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GOING HOLLYWOOD
GOING HOLLYWOOD
Cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones, who previously lit Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch for Guy Ritchie, has had a long and fruitful collaboration with French director Michel Gondry on award winning commercials and music videos. So when Gondry was invited to Hollywood to make his first feature, he took Maurice-Jones with him. Human Nature, by Charlie Kaufman, is the sort of dark and deeply eccentric comedy you’d expect from the BAFTA-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich. It co-stars Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette and Rhys Ifans in a bizarre romantic triangle involving a behavioral scientist, a nature writer with hair issues and a feral man nicknamed Puff. Maurice-Jones talked to QUENTIN FALK about his West Coast debut.
Q. What were your first thoughts about working with Michel Gondry on a feature?
A. So I tell people I’m doing a movie with Michel and they say ‘Yeh, Michel’s a genius at visuals, second to none. But you haven’t ever really seen him direct an actor with dia- logue. It’ll probably be a disaster.’ I suppose I did have some initial mis- givings. It turns out he directs actors
even better than his visuals. For example, Tim Robbins, wanting to do a certain performance in a certain scene, would say to Michel, ‘I want to be slightly angry here, or more naïve there.’ Michel, who had the whole film in his head, would reply, “Okay, if you do a performance like this on scene 5, by Scene 87, when I want you to do this particular performance, you will have already given it away
maybe 20 scenes earlier.” Robbins would look at him blankly and just say, ‘Yeh, you’re right’ and walk away. I usually storyboard my films [togeth- er with operator and director] but when I turned up this time he had already storyboarded the whole film. He stuck to it frame by frame except for perhaps just one shot. He’d some- times allow actors to do their own thing – but it’d usually end up with
EXPOSURE • 30 & 31