack is a depressed puppeteer, marionette operator. And the movie involves a love triangle with Catherine Keener. And then eventually in a bravura sequence, John Malkovich himself enters the portal to go into his own mind. And then you get the best set piece of the whole movie.

• 30:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Malkovich, Malkovich.

• 30:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Which we will not spoil. Yeah, ever.

• 30:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's spoiled by the beginning of adaptation, but yes.

• 30:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. So Being John Malkovich is a bonkers movie. It's exactly the kind of movie that Propaganda was actually built for. So Propaganda was founded by Steve Golin and producer Yoni Vatson in 1986, Icelandic, we should mention, along with some directors, including David Fincher. It was built on music videos and commercials, and then they expanded into films, which was an unusual move. There was this tendency in Hollywood at the time to look down on music videos. In fact, in 1990, The New York Times described the music video as, quote, "A realm that most of Hollywood scorns as a low-rent district, suitable only for those of limited imagination and talent." But of course, Golan saw the opposite. Music videos were filled with imagination and talent,

• 31:00Chris Winterbauer?

  and these are low-risk opportunities to meet and foster people like Spike Jones. And of course, Lizzie, this becomes a pipeline for a lot of new directors. Michael Bay, Antoine Fuqua, as we mentioned, David Fincher, Spike Jones, Michelle Gondry, Frances Lawrence, eventually Daniels, you know, many, many, many years later. The music video boys take over Hollywood. And so when Jones couldn't get anyone to make Being John Malkovich, she calls up Golan. But the problem was, Propaganda had a parent company, Polygram Filmed Entertainment. And every time Golan brought up Being John Malkovich, he got teased mercilessly. But he kept pushing, and finally Polygram greenlights the movie under four conditions, and these are the real conditions, Lizzie. Take them seriously. One, it doesn't cost one penny more than is on the control sheet. Two, it does not distract Golan

• 31:44Chris Winterbauer?

  from delivering one big movie for us in 1999. Three, Golan delivers at least one big movie for us in 1999. Four, Golan's penis is on the line in a big way. Okay. Two months later, Golan added his balls to the line when Propaganda bought the then unnamed pitch for Eternal Sunshine for an alleged seven-figure sum. And it was also reported that Nicolas Cage's Saturn films, quote, "Came in as a producer of the movie as a possible vehicle for Cage." His agency, CAA, confirmed that he was attached. There was only one problem, Lizzie. Charlie Kaufman wasn't really into this relationship. Yeah. So, according to Kaufman, pitching Sunshine was very easy, and writing it was another problem.

• 32:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So, the memory erasing elements, going backward, forward, got very messy very quickly. It was not just that it was gonna be hard, he didn't have time. So, a day or two before he sold Sunshine, he got another assignment, adapting a book called... The Orchid Thief. That's right. So, he decided that he needed to tell Gondry that they needed to take a break. He says, "Michelle, this has been fun. Uh, I need to do The Orchid Thief first," and Gondry did not take this well. No. According to Kaufman, quote, "He started to freak out, and he said, 'I have to direct something. Can I do Human Nature?'" Which was this other script that Kaufman had written. "It was something I was planning to direct maybe myself, but I felt guilty. And I said, 'Yes,' but I felt that I really couldn't take on any additional writing work at the time."

• 33:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And Gondry says, "Well, there's nothing for you to do. I'm just going to direct it. There's not much rewriting." And of course, that didn't turn out to be true. So, Gondry gets to work on Human Nature, but I think it was hard not to get distracted by Charlie Kaufman and his new lover, Spike Jones. So, in this little three-way relationship, Gondry is very much on the outs. Oh. Being John Malkovich is released in December of 1999, and it is a hit. Yes. Critically, commercially, it is nominated for three Oscars, including Best Screenplay. Gondry said people would ask him about Human Nature. "Why did they get you to direct this movie? Or why didn't Spike Jones direct this?" Oh, no. And then he felt that Spike Jones maybe stole some of his mojo with a shot in Being John Malkovich.

• 33:54Chris Winterbauer?

  He said, "When he finished Being John Malkovich, I met him at the wrap party, and he said, 'I have to confess, I did a little tribute to your Smirnoff commercial in my movie. And I was devastated, because this kind of transition into a cubist world done in film, it's my signature. I really dig deep into my brain to find those ideas.'" So, he felt, you know, he didn't get the chance to bring that to the big screen first. Now, Gondry was the third wheel, and Kaufman had clearly found true love with Jones, right, Lizzie? I mean, Kaufman's tammed the time of his life. All relationships must come to an end, Chris. And what Gondry didn't know is that Charlie Kaufman was in hell. Yeah. The Orchid Thief, it turns out, was unadaptable. He couldn't structure it. It was a sprawling New Yorker shit! He has panic attacks. He falls four months behind schedule.

• 34:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And when he finally hands in the script, he had written himself into it.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  I've written myself into my screenplay. It's self-indulgent. It's narcissistic. It's solipsistic. It's pathetic.

• 34:49Chris Winterbauer?

  He also wrote in, author Susan Orlean, he gave her a love story with the subject of her book, added in drugs, a car chase and a murder.

• 34:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Multiple murder. Well, I guess one attempted murder and then one crocodile death.

• 35:02Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. He added a fictional twin brother, Donald, who executives initially thought was real because Charlie Kaufman credited him on the title page of the script.

• 35:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he was nominated for an Oscar, Donald Kaufman.

• 35:14Chris Winterbauer?

  He was, but Gondry didn't see any of this. All he saw was Spike Jones being announced as the director of Adaptation. And to add insult to injury, in August of 2000, The Trades reported that who was in talks to star?

• 35:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Nicolas Cage.

• 35:28Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Who maybe would have been the lead of Eternal Sunshine. And then, Lizzie, Kaufman took on an even more handsome lover, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind with director George Clooney.

• 35:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 35:41Chris Winterbauer?

  In the background, he was working on Eternal Sunshine, but it was too slow and somebody beat them to the punch. What 2001 film involving memory did we cover to start this year, Lizzie?

• 35:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Memento.

• 35:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. In the spring of 2001, Nolan's breakout film hit theaters in the United States. Kaufman hadn't seen it, but he'd heard the concept. That was enough. That was the perfect excuse. It's time to end things once and for all with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He calls up Michelle. Michelle, we gotta end this. It's not working. And Michelle says, I understand. They tried once. It hadn't worked. So they call Steve Golan to give him the news. And Steve Golan says, you are not allowed to break up. This movie has nothing to do with Memento. I've been waiting for this forever and you're not not doing it. End call. So they said, okay, I guess we'll just keep seeing each other.

• 36:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So Kaufman's been clear that Memento was not an inspiration for Sunshine, but he did have to ditch at least one idea because of Memento. And that's early on, he thought Joel could write on the walls of his memories to keep a continuity from memory to memory. But the written notes to oneself is a big conceit in Memento, so he ditched it. He was also inspired by a book he'd read years earlier, The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, which is about a woman trying to piece together memories from the end of an Relationship and he even pulled from his own life, which he tends to do. He would go out to dinner with his wife and they'd record their conversation. And later they'd tell each other what they remember talking about at dinner. And they'd listen to the recording and realize that they both remembered it wrong. Oh, I love that. It's really cool. This became like a really big theme in the movie.

• 37:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Memories are recreated. They don't exist in storage. They're recreated each time you think of them. And I believe that we know that this is actually true scientifically. When you remember something, that memory is replaced by the remembering of the memory each time. Right. He knew early on that the story was going to be told from Joel's perspective. And over time, he decided that it was important that Clementine was not in the movie that much. So that almost everything you see about her is Joel's perception of her. So there's a lot in the early drafts and even in the final shooting script, it doesn't make it into the final film. Let's talk about some high level stuff. In one version, the movie was going to open 50 years in the future with an old woman going into a publisher's office with a manuscript.

• 37:59Chris Winterbauer?

  They won't see her. She goes back to the subway. She gets sucked into a plastic tube that sends her back home. We see the title of the manuscript. It's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. We get the title card 50 years earlier and we realize that that woman is Mary. Oh. Who works for Lacuna. And we realize she spent her entire life taking people's memories and saving them because they're sacred. She's trying to get it published before she dies. And then she dies on the subway at the end of the movie and the book is probably going to get lost. And I think if you guys have seen it, a lot of what Kaufman is trying to explore here thematically would end up in his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Yeah. With Philip Seymour Hoffman. So another abandoned bookend involved Clementine in the future, and this one's even more tragic. We see Clementine as an old woman coming in to get someone erased.

• 38:40Chris Winterbauer?

  And we realize that it's Joel and that they've been doing this again and again and again. Oh, no. And as she's getting erased, Joel calls and asks her where she is. Where are you, Clem? What are you doing in there? And then the technician erases the message and the movie ends. That's too sad.

• 38:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so brutal. According to Jim Carrey, there was a version of the script in which Clementine and Joel don't try again because Joel walks away from the relationship at the end of the movie. And Kaufman even toyed with the idea that it would be Patrick who sent the Lacunophiles out instead of Mary. I don't think that would have worked nearly as well.

• 39:13Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 39:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Kaufman had a lot of freedom to play around with different ideas because the script was developed over multiple years and the corporate ownership of the script started to change. Basically, Polygram, which was the parent company of Propaganda, was sold to Seagram, and then Polygram was folded into Universal, but Polygram sold off the film division of Propaganda to Barry Diller's USA Films. Eventually, USA Films gets folded, along with Universal Focus and Good Machine and Studio Canal, into what will become Focus Features in 2002, which will release Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Now, there are six dated versions of the script that we know of. November and December 2002, three drafts in January of 2003, February 2003, but the

• 39:58Chris Winterbauer?

  writing never really stopped. And by this point, it had its current title, which Kaufman said was intentionally cumbersome. And he in fact actually said there was an earlier title that was 18 words long because, quote, "I wanted something you couldn't possibly fit on a marquee," end quote.

• 40:12Lizzie Bassett?

  He's trying to kill this thing.

• 40:13Chris Winterbauer?

  He's just trying to kill it so bad. He just wants the relationship to end. Oh, man. It seems there was probably an earlier finished draft sent to actors in 2001 because Nicolas Cage is out. He was already playing Charlie Kaufman in another movie. So they needed another big-name actor to help finance the film. And it is hard to think of a bigger actor at the turn of the millennium than Jim Carrey.

• 40:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Lizzie, any favorite Jim Carrey films pre-Eternal Sunshine?

• 40:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I love The Truman Show.

• 40:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It's great.

• 40:44Lizzie Bassett?

  I remember seeing that in theaters and it blowing me away that that was Jim Carrey of, you know, Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura. Of course, looking back at those movies, it is clear that he is an amazing actor in addition to being an incredible physical comedian. One of my favorite moments in all of Dumb and Dumber is when he's standing at the window crying, talking to Jeff Daniels and saying, you know, "I just..." Just I want to be somebody. I want to have somebody. But yeah, so actually, honestly, Dumb and Dumber.

• 41:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Dumb and Dumber is probably the best one. I agree.

• 41:14Lizzie Bassett?

  It's incredible. He's amazing in that movie.

• 41:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He is. And that was 1994, which was his

• 41:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Big year.

• 41:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Hat trick breakout year. Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber. It's hard to think of an actor who had three bigger films released in one year.

• 41:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that was crazy.

• 41:30Chris Winterbauer?

  In the last 40 years, he was the first comedic actor to get $20 million upfront, which was for The Cable Guy. And with that film in Ace Ventura 2, even though they were pretty much panned by critics, they were still box office successes. And then Liar Liar broke big in 1997. It made over $300 million and was well reviewed. And then, of course, as you mentioned, Lizzie, Jim Carrey unexpectedly wins the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama for his turn as Truman Burbank in 1998's The Truman Show. And then he won the Golden Globe again in 1999. Do you remember which film this was for, Lizzie?

• 42:05Lizzie Bassett?

  That wouldn't be Me, Myself and Irene, would it?

• 42:07Chris Winterbauer?

  No, that was 2000 or 2001. It was Man on the Moon.

• 42:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 42:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Where he plays Andy Kaufman, no relation to Charlie Kaufman. But it is fun that Nicolas Cage and Carrey have both played Kaufmans within this time period.

• 42:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, we may have to cover that movie at some point because I heard he was not fun.

• 42:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Milos Forman, I think, lost his mind trying to direct Jim Carrey on that movie. And Jim Carrey is about to lose his mind being directed by Michel Gondry on this movie.

• 42:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Good. He deserves it.

• 42:32Chris Winterbauer?

  How the Grinch Stole Christmas stole everybody's money. When it became the second highest grossing Christmas film of all time, it was an embarrassment of riches. And Jim Carrey actually felt guilty when he got the script for Eternal Sunshine. He said, how can I get this one and The Truman Show? The only problem, Lizzie, Eternal Sunshine is a small movie. The movie's budget was actually $20 million, the exact amount that Jim Carrey had been paid for The Cable Guy. But Eternal Sunshine had an ace up its sleeve, Charlie Kaufman's name on the title page. According to Carrie, they just said Charlie Kaufman, and I'm like, okay, where do I sign? I mean, it's just to be part of his legacy. It's like a Hitchcock kind of thing, where you just want to go, yeah, I did one of his movies, man. And to be clear, the only Kaufman movie that has been released at this point is being John Malkovich.

• 43:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 43:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is just how well received that movie was. Now, Gondry was very excited and surprised by Carrie's interest. And one of the reasons that he was surprised is that Carrie was known as this like rubber-faced comedic actor. Even following something like The Truman Show, that would be an outlier in his filmography. But Gondry really thought Carrie could do it, because he said, quote, "It's hard to be funny. It's far easier to take someone really funny and bring them down than to do the opposite." And then Gondry has said that he saw something else in Carrie that few others did. And he has, over the years, I think in trying to pay Carrie compliments, just said the most amazingly brutal things about him, and I would like to read some quotes. "In one interview, he described visiting Carrie on the set of Bruce Almighty. He said, quote, "It's the exact feeling when you walk into a party and you feel everybody knows each other but you.

• 43:56Chris Winterbauer?

  I always saw Jim like that, like he doesn't belong." "In another interview, he described Carrie as normal and not super handsome. He liked the fact that he didn't have the, quote, 'coolness' of most Hollywood actors. And he told Jim Carrey to his face that he used to watch reruns of In Living Color, which Jim Carrey was a cast member of. And at the end, when everybody else was dancing, quote, "There was one guy, and he's taller than everyone, and he's doing nothing but being lonely, and it's Jim." So he clearly just saw him as this lonely bastard, despite his, you know, overall sort of boisterous personality. And I think it's very perceptive, because I think that's what Carrie pulls off so well in this movie. So Gondry really wants Carrie. Carrie comes onto the movie, and Gondry is really nervous that Jim Carrey's gonna break up with him.

• 44:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Because his last relationship, the movie Human Nature, hadn't gone great. And it's about to be released in the United States, and Gondry's pretty sure it's gonna flop. So he takes Carrie out to lunch, and he says, "Look, I used to go out with this movie. It's about to come out, and it's gonna say a lot of bad stuff about me. So I need you to sign this napkin and say you're not gonna quit when it happens." That dialogue's made up, but according to Jim Carrey, Michelle Gondry really did make him sign a napkin, saying that when Human Nature comes out and bombs, he's not gonna get him fired.

• 45:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Aww.

• 45:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Jim Carrey, obviously. Didn't seem to care he did the movie. And Michelle Gondry did something similar with Kate Winslet. Before Eternal Sunshine was greenlit, he just kept calling her to make sure she hadn't taken another job. Hey, just making sure you're still gonna do Eternal Sunshine? I'm totally chill. I'm totally cool. Just reminds me of like me in high school, you know? Hey, just making sure we're still going out on Friday, right? I'm a cool guy. I don't care, whatever.

• 45:30Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm very relaxed.

• 45:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he'd basically become Patrick by this point in the movie. It's like, I'm not doing something wrong, am I? What's wrong, honey bear? Apparently it actually made Winslet feel great. She said she loved that he called her directly and she actually didn't book anything else, deciding to hold out for Eternal Sunshine. And so, Lizzie, this is a few years out from Titanic and she was trying to shed the quote "classical Kate" moniker that she had done for that period of time. She said it was so far removed from the period films that she had done.

• 45:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, she had done Sense and Sensibility, that was an early breakout for her. Titanic is another big period film.

• 46:01Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. So, Gondry had met with several other big names, including, we can confirm, Winona Ryder. But Winslet was the only one who dared to give him notes on Kaufman's script.

• 46:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for her.

• 46:12Chris Winterbauer?

  As he put it, quote, "She was the only one not licking my ass." Very graphic, but okay. She pointed out when the script was repetitive. She said that we should not shy away from being sentimental. I think that's a great point.

• 46:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 46:24Chris Winterbauer?

  She also said she was going to be just as big as Jim Carrey in the movie. And since you can't have two Jim Carrey's in the movie, he'd have to tone his performance down.

• 46:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for you, Kate.

• 46:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Again, I think she contributed a lot to the tone and why this movie works.

• 47:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So Gondry had his heart set on Winslet, and then an actress that the studio, eventually Focus Features, liked, won an Oscar. We don't know for sure who this is, but based on the timeline we've put together, this was likely the 2002 Oscars, which would narrow it down to two actresses. Halle Berry won for "Monstrous Ball", and Jennifer Connelly won for "A Beautiful Mind".

• 47:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Ooh, they're both so not right for this at all.

• 47:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree, both great actresses, but not right, in my opinion. My guess is that it would be Connelly that the studio was after, because she had had more mainstream success prior to 2002 than Halle Berry.

• 47:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Although of the two of them, I actually think Halle Berry would have been better if you had to pick between the two.

• 48:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. I think creatively, Berry, even in something like "Catwoman", shows a bit more of the humor needed for this.

• 48:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, she's a little more fun.

• 48:10Chris Winterbauer?

  But my guess is that Connelly, coming off of, you know, "Dark City", "Requiem for a Dream", "Pollock", again, my guess is that if they wanted her before the Oscars and then the Oscar tipped her, it makes a little more sense, based on career arc, that it would be Connelly. But regardless of who it was, Gondry says, "If I can't do the movie with Kate Winslet, I'm not gonna do the movie." And so, they relented. And almost immediately after the 2002 Oscars, in April of that year, Michelle Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's first relationship, "Human Nature", was released. Lizzie, have you ever seen "Human Nature"?

• 48:41Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 48:42Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's this very fantastic satire about what it means to be human, explored in a triptych of characters. You have Patricia Arquette, who's a woman who has hypertrichosis, a disorder where you have excessive hair growth out of all the follicles on your body. And after a brief stint in the circus, you know, she's attempting to live as a human, doing electrolysis to remove all of her hair. And then you have her love interest, Tim Robbins, who's a scientist who has grown up with this almost abusive relationship toward manners. And then you have Reese Vans' character, who plays a boy raised by a man who believed he was an ape. Fun cameo by Toby Huss. And so Reese Vans was raised as an ape, even though he's a man. And again, there's murder, there's a love triangle. Peter Dinklage plays a major role. It's a movie that has a lot on its mind. It's really outlandish. I think maybe it would have worked better

• 49:26Chris Winterbauer?

  as a kind of ridiculous novel or maybe a short story. In my opinion, it doesn't completely come together, but it was their first outing together. And this movie ends up being a pretty big flop. I mean, this was probably around a $10 million movie and it made about a million dollars at the box office.

• 49:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Yikes, yeah.

• 49:44Chris Winterbauer?

  But Michel Gondry was spared director's jail because in mid-September of 2002, the trades reported that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had been greenlit. So Gondry and his team have six weeks to prep. This included location scouting New York City, not the producers' first choice for the location of the shoot. They wanted to shoot in Toronto. Gondry said he had already tried to make LA work as Washington DC and that didn't work at all. And so he said, "I'll still shoot in New York. I promise I can do it for less money." All of the actors took a 10% pay cut to make this happen.

• 50:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 50:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Remember? Now, Gondry said that having less money was ultimately better because they had to use a smaller crew and simpler lighting. More on lighting later, that's debatable. And a lot of the effects had to be done in camera, which I do think is true. And I think one of the reasons this movie works is that you have to employ a lot of the techniques that Gondry himself either knows how to do or has figured out how to do through his music video work.

• 50:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, the effects in this are wonderful. And you can tell that they're mostly practical.

• 50:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. And so, like an example, Gondry's approach to effects is much more hands-on DIY, perhaps unsafe than the typical Hollywood set. One example, when Joel and Clementine are lying on the frozen lake.

• 50:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I knew this was gonna be what you were gonna talk about. It's one of my favorite moments in the entire movie.

• 50:54Chris Winterbauer?

  The car passing under the ice?

• 50:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no, sorry. Okay.

• 50:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Which part are you talking about? When she gets pulled away?

• 50:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 50:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. I don't know if that was actually a problem, like that stunt, but he wanted to see Joel's car pass underneath them when they're on the frozen lake. So he suggests equipping the car with a battery pack to keep the headlights on, then put it under the lake, wait for the lake to freeze, and then use a rope to pull it across the shot, which is dangerous for a whole, like, host of reasons, including the car damaging the ice as the actors are on top of it and make it fall into the frozen lake. Producer Anthony Bregman later said, "God forbid the Bond company or the studio should be sitting in any of these meetings they'll think were out of our mind." In Gondry's defense, he has said that a lot of people in their production meetings didn't understand him because of his accent. And he recalled Steve Golan and Anthony Bregman regularly just sitting there and laughing

• 51:41Chris Winterbauer?

  at him, which is, of course, ironic considering how Golan had been laughed at by his superiors at Polygram on being John Malkin. Which they said was a crazy idea. I do want to say like, much is made of Gondry's accent in the discussion of this film by the actors, etc. I will refrain from doing any impressions, but my brother-in-law is French and even he said he found Gondry's English difficult to understand. It's just worth mentioning that I believe at least a decent portion of miscommunication on this film may have been due to Gondry working with a language barrier. Yeah. And everybody trying to figure out, you know. To which I say like, get a translator at some point. Let him speak French, you know, which is his first language. So a lot of what they were also trying to figure out, besides what Gondry was saying,

• 52:26Chris Winterbauer?

  was how to show Joel's memories being erased because Kaufman's script wasn't that specific. So I'm going to read you some examples from the script. Joel grabs her. They run off as the scene decays into a husk behind them. The scene has already been erased. It's just a decayed husk. The scene is faded and disappearing fast. It's gone. The room, Stan and Mirzak are now vague and wispy. So again, there's not a lot of specificity in how things are disappearing. It's just saying they're disappearing. But if anybody can come up with a way to turn something vague, not fully understood, visual, like the lyrics of a song, it's Michel Gondry. Mm-hmm. And here are a few ideas they pitched on how to handle disappearing memories. So ink mixed with sand projected on an actor's face. You can see this online, Lizzie.

• 53:10Chris Winterbauer?

  It actually gives something kind of similar to Rorschach's mask in Watchmen, if you remember. Yeah, it makes sense. Different textured screens placed between the actor and the camera, actors' faces turning into film negatives. And Gondry starts to really worry that he's overthinking it. He said he was frozen by fear. So he calls up Kaufman and he says, I'm not sure about all these effects and transitions. Maybe we should play it another way. And I want to point out that one of the things that really doesn't work in human nature is that the movie feels extremely heightened from the very beginning. It never grounds you in the real world. And so I think Gondry consciously or not was not going to make the same mistake with Eternal Sunshine. He decided to ditch the complicated optical tricks and favored more subtle visceral effects used like lighting or editing, which I think is so smart because, Lizzie, if you've seen his music videos, I think if you used that style,

• 53:54Chris Winterbauer?

  and he would eventually do this in Science of Sleep, I think the twee would over. overwhelm the finished product. I agree. Now, there's some, you know, Gondry flourishes. If you remember the argument at the flea market over, I mean, the brutal argument where Joel says that he doesn't think Clementine would be a good mother, effectively. They do put a screen between Joel and the background to show that the memory is blurring and disappearing. So they did some of that, but again, it was handled very practically. So principal photography lasts three months, January through March of 2003. Valentine's Day, where the movie is set, right in the middle in New York and New Jersey. It's very cold and Lizzie, it is not your typical production. For starters, Gondry didn't like to call action, so sometimes he just started filming without warning. Now, there was a method to the madness.

• 54:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Quote, "You say action and everybody becomes a piece of wood. And when you say cut, everything becomes fluid and alive. So the word action became my enemy." I actually think that that can be true. Yeah. And roughly for the first week, the actors, mostly Kate Winslet, were facing another challenge. Kaufman had written into the script, this idea that as Joel's memories decayed, the actors' acting should too. So, quote, "The memory is already in the midst of being erased. Clementine is talking in a monotonous robotic manner." That's screen direction from the script. "A vague Joel watches a vague Clementine model in a black dress." Winslet later said she was terrified of this. She didn't know what they were going to do. Are we speaking differently? Are we speaking more slowly? Are we speaking backward?

• 55:20Chris Winterbauer?

  She says that they tried a bunch of different things for about a week and Gondry clearly knew something was off and decided to ditch it. So the memories would decay visually and maybe auditorily, but the performances would not decay, which I think is really smart. Yeah, you have to. I think that would have been very distracting. Kaufman later said that he thought Michelle's concern was that there is a lot of emotional stuff happening in these scenes. Making them robotic would be taking away from some of the experience of the emotion. Yeah. And Gondry was the opposite of robotic. In fact, he was pretty spontaneous, impulsive. There was very little rehearsal time. He liked for each take of the same scene to be shot and acted very differently. So Lizzie, there were no marks for the actors. He wore a microphone and the camera operators wore earpieces so he could direct not just the actors, but also the cameras. Oh, cool.

• 56:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Ruffalo later said, "I was very excited by what we were doing." We were shooting 36,000 feet of film a day.

• 56:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 56:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Even by the most excessive standards, this is out of control. The cameras were rolling nonstop. He'd be standing there just talking and then you'd realize the camera was rolling on you and it was out of control. We were improvising so much of it. To capture all of this action, the cameras were getting near 360 degree coverage. What's hard about 360 degree coverage, Lizzie, in a scene?

• 56:34Lizzie Bassett?

  You can't hide the crew.

• 56:35Chris Winterbauer?

  You can't hide the crew and it has to be lit for every possible angle. The cinematographer, Alan Curris, said that the film was shot entirely handheld with sled dollies, wheelchair and chariot dollies, no traditional dollies. And Gondry wants all of the lighting to look natural with minimum film lights. So they had to get super creative. They had all these light bulbs, refrigerator bulbs, small bulbs on hand dimmers. They'd hide it behind furniture and lampshades. She said it was a game of hide and seek. Where can we hide our light bulbs? And she was not always happy. They had to cut holes in lampshades, hide these bulbs, but the actors would inevitably end up shadowing one another throughout the scene. As they're just walking around and it's like, no, this shot doesn't look right. And Gondry's like, run around, do what you want. Camera operators chase them. So let's talk about another scene that I think was like a very pivotal point in this production.

• 57:20Chris Winterbauer?

  So this is when Joel revisits the memory of going to Lacuna. It looks like it's at night, right? It's very dark.

• 57:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 57:25Chris Winterbauer?

  He goes into Howard's office. He demands that he erase Clementine. And there are two Joles in the scene. There's the real or the present Joel and the memory or the past Joel. And so this was shot sometime at the end of the first or second week. And Curris said that they didn't want to depart from the film's look too much, but they wanted to capture the feeling that they were in quote, "the tunnel of the mind." And that's when Gondry has an idea. There's this scene from a French film called Le Boucher, in which a car is driving on a deserted country road at night. And you can only see what's illuminated by the throw of the headlights. So the idea is when you remember something, you don't see the full picture, just glimpses of a scene. So they decided to attach one light, like a spotlight on top of the camera. And Gondry decided to shoot it as a one-er. Now, Lizzie, can you describe a one-er briefly for our audience?

• 58:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure. A one-er means that it is shot in one take. There are no edits. Famously, there was a recent episode of the studio, I believe titled The One-er, that is all a one-er about capturing a one-er.

• 58:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Inevitably about a one-er ruined by the studio head played by Seth Rogen. It's a really wonderful episode of television.

• 58:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's actually a great explanation of the production of something like this. Yeah.

• 58:32Chris Winterbauer?

  I couldn't agree more. So this meant that Kerry, while the camera was rolling, because they would not be able to cut, would have to run behind the camera, change his clothes, and jump back into the scene. Kerry thought this was impossible, and he said that he and Gondry argued about it on set for a good 15 minutes. And it seems like maybe Gondry was on the precipice of losing Kerry and his crew's faith. Kerry kept telling Gondry, "This can't be done. I can't do this. It's impossible." And if this were Eternal Sunshine, I feel like at this point in the movie, we'd step into a memory of Steve Golan and Anthony Bregman laughing at Gondry's accent, or strangers asking him why Spike Jonze wasn't directing his movie. And so Gondry sticks to his guns and he says, "You know, how do you know if you don't try?"

• 59:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And so Kerry says, "Fuck it," and he tries, and it works. After five or six takes, to be clear, but it works! And everybody in Video Village cheers and claps. Gondry later said, "That was sort of a miracle. I think at this moment, I had gained the respect and the trust of all the crew. After that, people really would follow my idea, even when it seemed unachievable." And Elijah Wood later said something similar, "The entire crew went out for drinks for the first time. It was the second week, I think it was the end of the second week, and it was electric, this feeling of, 'We're making something incredible, and we could all see it for the first time. It was really, really special. That was a great, great experience." Jim Carrey later said, "Michelle was a creative genius, and that he would come in every day with an idea that would make him go, 'Wow, somebody's thinking, man. Thank you. This is great. Somebody's bringing something to the table.'"

• 59:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, Lizzie, memory is unreliable, and relationships are not really that smooth. In actuality, according to Gondry, at one point, Jim Carrey marched up to him and said that he'd never seen such a disorganized shoot. And that was intentional. Gondry said he wanted everyone on set to feel lost, because he felt lost. "I think my main job was to make sure nobody was in control. I didn't want to be the only one, because I was not in control, but I wanted people to be equal to me on this level, and everybody to be lost."

• 1:00:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Things were tense between Gondry and Carey throughout the shoot. For starters, Gondry was trying to rein Carey in while encouraging everybody else to make their performances bigger and looser.

• 1:00:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Jim Carrey also famously not the easiest man to work with.

• 1:00:43Chris Winterbauer?

  There's an apocryphal story that I'm not going to put in the main narrative, but I will tell at the end after what went right. It is a story I heard about this production. We could not verify it, so I don't want to include it here, but I will say it at the end. That may speak to this a little bit. So here's the quote from Gondry. "I had to bring Jim Carrey so far down to the point where he couldn't improvise or joke too much. But then there are scenes where he's sleeping in the bed and he had to be laying there very still because he's in frame and he'd see Mark Ruffalo and Kirsten Dunst be crazy and improvising and going off script. And he got so frustrated, he said, why are they improvising? You told me the opposite. Sometimes I had to talk to Kate Winslet in a different room to tell her, go as big as you want. This is a comedy. And then to Jim, I'd say, this is a drama, not a comedy. Jim was very frustrated when we were shooting it.

• 1:01:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Fun fact, apparently Charlie Kaufman also disagreed with how big and broad Gondry made the moments with Stan and Mary partying while Joel is asleep.

• 1:01:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no, that's like one of my favorite parts of the entire movie. You have to have that.

• 1:01:36Chris Winterbauer?

  You have to. It's so important. He said he wanted them to be more insidious. I think that would totally screw the tone of the movie.

• 1:01:42Lizzie Bassett?

  A hundred percent. They kind of make the movie for me and like where that world outside of the memory exists. I don't think this movie works without them, the way that they are.

• 1:01:51Chris Winterbauer?

  There's no real villain at the end of the day, and I think that's what makes it fun. It's, you know, there are people with bad motivations.

• 1:01:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Arguably Tom Wilkins is pretty evil, but.

• 1:02:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He is, and actually there's a change that they made to make him less evil, in fact.

• 1:02:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:02:06Chris Winterbauer?

  So we'll get into it in a moment. Now, what's funny though, is that I think a lot of people, because Charlie Kaufman is this inspired writer, this mad genius, they think he must be so precious about his script. And Jim Carrey, there was this one line in the script he didn't understand. And he had such reverence for Kaufman's scripts that he calls him directly. And this is the quote, "I said this line, I want to make sure it goes well. It's right, whatever. I gave him the line and Charlie Kaufman just says, I don't know, just take it out."

• 1:02:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He doesn't care about this movie at all. So Jim Carrey's struggling to keep track of where he is in the story. Are we lucid in this memory? Is this memory the way it was? Has it been gilded in retrospect? And I think on top of the language barrier, on top of the complicated script, Gondry is purposely trying to keep Carrie off balance at all times. He'd roll the camera at the wrong time. He'd give him the wrong direction at the last minute to make him panicked. He says that he wanted him to forget about what he should do to be the character, instead become the character, which all sounds well and good, but it also sounds so stressful. Yes. They would yell at each other. And this was also in part, we must mention, because it sounds like Gondry wasn't always putting the safety of his actors first. And now this is Gondry's quote that I want to read.

• 1:03:20Chris Winterbauer?

  "When Jim Carrey walks into the house and the ocean is taking over, we built the corner of the house and we put it on the side of the beach and we waited for the tide to be high, too. We hired a special team to put the set like two feet in the water. They had gear and stuff, and then at the last minute, they refused because they said it was too dangerous. So we were screwed. We had to do it ourselves, the actors, the producer, everybody. So I called them pussies, I think. Then I got told off by the chief of the union, who came in to sort of humiliate me in front of my crew because we fired those guys. I had my satisfaction." End quote. So to be clear, they hired, I believe what they're saying, a special effects team, a union crew special effects team to make something happen. That team, we were not there. We cannot assess whether they were right or wrong, but that team said this is too dangerous.

• 1:04:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Gondry fired them and then he did this stunt set piece anyway. Mark Ruffalo later said that Michelle Gondry called him while he was filming in Montauk. Quote, "I'm like, hello?" And he says, "I wish you were here, man. They hate me. Everyone hates me. I wish you were here." And then Mark Ruffalo says, "That was awesome."

• 1:04:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, no. It's such a mixed bag on this movie. Yeah. So according to Carrie, the worst day was when they filmed Joel and Clementine in Joel's memory of being bathed in the sink. So the sink was a hot tub. Winslet felt nauseous and then allegedly fainted. Michelle Gondry wanted to keep shooting and Jim Carrey did not. Carrie got so mad that Gondry- Gondry allegedly asked him, are you going to punch me in the face? To be clear, Jim Carrey did not. Although there was one quote that said, how did you rap Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? And Carrey, I believe jokingly says, Michelle and I got into a fistfight on the street. So I think things were very, very tense. And Gondry was the one behind Clementine punching Joel on the shoulder on the train, and his reaction is real.

• 1:05:07Chris Winterbauer?

  That was not in the script. And when it happened, Carrey knew that Gondry had put her up to it. It was a relationship gone sour. One of the last times that Carrey yelled at Gondry, according to Gondry, he yelled back at Carrey, Jim, if you yell at me, I don't like you anymore. And if I don't like you, I can't direct you. I mean, it's not going well. But there was one person on set, Lizzie, who had a very effective way of dealing with Michelle Gondry. If you had to guess which actor was not going to take any of Gondry's crap, who would you guess? It's gotta be Kate Winslet. Tom Wilkinson. Oh. Tom Wilkinson said he would do three takes, no more. And when Gondry would give him direction, he'd look him in the eye and just say, why?

• 1:05:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Gondry was terrified of Wilkinson, but he says, it didn't matter because he was great in all three takes, every time. Yeah. For his part, Wilkinson had no idea what they were doing. According to Ruffalo, Wilkinson said, I don't know what the hell we're doing. I don't know what he's doing. And then Ruffalo says, I think it's good. And he said, I don't dig any of it, and I don't know what you're doing. And then Ruffalo says, I don't know what I'm doing either, man. I hope it works.

• 1:06:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So Carrey and Winslet get nervous, and they call some of the producers to Winslet's trailer. And they say, we're really concerned this movie isn't going to make any sense. And Anthony Bregman, one of the producers, says, what are you talking about? And they're like, have you seen the scenes? And we're like, yeah, the dailies are incredible. They're so good. And they're like, no, no, no. Have you seen the scenes cut together? And they had not, because 10 days into shooting, footage from the first day had yet to be cut because, according to Bregman, the original editor was let go after having a nervous breakdown. This was an Academy Award winning editor, but she could not wrap her head around the way Gondry was shooting. There was so much footage.

• 1:07:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I mean, that's an overwhelming amount of film.

• 1:07:03Chris Winterbauer?

  And it could not be organized.

• 1:07:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Bregman thought the footage looked cool, but he had no idea if the shots could be edited together. And he estimated that if the production continued in that same way, they'd go a million dollars over budget just on film.

• 1:07:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Ooh.

• 1:07:16Chris Winterbauer?

  So Steve Golan, according to Bregman, says, "Look, I'm gonna be honest with you." And Bregman thinks, "Oh, my God, this is where the movie falls apart." And then Golan says, "It's incredible. The scenes are incredible. They cut together perfectly. We're making something like we've never seen before."

• 1:07:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm guessing he had never seen a single.

• 1:07:35Chris Winterbauer?

  He has not seen a single scene.

• 1:07:39Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what? He's right, though. That's what you gotta do.

• 1:07:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Winslet and Carey are like, "Oh, my God, I'm so relieved to hear that. It was a lie."

• 1:07:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Chris Winterbauer?

  But it was not a lie for long, because they had a savior from Iceland. Editor Valdis Oskarzoltev was probably used to unconventional productions. Lizzie, she cut a bunch of Dogma 95 films, including The Celebration, which we've discussed, we've talked about it on our 28 Days Later episode, as well as Harmony Corinne's Julian Donkey Boy. And she was thrilled with the material. She said, "I got everything I needed and more." She was not thrilled to be working with Michelle Gondry. Quote, "He is French. I am Icelandic. We're both stubborn, and so it was full of arguments. Michelle can be very sweet and nice, funny, creative, and then he can be a pain in the ass. But I think that I can be a pain in the ass, too. Probably more of a pain in the ass than Michelle."

• 1:08:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Good.

• 1:08:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Valdis had a belief. If a director's input isn't brilliant, it should be ignored. Gondry didn't love this, so he told the producers. He says she rolls her eyes at him. And she says, "How can you see me roll my eyes? You sit on the couch behind me." Years later, she said she didn't think they'd ever work together again. Basically, this is not working. And it's possible that Gondry was in a really sensitive place because he was going through a real-life breakup at the time. His girlfriend left him during editing.

• 1:08:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

• 1:08:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Things that seemed cliche to Gondry in the script, you know, Joel putting Clementine's belongings in a garbage bag. He said this would never happen, and then it literally happened to him during post.

• 1:09:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. I just want to say, I think he needed somebody like this editor, though. Because like, what you're asking-

• 1:09:08Chris Winterbauer?

  100%.

• 1:09:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. If you have that much film, and what he's saying about wanting everybody to kind of feel lost, you have to relinquish some control if that's the case. Like, you can't have somebody come in where you're going to say exactly what you want, because you don't, maybe don't know exactly what you want. So it sounds like she was just right, even if they didn't get along.

• 1:09:27Chris Winterbauer?

  I couldn't agree more. I think she did an amazing job. And we'll talk about some of the stuff that was removed from the film that I think was a brilliant choice. So, just a brief aside on the music, because it ties into memory. So John Bryan, incredible composer, is brought in to score the film. And Gondry visits his studio. And in his studio, he discovers this trove of old keyboards, like the one that his grandfather had invented, the clavioline. And in fact, his grandfather had had a keyboard shop that his dad took over. And in John Bryan's studio is this ancestor of the synthesizer called the Chilton Talent Maker. It's a keyboard that plays back pre-recorded samples from optical discs made of clear plastic. Basically, it plays back memories.

• 1:10:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not unlike the tapes that they use in the film where people record, "My name is Clementine Kryzinski and I want to forget Joel Bearish." It's this imperfect, crackling, unsteady sound. It sounds like an old phonograph. And Gondry hadn't seen this instrument in 30 years, not since the time he'd spent in his grandfather and father's keyboard shop. And what sounds like a guitar in Eternal Sunshine is actually the Chilton Talent Maker layered. And I'd like to play you, Lizzie, a couple of layers of how this score comes together to form the textures of a memory.

• 1:10:49Chris Winterbauer?

  So that's layer one. Here's layer two.

• 1:11:00Chris Winterbauer?

  And here they are combined.

• 1:11:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's beautiful.

• 1:11:17Chris Winterbauer?

  One of my favorite pieces of music, that's specifically Phone Call from The Score, if you guys want to look it up.

• 1:11:22Lizzie Bassett?

  It's beautiful, and it's interesting that it's called Phone Call because it actually reminds me of the scene in adaptation where Meryl Streep has Chris Cooper help her create the sound of a dial tone.

• 1:11:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, really wonderful use of sound in both movies. I'd also like to credit the website Reverb Machine, they put together the breakdown of the making of John Bryan's score, and I recommend that you all go check out that blog post, it's really interesting.

• 1:11:44Lizzie Bassett?

  That's really cool.

• 1:11:45Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, there are a lot of rumors about the release date of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it pushed from November of 2003, kind of the typical awards contender spot, to March of 2004. There were a lot of rumors that it's because post-production was just so complicated, which would make sense, but Charlie Kaufman said that's not true. He said they actually rushed to finish it by November, were ready, and then they just took more time after the release date pushed because they had more time. It seems what's more likely was the upcoming release of Paycheck. Did you ever see the Ben Affleck action thriller Paycheck with Uma Thurman?

• 1:12:16Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, I think I did, but I-

• 1:12:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I saw it in theaters, and even at like 14, I thought, this is kind of a clunker. It's a bit of a stinker. You know, John Woo directed, Aaron Eckhart, it's a Philip Dick adaptation, it's in the realm of something like Total Recall, I don't recommend it. Not the best work if anybody involved, but it featured memory-erasing headgear that looked a little similar, even in the trailer, to Eternal Sunshine. So, whatever it is, you know, whatever the reason, be it a strategy around Art-Haut releasing, or wanting to distance themselves from Ben Affleck, the studio pushes the release, and let's talk about the studio's thoughts on the movie. So, at the script stage, it seems like Kaufman didn't get a ton of notes because it took so long to write and it was moving around town quite a bit, but one of the few early notes was, "We don't really know what Clementine's about, can we include some of her memories?"

• 1:13:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Which Kaufman would always push back on, saying it's not her story. For better or worse, it's Joel's story at the end of the day. But they were also really concerned about confusing the audience, so they hold a couple of test screenings, and we don't know if these changes were a reaction to the test screenings, but let's talk about some of the changes, including someone who was erased from the film.

• 1:13:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:13:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, Naomi, who's barely mentioned in the finished film, was once a fully-realized witnessed character in the script and early cuts. Her scenes were completely removed, and do you know who played her?

• 1:13:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't, but I was wondering about this because I felt myself wondering if we were going to see Naomi in the memory where he goes to the beach and meets Clementine.

• 1:13:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It was Ellen Pompeo.

• 1:13:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  She later joked that she got completely cut out of it because Kate Winslet is in the movie, and if you have Kate Winslet, you don't need me. And of course, what's ironic about that is that I don't think Kate Winslet would have wanted her out, but not only that, they may have cut her for the opposite reason. Jim Carrey has said that he thinks they had such good chemistry that Ellen Pompeo's Naomi competed with Kate Winslet. Charlie Kaufman, for his part, said he was totally against cutting her out. He felt that it helped understand where Joel came from. If we see Naomi and that he's in a relationship and he is willing to take a risk and leave that relationship for Clementine, we understand what Clementine means to him. So that was Kaufman's logic. I don't know if I agree with that.

• 1:14:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think you need her. I think it actually does something more effective by not ever seeing her.

• 1:14:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Jim Carrey, actually, I think, was relieved. He said that he was hurt that Gondry had cast her because she looked like his ex-girlfriend, Renee Zellweger, and they'd gone through a breakup recently. He said, quote, "She reminded me completely of Renee. Her look was similar." And I said, bastard! And it ends up that she's not even in the movie. Now, my theory is that American audiences, I think, have a really hard time stomaching infidelity in any way. And I know relationships are messy, and where one ends and one begins is difficult to parse sometimes, but I think that's something that American audiences really struggle with. You know, in my own experience, we had a version of Moonshot where the two main characters kiss at the midpoint of the movie when one of them is technically still in a relationship. I could not believe how negatively the audience rated

• 1:15:15Chris Winterbauer?

  her character, not his, after that. And so I wonder if it was like, oh, then Clementine's a homewrecker and he's a slut, and you know what I mean, that sort of thing. We don't know. What we do know is that Tracy Morgan shot some scenes for this movie, Lizzie.

• 1:15:27Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:15:28Chris Winterbauer?

  He was gonna be one of Joel's neighbors.

• 1:15:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Um, put those back in.

• 1:15:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I think it was just that, oh, it's like, oh, there's Tracy Morgan. Joel's just neighbors with Tracy Morgan. He's just himself.

• 1:15:37Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it would be insane.

• 1:15:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So in terms of Tom Wilkinson's character being dark, the extra scenes actually revealed that originally that character, Mary, discovered that Howard had coerced her into having an abortion.

• 1:15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I was gonna, yeah, that's what I figured when you said that.

• 1:15:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, I think one really important change that they made was that they pulled up the present moment scene where Joel and Clementine lay on the ice. That happens in the first 15 minutes.

• 1:16:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Chris Winterbauer?

  This was originally written for the end of the movie, but on the one hand, it delayed jumping into Joel's memories. On the other hand, it helped establish their chemistry and it helped the audience view Clementine in a positive light from the beginning, which is funny because, Lizzie, to your point, Charlie Kaufman had been trying to do the opposite. You mentioned how you had a really hard time with her at the beginning, but you kind of maybe loved her by the end. That's actually what Kaufman wanted to do. He wanted the audience to think she was horrible at the beginning because we only see her through Joel's perspective at the end of the relationship.

• 1:16:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And then to love her by the end. I just think that's so hard to pull off, even for an actress as talented as Kate Winslet.

• 1:16:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It has nothing to do with Kate Winslet. I love that idea. The reason for me that it doesn't work is you do not get enough time with her outside of Joel's memories for that to ever be viable.

• 1:16:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think like, as we learned in Memento, it's so hard for the audience to shake something that they've already formed as an opinion.

• 1:16:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Chris Winterbauer?

  When Christopher Nolan talked about how people distrust Teddy when they first meet him and they never let go of that.

• 1:16:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Even as we see Natalie be a darker character, you know, than him by the end of the film. What's so funny, though, is Gondry accomplished with the movie what Kaufman was trying to accomplish with Clementine. So Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind releases on March 19th, 2004, and I'd like to read a section of Kenneth Turin's review from the LA Times. Frankly, I'd avoided seeing Eternal Sunshine for weeks because it looked like everything I'd hate in a film. Though I was an admirer of Kaufman's screenplays for adaptation and being John Malkovich, I'd loathed his first collaboration with Gondry: Human Nature, a film that attempted to make virtues of excessive cutesiness and playful artificiality. He goes on to say that he didn't think Gondry could pull off a movie with emotional depth, but he was wrong. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind had some of the things I feared it would, maybe even a lot of them. I noticed.

• 1:17:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Libeness, indulgence, artificiality, whatever. But there was something else here, something I hadn't counted on. Something that almost against my will turned this film into one of my favorites of the year. And that would be emotion, honestly and unapologetically displayed. Not only does Spotless Mind's story illustrate true feelings overcoming hellacious obstacles, but the way its techniques work on our psyches follows the same trajectory. I think it's a great review. Yeah. Many critics walked into Eternal Sunshine with the opinion that Michel Gondry was horrible. And most, though not all, were slowly won over. Roger Ebert gave it four and a half stars, and we cannot understate the importance of Gondry's actors. Everything that Winslet brought, not just to the character, but to the script. And Carey in particular was called out as being as genuinely natural as he's ever been.

• 1:18:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Human Nature brought in a million dollars at the box office. Being John Malkovich made 23. Adaptation made 32. And despite the fact that its trailer made the movie seem like an upbeat comedy, which it was not. It is not. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind made 34 million dollars at the domestic box office alone. Wow. It ended its run north of 73 million dollars worldwide against its 20 million dollar budget. Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It is Kaufman's first and only win to date. As you mentioned, Lizzie, he had been nominated for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation both. Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Actress, but she lost to Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby. Jim Carrey was not nominated, and nor was John Bryan for Original Score. Wow. Which is crazy.

• 1:19:12Chris Winterbauer?

  The other nominees were Finding Neverland, which won, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Lemonade Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, starring Jim Carrey, The Passion of the Christ, and The Village. Wow. There are a couple I would kick off of there. Yeah. I actually think The Village is maybe my favorite score. I know people have problems with the movie, but I think the score is amazing. What's so interesting is that in a period of roughly five years, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman together made both the least successful film of their entire careers in Human Nature and the most successful film of their entire careers in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet, they never worked together again. Charlie Kaufman wanted to direct, and he did, starting with Sinek to Key New York, which was a commercial misfire. We'll have to cover it. It got mixed reviews, but it's been reevaluated by many as a masterpiece.

• 1:19:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Michel Gondry wanted to write, and he did with The Science of Sleep, a modest financial success that paled in comparison to Eternal Sunshine. And Gondry was asked in 2007 if he was going to collaborate with Kaufman, and he said, "I would like to, but you know, it's difficult because I'm sure a lot of people think that there is more depth in the work we did together than in the work I do on my own." And maybe there is, but my way of thinking is a little more naive. And sometimes by working with him, I had to explain and to write things that when I work on my own, I don't have to. I think he had a hard time compromising on this movie. As Steve Golan later said, Eternal Sunshine was actually the product of great compromise.

• 1:20:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Chris Winterbauer?

  He said that he and Kaufman and the other producers spent a lot of time to rein in Michel's creativity. He said he's brilliant, he has 100 brilliant ideas a day, but they have to work in the context of the narrative. And the only reason they could do that on Eternal Sunshine was because Michel was coming out of a bad relationship.

• 1:20:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:20:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Human nature flopped. They could always tell him, "Listen, your last movie wasn't a success, so stop being so confident that you're always right." And just to end it, it reminds me of that cliche, the friend or family member wondering why that great couple they know broke up. You know, "You're so good together, but maybe they just weren't happy or the memories are too painful." And that brings us to the end of our coverage of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

• 1:21:08Lizzie Bassett?

  That was great, Chris.

• 1:21:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So, Lizzie, I have to ask you, what went right?

• 1:21:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I think I would have to give it to the editor, whose name I'm never going to be able to pronounce. But knowing the way that he shot this and the amount of film that she was working with, I think the way that this is edited, the things that they chose to excise, she feels essential to this to me. And it is beautifully edited. So that would be my what went right. But I would also say this, you know, about them not working together again. I think it's a bit of a tragedy because this strikes me as a situation where they may be people who really need to be challenged, in particular Gondry. But it sounds like he is, for whatever reason, pretty averse to that.

• 1:21:52Lizzie Bassett?

  And it's too bad because I do think, I'm not a huge fan of his other work.

• 1:21:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm not either.

• 1:21:58Lizzie Bassett?

  But I am of this.

• 1:22:00Chris Winterbauer?

  This is an outlier for me.

• 1:22:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and I think it's because he was forced to temper the tweeness. And he was forced to examine some darker elements of himself and his own work in this. And when he does that, it's incredible. But I don't know that he's willing to do that on his own.

• 1:22:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree, and I actually feel a bit similarly with Kaufman in that my favorite Kaufman films are mediated by two directors who I believe have somewhat more optimistic views of humanity, and that would be Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.

• 1:22:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:22:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And Kaufman's work on his own, although I think it's intellectually brilliant, leaves me a bit emotionally wanting. And even though I enjoyed Sonnet City, New York, and the sequences of Sonnet City, New York quite a bit, and Philip Seymour Hoffman's amazing in that movie, something like, I'm thinking of Ending Things, works more as, again, an intellectual exercise than it does as an emotional journey for me.

• 1:22:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:53Chris Winterbauer?

  And, yeah, we discussed a little bit, we were talking about Bob Evans and Francis Ford Coppola, there are so many interesting instances in Hollywood history of folks who, when they are able to come together, can create something incredibly special, but it's so painful to do it that it is not sustainable.

• 1:23:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I would like to give my what went right to John Bryan. This score, I think, is incredibly influential. John Bryan has since, of course, become an enormous composer, but I think that the score has humor in it, it has heart in it, and it feels analog and handmade in a way that feels so consistent to the texture of the movie that it only adds to, you know, my experience as I watch it. And especially, I love the funkier tracks as we are tumbling down the rabbit hole of Joel's memory and the memories are disappearing.

• 1:23:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It almost acts as sound design, because a lot of it is timed to match all of the disappearing elements on screen. So, mine goes to John Bryan.

• 1:23:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I stand behind that.

• 1:23:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay. Before we go, I will share my possibly true, very much apocryphal story of Jim Carrey and Michel Gondry on the set of Eternal Sunshine. I was told this story by another crew member, a friend of mine. Again, we could not verify this. I do not know if this is true. I feel comfortable sharing it because I don't think it reflects poorly on either Carrey or Gondry, and is pretty charming. But again, treat this as fiction for now. So, what I heard was that Jim Carrey, because of all of the comedic work that he did, had a stipulation in his contract where he was allowed to see playback on any given take in a movie he was in to help him dial in his performance. And this,

• 1:24:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I think, would make sense, especially on a bigger, you know, performance like The Grinch, you know, for example.

• 1:24:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Obviously, on an independent film, especially, you cannot afford to have your lead actor stop the production to check playback whenever they want. And especially now that I know how Gondry was filming 24/7, you can't do that. So Carey agrees, he's not gonna have this in his contract. One day, they're filming out at the platform, when he decides to go to Montauk at the beginning of the movie, and he kind of, "Will I go to work? Will I not go to work?" And then he runs around to the next platform, and gets on the train. They've shot it a bunch of times, they've got it. And Michelle Gondry's ready to move on. And Mr. Carey says to him, "You know, hey, can I just do one more?" And Gondry's like, "No, no, no, it's time to move on. You know, we're on a tight schedule." And he says, "Let me just do one more. Just

• 1:25:24Chris Winterbauer?

  one for me." So they decide, "Okay, you can do one more." And again, according to Gondry, he turned to the DP and said, "Don't waste film on this one. Don't roll on this one." And so they start the scene, and Carey does a big Charlie Chaplin performance, where he runs up the stairs, down the stairs, gets on the train, off the train, falls down, grabs his briefcase, blah, blah, blah. It's this virtuosic, very broad, you know, Three Stooges-style performance. And he gets done, and everybody cheers. And Michelle Gondry says, "Okay, let's move on." And Carey says, "Can I watch the playback?" And Gondry says, "No, no, no, we don't have time." And he's like, "I know you're never gonna use this,

• 1:26:05Chris Winterbauer?

  so I'm never gonna see it. Could I just see the playback?" And Gondry has to admit, he didn't roll on the take. And things got very quiet, and they finished the day. And the way I heard it, Carey did not show up to set the next day, and there had to be a big come together to smooth things over. The reason why I now think this story is most likely not true, is that Michelle Gondry rolled on everything in this movie. And so I very much think he probably, if Carey had asked him, would have rolled on this, too. But that is my Gondry-Cary story. Again, I would treat it as fiction. All right, Lizzie, would you like to tell folks at home how they can support the show if they happen to be enjoying it?

• 1:26:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course, you can always tell a friend or family member that you like What Went Wrong. Make them listen to it. Sit them down in an eight-hour car ride and just put on, I don't know, five of our episodes during that timeframe, probably. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. You can, if you would like to receive at least one bonus episode a month, you can now subscribe on both Apple and Spotify, and you will there get at least one bonus episode. Mostly they're reviews, although we are entering Oscars season, so there will be some special Oscars episodes.

• 1:27:24Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And this Friday, we're coming at you with a review of Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights. Let's see what all the fuss is about.

• 1:27:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Or you can, of course, head over to our Patreon, where for $5, you get access to everything. All of our ad-free bonus episodes, ad-free feed, musings from mostly Christopher, and more. So if you'd like to support us, that's how you can do it. And if you want to pay $50 on Patreon, you get all of those things and a shout-out just like this.

• 1:27:57Chris Winterbauer?

  In honor of eternal sunshine, I thought this week, the shout-outs could be handled by somebody who I hope will never choose to forget me.

• 1:28:05Speaker 03

  Mary Poppins, There Is No Spill, Frankenstein, Angelina Jolie, and Van Van Damme.

• 1:28:15Chris Winterbauer?

  This one's hard. Jose Emiliano Salto del Giorgio. Do you want to just do Jose?

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  Jose, Nathan Stantanel, Joey Help Piper, Felicia G., Jared, Scott Ashura, Karina Kanaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Cimberlin, Debra Ross Family, Galen and Miguel, Broken Glass Kids, David Frisk, Galilee, Filmy Yourself, Chris Saka. Kate Ellington, Amazonia, C. Graceby, Blaze Ambrose, Roro Joel, Nathan Knife, Lena LJ, Half Greyhound,

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  Brittany Morris, Dale and Dale Conquie, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter, Ellen Singleton, JJ Rapido, Lacey Freddy, Sadie, Jess Sadie, Brian Donahue.

• 1:29:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Adrian Peng.

• 1:29:25Speaker 03

  Wait, I have a Brian at my school called Coach Brian.

• 1:29:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, Coach Brian, maybe this is the same one.

• 1:29:31Speaker 03

  Adrian Pinkeria, Chris Leo, Kathleen Nelson, Brooke, Steve is open.

• 1:29:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  Steve Winterbauer, Don Schible, that's good game.

• 1:29:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Can you say that Rosemary Southward?

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Rosemary Southward, Jameson Frankel, Soma Chayani, Michael Grass, Lydia Salas, For Greyhound, Marc Bertha, Amy Goldish, Largely McCoy.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  Good job, Nora.

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  Goodbye.

• 1:30:07Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie, thank you so much for joining me today in a journey into the memories of Michelle Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, and many more. Next week, we're covering a movie that I believe most involved wanted to forget. A movie I was so excited to see that I dragged a bunch of my friends to it and they teased me relentlessly. Lizzie, what are we covering?

• 1:30:31Lizzie Bassett?

  A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

• 1:30:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I believe it's the final live action appearance of Sean Connery in a film.

• 1:30:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, boy. It is a movie and it's quite a doozy of a story. Pretty funny.

• 1:30:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm excited, though, especially because I feel like we don't get those kind of clunker superhero movies that we really got in the early 2000s, a number of.

• 1:30:54Lizzie Bassett?

  I wanted to go back to a real, a real stinker, a true big time flopper, and we're gonna get it.

• 1:30:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you know, Elektra, Daredevil, we'll hit them all.

• 1:31:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm excited.

• 1:31:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:03Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, guys, go rent.

• 1:31:04Lizzie Bassett?

  A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

• 1:31:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And we'll go, we'll go watch the movie that made Sean Connery say, I'm out.

• 1:31:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:31:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Talk to you guys later.

• 1:31:14Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, see you next week. Bye.

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.