Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

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 host Lizzy Bassett here as always with my co-host Chris Winterbauer and Chris, what do you have for us today?”

Today we are discussing a turnle sunshine of the spotless mind, the cinematic equivalent of that SNL sketch Wells for sad boys. 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 Jessica Gordon Levitt's character with the graduate in 500 days of summer and so I'm really excited to talk about it today. Lizzy had you seen a turnle sunshine of the spotless mind before and what were your thoughts upon watching or rewatching it for the podcast.

Of course I've seen this. This came out when we were 14, 15, yeah.

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 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 when I texted you this, but as it started, I did feel a creeping sense of dread because I was like, oh no. Oh no. The manic pixie dream is very alive in this movie.

Yeah, turnle sunshine said garden state whole 20 years. 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. Clementime Christian ski 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. 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 can't get out of here. It's 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 by your 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 Kristen Duns Mark Refflow Tom Wilkinson storyline this time around. And I had forgotten the twist with Kristen Duns and Tom Wilkinson and that really hit me hard upon watching at this time. I also just think that they pull off the dialogue a little bit better than Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet do. 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 director's 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? I generally similar feelings to you. I also saw this back in high school and have seen it multiple times since then.

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.”

Great production design. I do think great performances generally speaking across the board. I agree. I think this is a high point for Kerry 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 as opposed to a fantasy or a projection. And I try to figure out what's the intention. 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. 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. I think the speech patterns are a little wonky, I agree.

Is the word that I think? Big time to eat. 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 gas lit by another character at this time, 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 onto this guy sort of way. That's the only way I can justify it.”

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

Yes, exactly. It's that. Perfect. Yeah. 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. I'm not saying I'm right. I agree with you at 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 of murder 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 on Mon Talk 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. And we are unwilling to take that leaf 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 of the example that came to mind was the fact that in his memories as they're trying to erase them, it's her idea to hide her within the memories. And to me, I thought that was an interesting choice. Right, because she is at that point a figment 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 the episode. But also, as we see an adaptation, Charlie Kaufman is very obsessed with this idea that he can only really understand himself. And there's even that line in adaptation race, as I have no understanding of anything outside my own panic and self-loving. 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 Montag, 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 naval gazing cynicism, I would say.

And so I think that the reason ultimately for me this movie works, and that it did find a lot of successes, 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.

“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, internal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a 2004 romantic dramatic science fiction film directed by Michelle Gondry. It was written by Charlie Kaufman, although a story credit is shared by Kaufman, Gondry and Pierre Bismas. Stars, Jim Carrier's Joel Barrish, Kate Winslet, as Clementine Krasinski, Elijah Wood is OG in cell Patrick. Yeah.

Great. Really fun that he took this role after playing Frodo. He's great. Yeah. Mark Rufflow, as Stan, my sister would like everyone to know, this is, we're close to Mark Rufflow, Peacottonis, according to her.

Tom Wilkinson, as Dr. Mirosek, Kirsten Dunst, as Mary Jane Adams, and David Cross, as Kerry and Rob, and 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 to 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.

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?”

Boy needs girl. A meat cube. A meat cube. It could be boy meets boy. It could be girl meets girl.

Yes, of course. In this case, it is boy meets girl. Our story, Lizzy, begins with a young man desperate to fall in love with a story. So let's go back to 1998. Michelle 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. Our all-screen place, 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 shot a music video for, called Chibomato. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, Lizzy. They are a New York band. Very fun.

“A lot of their songs are references to food.”

They're an interesting group. He 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's bus driver." And he's like, "Okay, the bus driver?" And they say, "Yeah, he's a huge fan of your work."

And he says, "The bus driver's a book, okay?" So he sits down, and this bus driver pesters Gondry was questions about it. And you've seen all of his music videos, and he's asking 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 Michelle 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 Michelle Gondry read the script. Do you know what movie that was, Lizzy? 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, it 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. And people read them.

But they're impossible to make. They're wild and out there. Until Spike Jones comes along. And he falls in love with being John Malkovich. And so does Michelle Gondri.

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 Michelle Gondri?

He is French. That's as far as I go. And tweak. French and tweak.

“It's about what I knew coming into this.”

But he's not like Joel Barish. 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, had this house full of radios. And all these different electronic instruments that he patented, including the clavio lean, which was a monophonic analog keyboard and predecessor to the synthesizer.

And Lizzie John Lennon famously played it on the 1967 Beatles track Baby Your Rich Man. And it's rumored that he played it using an orange. Yeah. Although I like to think it was a Clementine. Now, if he wasn't playing music, Michelle Gondri was taking photos.

He loved taking photos. And he seems to have that 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 wish I was dating her.

She ended up dating my older brother. And quote. So women as a concept? Maybe a little bit of a root there. Sure.

If he wasn't taking photos, he was drawing. He made flip books. As far as dad's super-rate 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.

Climes 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 going to play drums in a band with his friends. It's great. We, as they were called, played pop rock, released a couple albums. But most importantly, Michelle Gondri 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 we, we, 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? Could it be Bjork? Yes. I'm so glad you did the impression. Like the Bjork.

I love Bjork. Yeah. Our currency is rainbows and clouds. There's a, I don't know where that's from. The thing is, everybody always does...

Everyone always does Bjork like this.

But they're forgetting about this. It's kind of Bjork. Yes. Her amazing voice. I know I love her.

I know I love her. Yes. She's got a volcanic voice. She saw his video work. And of course, knew he was the perfect fit for her first music video.

Human behavior. It gets a Grammy nomination. If you guys haven't seen it, it's all of these animals. Some of them are in costume, 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? Yeah, you can. 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, Gondri 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. Protection by Mass of Attack. Sugar water by Chiba Mato. Everlong by the food fighters that someone where Dave Grohl has giant hands.

Yeah. And then my personal favorite around the world by Daphpon. 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 we're 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.

“So I think it's really important for us to understand that Gondri has a very free-wheeling, 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 Gondri 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 going to 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. And then they leave together and it's about the little teeny pocket in the front of Levi's jeans set.

Apparently for decades, people have been putting condoms in, unbeknownst to me. Yeah. It holds the Guinness World record for the most awards won for a television commercial to this day.

And then he also made the spot for Smyrnaugh called Smyrnaugh, which includes a moment that looks like neo dodging bullets in the matrix.

“And in fact, John Gata, the VFX supervisor for the matrix, Scyt Scondry, as an inspiration for bullet time.”

Wow. 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 too jump into feature films unlike a lot of directors. And then one night, he screens the video for Bjorks 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 of all things. It's an adaptation of a 1966 TV series Lizzy. He eventually would make this movie with Seth Rogan in 2011. Right. I'm not sure if you ever saw it.

No, not many did. No. He was hired to rewrite this rich Wilkes version of the script.

“And I believe he worked with Ed Newmire, who had written Robo Cop 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.

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[Music] So he goes out to lunch with his friend, artist Pierre Bismiss. And Bismiss 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.

Wait, sorry, he wants to mail out cards that someone they knew has erased them from their memory. Yes, that has someone they know has erased them from their memory. To learn, as Joel does, that you have been erased.

According to Gondri Bismiss 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, Gondri 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 Gondri 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 like a time skyscraper to represent 158 memories in the same location. It was basically inception meets the climax of interstellar.

Yeah, I'm realizing. Yes, it was also impossible. It was undoable. Gondri 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, by Jones crossover from music videos to movies,

maybe he could save Michelle Gondri too. So, Gondri 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, "I just want to make a movie about nothing."

“That's how it's like, "We're 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. 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 Lizzy, I would like to imagine for these purposes as Ron Livingston from adaptation. Sure.

And Marty Bowen tells them, "Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You've got gold here." But Kaufman wasn't convinced.

He was just a fucked up guy looking for his own piece 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 being 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 really wanted to make any of his wild ideas anyway. 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. And all of a sudden, offers come pouring in, a bidding war breaks out.

According to Variety, it involves as many as nine studios in production houses. And one major studio authorized to bid $500,000, another $750,000. Basically, the ironies 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-cons.

He said that they gave me expectations in life that were never met. You 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 it in your piffinies. They struggle and get frustrated, nothing is resolved.

So, some people really locked in on the sci-fi angle, even though Charlie Kaufman and Michelle 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 Michelle Gondry wanted to make.

And that was Steve Golan, the co-founder and CEO of Propaganda Films. And eventually, anonymous content.

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

I did. Did you ever run into Steve Golan? 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.”

I think he was a very shrewd taste maker, 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 Golan, Charlie Kaufman and Michelle 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 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. It's incredible.

John Qsack 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.

I'm too like a New Jersey turnpike. So, yeah, they start using the portal into Malkovich's mind to, you know, crazy results. Right.

“And to be clear, John Qsack is a depressed puppeteer being a operator.”

And the movie involves a love triangle with Katherine 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. Malkovich, Malkovich.

Which we will not spoil. Well, it's spoiled by the beginning of adaptation, but yes. 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 Golland and producer Yoni Savatsen 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 wasn't an usual 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, Golland saw the opposite. Music videos were filled with imagination and talent,

and these are low risk opportunities to meet and foster people like Spike Jones. And of course, Lizzy, this becomes a pipeline for a lot of new directors. Michael Bay, Antoine Fuqua. As we mentioned, David Fincher, Spike Jones, Michelle Gondri, Francis 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 Golland, but the problem was, propaganda had a parent company, polygram filmed entertainment. And every time Golland brought up being John Malkovich,

she got teased mercilessly.

But he kept pushing, and finally, polygram green lights

the movie under four conditions, and these are the real conditions, Lizzy. Take them seriously. One, it doesn't cost one penny more than is on the control sheet. Two, it does not distract Golland from delivering one big movie for us in 1999. Three, Golland delivers at least one big movie for us in 1999. Four, Golland's penis is on the line in a big way.

when propaganda bought the then unnamed pitch for eternal sunshine for an alleged seven figure sum.

“And it was also reported that Nicholas 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, Lizzy. Charlie Kaufman wasn't really into this relationship. Yeah.

So according to Kaufman, pitching sunshine was very easy and writing it was another problem. So the memory erasing elements going backward forward got very messy very quickly. It was not just that it was going to 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 Market Dave. That's right. So he decided that he needed to tell Golland that they needed to take a break.

He says Michelle, this has been fun.

I need to do the work at the first

and Gollandry 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 to 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.

And Gollandry 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 Gollandry 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, Gollandry has very much on the outs. Bing John Malkovitz is released in December of 1999, and it is a hit.

Yes. Critically, commercially, it is nominated for three Oscars, including Best Screenplay. Gollandry 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 may be stole some of his mojo

with a shot in Bing John Malkovitz. He said, "When he finished Bing John Malkovitz, I met him at the rap party." And he said, "I have to confess I did a little tribute to your smear-off 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 you thought, "You know, he didn't get the chance

to bring that to the big screen first."

Now, Gollandry was the third wheel. And Kaufman had clearly found true love with Jones, right, Lizzy? I mean, Kaufman's. To have him the time of his life.

All relationships must come to an end to Chris. And what Andre didn't know is that Charlie Kaufman was in hell. Yeah, I orchid thief. It turns out was unadaptable.

He couldn't structure it. It was a sprawling New Yorker ship. He has panic attacks. He falls four months behind schedule. And when he finally hands in this script,

he had written himself into it. I've written myself into my screenplay. It's self-adultment. It's narcissistic, solopcystic, it's pathetic. He also wrote in author Susan Orlene.

He gave her a love story with the subject of her book and it engrugs a car chase animator. A multiple murder.

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

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

He was. But Andre 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. Nicholas Cage. That's right. Who maybe would have been the lead of eternal sunshine. And then Lizzy Kaufman took on an even more handsome lover.

Confessions of a dangerous mind with director George Clooney. Mm. 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, Lizzy?”

Memento. That's right. And 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. One sin for all. With the total sunshine of the spotless mind. He calls up Michelle.

Michelle. We got to end this. It's not working. And Michelle says I understand. They tried once.

It hadn't worked. So they called 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. And call. So they said, OK, I guess we'll just keep seeing each other. 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 read years earlier.

from the end of an old 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 record their conversation. And later they tell each other what they remember talking about it dinner. And they listen to the recording and realize that they both remembered it wrong. Well, I love that.

It's really cool. This became like a really big theme in the movie. 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 that doesn't make it into the final film. And it'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.

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 a journal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. We get the title card 50 years earlier.

And we realize that that woman is Mary. Oh, it works for Lakuna. 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. "Select a Key New York," was Philip Seymour Hoffman. So another abandoned book end 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.

And we realize that it's Joel. And that they've been doing this again and again and again. And again. And as she's getting erased, Joel calls and asks her where she is. Where are you Clement?

What are you doing in there? And then the technician erases the message and the movie ends. That's too sad. 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 Lucuna files out instead of Mary. I don't think that would have worked nearly as well. 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 a serum. And then polygram was folded into universal, but polygram sold off the film

division of propaganda to Barry Dillers 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 in December 2002, three drafts in January of 2003, February 2003,

but the writing never really stopped.

And by this point, 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. And quote.

He is trying to kill it so bad he just wants the relationship to end. Oh, man, it seems there was probably an earlier finished draft since actors in 2001 because Nicholas 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 money than Jim Kerry. Yeah.

“Lizzy, any favorite Jim Kerry films, pre eternal sunshine?”

I love the trim and show. It's great. I remember seeing that in theaters and it blowing me away that that was Jim Kerry of, you know, dumb and dumber in 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 dumbers when he's standing at the window crying talking to draft animals and saying, you know, I just, I want to be somebody. I want to help somebody.

But yeah. So actually, honestly, dumb and dumber. It's dumb and dumber. Probably the best one. I agree.

He's incredible. He's amazing in that movie. He is. And that was 1994, which was his hat trick break out 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. Yeah, that was crazy.

In the last 40 years, he was the first comedic actor to get $20 million up front,

which was for the cable guy. And with that film in Ace Ventura too, even though they were pretty much paned 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, Lizzy Jim, carrying unexpectedly wins the Golden Globe for best actor

And then he won the Golden Globe again in 1999. Do you remember which film this was for Lizzy? I wouldn't be me myself in Irene, would it? No, that was 2000 or 2001. It was man on the moon.

Oh, yeah, yeah, of course. Where he plays, Ian Gockman. No relation to Charlie Gaffman. But it is fun that Nicholas Cage and Carrier both played Kaufman's within this time period. Yeah, we may have to cover that movie at some point,

because I heard he was not fun.

“Milo's form and I think lost his mind trying to threaten Carrier on that movie.”

And Jim Carrier is about to lose his mind being directed by Michelle Gondri on this movie. So, he deserves it. How the cringe 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 Carrier 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 Lizzy, Eternal Sunshine is a small movie.

The movie's budget was actually $20 million.

The exact amount that Jim Carrier had been paid for the cable guy. But Eternal Sunshine had an ace up at sleeve. Charlie Kaufman's name on the title page. According to Carrier, 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. 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. Right? So, this is just how well received that movie was.

Now, Gondri was very excited and surprised by Carrier's interest. And one of the reasons that he was surprised is that Carrier was known as this rubber-faced comedic actor, even following something like the Truman Show, that would be an outlier in his filmography. But Gondri really thought Carrier could do it,

because he said, "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 Gondri has said that he saw something else and Carrier that few others did,

and he has over the years. I think in trying to pay Carrier compliments, just said the most amazingly brutal things about him, and I would like to read some quotes. In one interview, he described visiting Carrier on the set of Brousal Mighty.

He said, "It's the exact feeling when you walk into a party and you feel everybody knows each other, but you."

I always saw Jim like that, like he doesn't belong.

In another interview, he described Carrier as normal, and not super handsome. He liked the fact that he didn't have the "coolness" of most Hollywood actors. And he told Jim Carrier to his face, that he used to watch reruns of "In Living Color,"

which Jim Carrier was a cast member of. And at the end, when everybody else was dancing, 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 overall sort of boisterous personality. And I think it's very perceptive,

“because I think that's what Carrier pulls off so well in this movie.”

So, Gondri really wants Carrier. Carrier comes on to the movie, and Gondri is really nervous, that Jim Carrier's going to break up with him. Because his last relationship,

the movie "Human Nature" hadn't gone great, and it's about to be released in the United States, and Gondri's pretty sure it's going to flop.

So, he takes Carrier out to lunch, and he says, "Look,

I used to go out with this movie, it's about to come out, and it's going to say a lot about stuff about me, so I need you to sign this napkin, and say you're not going to quit when it happens."

That dialogue's made up, but according to Jim Carrier, Michelle Gondri really did make him sign an napkin, saying that when "Human Nature" comes out in bombs, he's not going to get him fired. Oh.

Jim Carrier, obviously, didn't seem to Carrier, he did the movie. And Michelle Gondri 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 going to do eternal sunshine. I'm totally chill. I'm totally chill. I'm totally chill. Just reminds me of me and high school,

you know, "Hey, just make it sure. We're going out on Friday, right? I'm a cool guy. I don't care. Whatever."

I'm very relaxed. Yeah.

“He'd basically become Patrick by this point in the movie.”

So yeah. I'm not doing something wrong. I'm like, 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 Lizzy, this is a few years out from Titanic, and she was trying to shed the "classical Kate moniker" that she had dawn for that period of time,

that it was so far removed from the period films that she had done. Right, she had done sense and sensibility. That wasn't early breakout for her Titanic, because another big period film. That's right.

So Gondry had met with several other big names, including we can confirm one owner writer. But Winslet was the only one who dared to give him notes on Kaufman's script. Good for her.

As he put it, quote, "She was the only one not looking 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. Yeah. She also said she was going to be just as big as Jim Carey in the movie.

And since you can't have two Jim Carey's in the movie, he'd have to tone his performance down. Good for you, Kate. I can't. I think she contributed a lot.

Yeah. So the tone and why this movie works. So Gondry had his heart set on Winslet, and then an actress that the studio, eventually focused features liked one and Oscar.

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, one for Monsters Ball, and Jennifer Connelly won for a beautiful mind. Ooh, they're both so not right for this at all. I agree, both great actresses, but not right in my opinion.

My guess is that it would be Connelly that the studio was after, she had had more mainstream success prior to 2002, than Halle Berry. Although of the two of them,

I actually think Halle Berry would have been better, if you had to pick between the two. I agree. I think creatively Berry, even in something like Catwoman,

shows a bit more of the humor needed for this. Yeah, she's a little more fun. But my guess is that Connelly, coming off of Dark City, Requiem for a dream,

Pollock, again, my guess is that if they wanted her before the Oscars, and then the Oscar tipter, it makes a little more sense based on career arc

that it would be Connelly. But yeah, regardless of who it was, Connelly says, if I can't do the movie with Kate Winslet,

I'm not going to do the movie. And so they were lented. And almost immediately after the 2002 Oscars, in April of that year, Michelle Gondry and Charlie Kaufman's

First Relationship, Human Nature, was released. Lizzy, have you ever seen human nature? No.

So it's this very fantastic satire about what it means to be human, explore it in a triptych of characters. You have Patricia Arquette, who's a woman who has hypertrophosis 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 love interest, Tim Robbins, who's a scientist who has grown up with this almost abusive relationship toward manners.

And then you have Reecy Von's character, who plays a boy raised by a man, who believed he was an ape, a fun cameo by Toby Huss. And so Reecy Von's 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”

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. Yes, yeah. But Michelle Gondri was spared director's jail because in mid September of 2002, the trades reported that eternal sunshine

of the spotless mind had been green lit. So Gondri in a scene have six weeks to prep, this included locations getting New York City, not the producer's first choice

for the location of the shoot. They wanted to shoot in Toronto. Gondri said he had already tried to make L.A. work as Washington, D.C. and that didn't work at all.

And so he said, "All 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."

Now, Gondri 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 Gondri himself either knows how to do or has figured out how to do through his music video work. Yeah, the effects in this are wonderful. And you can tell that they're mostly practical. Absolutely.

And so, like an example, Gondri's approach to effects is much more hands-on DIY perhaps unsafe than the typical Hollywood set. One example,

when Joll and Clementine are lying on the frozen lake. I knew this was going to be what you're going to talk about. It's one of my favorite moments in the entire movie. The car passing under dice? Oh, no, sorry.

Okay. Which part of YouTube about when she gets pulled away? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that was actually a problem,

like that stunt, but he wanted to see Joll'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 me, and make a call into the frozen lake. Producer Anthony Braggman 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 Gondri'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 Braggman regularly

just sitting there and laughing at him. Which is, of course, ironic considering how Golan had been laughed at by his superiors at polygram on being John Malkovich,

which they said was a crazy idea. I do want to say like, much is made of Gondri's accent in the discussion of this film by the actors,

and said, "I will refrain from doing any impressions, but my brother-in-law is French." And even he said, "He found Gondri'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 Gondri working with a language barrier, and everybody trying to figure out, you know, to which I say,

"Get a translator." "Yeah." "Let him speak French." "Right."

"This is his first language."

So a lot of what they were also trying to figure out besides what Gondri was saying was how to show Joel's memories being erased

wasn't that specific. So I'm going to read you some examples from the script. Joel Grabser, 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 Mirzack, 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 Michelle Gondri. 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, it actually gives something kind of similar to Rochax mask in Watchmen.

If you remember? Yeah, make sense. Different textured screens placed between the actor and the camera.

Actress faces turning into film negatives. And Gondri starts to really worry that he's overthinking it. He said he was frozen by fear. So we call 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 Gondri consciously or not”

was not going to make the same mistake with the 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 this is if you've seen his music videos, I think if you used that style

and he would eventually do this in science of sleep, I think the tweet would overwhelm the finished product. I agree.

Now, there's some Gondri flourishes. If you remember the argument at the flea market over 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 memories 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 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, Gondri didn't like to call action, so sometimes he just started filming without warning. Now,

there was a method to the madness, quote, you say action and everybody becomes a piece of wood. And when you say cut,

everything becomes fluid in 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 to the scripts,

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 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? She says that they tried a bunch of different things for about a week, and Gondri clearly knew

something was off and decided to ditch it. So, the memories would decay visually and maybe auditory, 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 was 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 Gondri 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 Lizzy, 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. Ruffalo later said,

"I was very excited by what we were doing, but we were shooting 36,000 feet of film a day." Oh, my God. Even by the most excessive standards, this is out of control.

The cameras were rolling nonstop. He'd be standing there just talking, and he'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, Lizzy, in a scene? You can't hide that crew. You can't hide the crew,

and it has to be lit for every possible angle. The cinematographer, Alan Kuros, said that the film was shot entirely handheld, with sled dolly's wheelchair and chariot dolly's no traditional dolly's,

and Gondri 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, and they were just walking around.

And it's like, "No, the shots doesn't look right." And Gondri'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.”

So this is when Joel revisits the memory of going to Lakuna. It looks like it's at night, right? It's very dark. Yeah. He goes into Howard's office. He demands that he erased Clementine,

There's the reel or the present Joel, and the memory or the past Joel.

And so this was shot some time at the end of the first or second week.

And Chris said that they didn't want to depart from the films look too much, but they wanted to capture the feeling that they were in "the tunnel of the mind." And that's when Gondri has an idea.

It's the scene from a French film called Le Bouchet, 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. It's 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 Gondri decided to shoot it as a oneer.

“Now, Lizzie, can you describe a oneer briefly for our audience?”

Sure. A oneer 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 Oneer. That is all a oneer about capturing a oneer.

An evidently about a oneer ruined by the studio head. Yes.

It's a really wonderful episode of television.

Yeah, it's actually a great explanation of the production of something like this. Yeah. 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 Gondri argued about it on set for a good 15 minutes.

And it seems like maybe Gondri was on the precipice of losing Kerry and his crew's face. Kerry kept telling Gondri, 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 Breggman laughing at Gondri's accent, or strangers asking him why Spike Jones wasn't directing his movie,

and so Gondri's six to his guns, and he says, "How do you know if you don't try?" 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. Gondri later said that was sort of a miracle.

“I think at this moment, I 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 Kerry 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. Of course, Zee, memory is unreliable. And relationships are not really that smooth. In actuality, according to Gondri, at one point Jim Kerry marched up to him

and said that he'd never seen such a disorganized shoot.

And that was intentional. Gondri 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. (laughs) Things were tense between Gondri and Kerry throughout the shoot.

For starters, Gondri was trying to reign Kerry in while encouraging everybody else to make the performances bigger and looser. Well, Jim Kerry also famously not the easiest man to work with. 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 Gondri.

I had to bring Jim Kerry 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 Winslitt in a different room to tell her, "Colors, because you want this is a comedy."

And then to Jim I'd say, "This is a drama, not a comedy." You know what's very frustrated when we were shooting in. Fun fact, apparently Charlie Kaufman also disagreed with how Gondri made the moments with Stan and Mary partying while Joel is asleep. Oh no, that's like when I fair parts of the entire movie. You have to have that.

“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. 100% 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. There's no real villain at the end of the day, and I think that's what makes it fun.

There are people with bad motivations. Arguably Tom Wilkins. Well, it's pretty evil. He is and actually there's a change that they made to make him less evil. In fact, wow, 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 carried, there was this one line in the script. He didn't understand. And he had such reverence for Kaufman's script. He calls him directly. 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,

He doesn't care about this movie at all. So Jim carried 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, Gondri is purposely trying to keep carry 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 all sounds so stressful. Yes, they would yell at each other.

And this was also in part we must mention because it sounds like Gondri wasn't always putting the safety of his actors first.

And now this is Gondri's quote that I want to read. When Jim carried 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 and quote.

“So to be clear, they hired a, 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. Gondri fired them and then he did this stunt set piece anyway. Mark Rufflow later said that Michelle Gondri called him while he was filming in Montac. 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 Rufflow says, that was awesome. Oh, no. It's such a mixed bag on this movie. So according to Carrie, the worst day was when they filmed Joel and Clementine and Joel's memory of being bathed in the sink. Uh-huh.

So the sink was a hot tub. Winslet felt nauseous and then allegedly fainted. Michelle Gondri wanted to keep shooting and Jim Carrie did not. Carrie got so mad that Gondri allegedly asked him, are you going to punch me in the face? To be clear, Jim Carrie did not. Although there was one quote that said, how did you rap eternal sunshine at the spotless mind and Carrie, I believe jokingly says Michelle and I got into a fist fight on the street.

So I think things were very, very tense. And Gondri was the one behind Clementine punching Joel on the shoulder on the train and his reaction is real. That was not in script. And when it happened, Carrie knew that Gondri had put her up to it. Mm-hmm. It was a relationship. Gone sour.

One of the last times that Carrie yelled at Gondri, according to Gondri, he yelled back at Carrie. 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 Lizzy who had a very effective way of dealing with Michelle Gondri.

“If you had to guess which actor was not going to take any of Gondri's crap, who would you guess?”

It's got to be Kate Winslet. Tom Wilkinson. Oh. Tom Wilkinson said he would do three takes. No more.

And when Gondri would give him direction, he'd look him in the eye and just say, why? Gondri 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 take 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. So Carrie 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. An Anthony Bragman, 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 daily's 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 Bragman, 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 gone. We were shooting. There was so much footage. Yeah.

I mean, that's an overwhelming amount of film. And it could not be organized. Yeah. Bragman thought the footage was 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. So Steve Goll and according to Bragman says, look, I'm going to be honest with you. And Bragman thinks, oh my god, this is where the movie falls apart. And then Goll and says, it's incredible. The scenes are incredible.

They cut together perfectly.

We're making something like we've never seen before.

He had to not see a single scene.

You know what? He's right, though. That's what you got to do. And I'm curious, like, oh my god, I'm so relieved to hear that. It was a lie.

It was not a lie for long. Because they had a savior from Iceland. Editor, Valdus, all scotted soldier, was probably used to unconventional productions. Lizzy, she cut a bunch of dogman-95 films, including the celebration, which we've discussed. Yeah.

She talked about it in our 28 days later episode, as well as Harmony Crimson, Julian Donkeyboy. And she was thrilled with the material. She said, I got everything I needed in more. She was not thrilled to be working with Michelle Gondry. Quote, he is French.

I'm 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 we shall. Good. Valdus, how to believe. If a director's input isn't brilliant, it should be ignored. Gondry didn't love this.

So he told the producers. He said she rolls her eyes at him. And she says, how can you see me roll my eyes? You sit on the couch behind me. Here's later, he said, 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 break up at the time. His girlfriend left him during editing. Oh, no.

Things that seemed cliché to Gondry in the script. You know, Joel put in Clementine's belongings in a garbage bag.

He said this would never happen.

And then it literally happened to him during post. No, no. I just want to say, I think he needed somebody like this editor, though. Cause like, what's your asking? A hundred percent.

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. Cause 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. 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, the incredible composer, is brought in to score the film. And Gondri visits his studio. And in his studio, he discovers this trove of old keyboards, like the one that his grandfather had invented, the clavio lean.

And in fact, his grandfather had had a keyboard shop that his dad took over. And in John Bryan studio, is this ancestor of the synthesizer called the Chilton Talent Maker. It's a keyboard that plays back pre-recorded samples from optical disks made of clear plastic.

Basically, it plays back memories.

It's not unlike the tapes that they use in the film where people record. My name is Clementine Prisonsky and I want to forget Joel Barrish. It's this imperfect, crackling, unsteady sound. It sounds like an old phonograph. And Gondri 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 a turtle sunshine is actually the Chilton Talent Maker layered. And I'd like to play you Lizzy a couple of layers of how this score comes together to form the textures of a memory. So that's layer one. Here's layer two. And here they are combined.

Yeah, it's beautiful. One of my favorite pieces of music that specifically phone call from the score, if you guys want to look it up. It's beautiful and it's interesting that it's called phone call because it actually reminds me of the scene in adaptation where Marryl Streep has Chris Cooper help her create the sound of a dial tone. 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 Ryan's score. And I recommend that you all go check out that blog post. It's really interesting. That's really cool. So Lizzy, 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. We're ready. And then they just took more time after the release date pushed because they had more time.

Hmm, it seems that it's more likely was the upcoming release of paycheck.

“Did you ever see the Ben Affleck action thriller paycheck with Uma Thurman?”

You know, I think I did. 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 Lou directed Erin Eckhart. It's a Philip Dick adaptation.

It's in the realm of something like total recall. I don't recommend it.

But it featured memory erasing head gear that looked a little similar. That's right.

“Even in the trailer to a certain sunshine.”

So whatever it is, you know, whatever the reason be it a strategy around art, how releasing or wanting to distance themselves from Ben Affleck. The studio pushes the release and let's talk about the studios 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?

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. 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.

Oh. So Lizzie Naomi, who was barely mentioned in the finished film, was once a fully realized witness character in the script and early cuts. Her scenes were completely removed in Juneau who played her. 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. It was Ellen Pompeo. Oh, wow. 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 Kerry 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.

I don't think you need her.

“I think it actually does something more effective by not ever seeing her.”

Well Jim Kerry actually I think was relieved. He said that he was hurt that God had cast her because she looked like his ex girlfriend Renee Zellwecker. 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 in fidelity in any way.

And I know relationships are messy and they wear one ends and one begins as difficult to parse sometimes. But I think that's something that American audiences really struggle with. In my own experience we had a version of Moonshot where the two main characters kiss at the midpoint of the movie. One of them is technically still in a relationship. I could not believe how negatively the audience rated her character, not his after that.

And so I wonder if it was like, oh, then Clementine is a home record 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 Lizzy. What? He was going to be one of Joel's neighbors. Put those back in.

I think he was just like, oh, it's like, oh, there's Tracy Morgan. Joel's just neighbors with Tracy Morgan. He's just himself. No, it would be insane. 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.

“I was going to, yeah, that's what I figured when he said that.”

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.

Yeah. This was originally written for the end of the movie. But on the one hand, it's a laid 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 Lizzy 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. Yeah.

And then to love her by the end, I just think that's so hard to pull off even for an actress's talented as Kate Winslay. It has nothing to do with Kate Winslay. 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.

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 and Christopher Nolan talked about how people distrust Teddy when they first meet him

and they never let go of that.

Yeah. 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 Godry accomplished with the movie. What Kaufman was trying to accomplish with Clementine. So it turned on Sunshine of the Spotless Mind releases on March 19th, 2004,

and I'd like to read a section of Kenneth Turen'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 Gondri Human Nature,

a film that attempted to make virtues of excessive cuteness and plainful artificiality. He goes on to say that he didn't think Gondri could pull off a movie with emotional depths, but he was wrong.

maybe even a lot of them. I noticed glibness, 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 a motion, honestly, and unapologetically displayed.”

Not only to spotless mind's story illustrate true feelings overcoming hilarious obstacles, but the way it's techniques work on our psyche's follows the same trajectory. Thanks a great review. Yeah. Many critics walked into Eternal Sunshine with the opinion that Michelle Gondri was horrible,

and most, though not all, were slowly one over. Roger Ebert gave it four and a half stars, and we cannot understate the importance of Gondri's actors, everything that Winslet brought, not just to the character, but to the script, and Kerry in particular was called out as being as genuinely natural as he's ever been.

Human Nature brought in a million dollars at the box office,

being John Malkovich made 23 adaptation made 32. And despite the fact that it's trailer made the movie seem like an upbeat comedy, which it was not. The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind made $34 million at the domestic box office alone.

Wow. It ended its run north of $73 million worldwide against its 20 million dollar budget. Charlie Kaufman, Michelle Gondri, and Pierre Bismuth won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It is Kaufman's first and only win to date, as you mentioned Lizzy, he had been nominated for being John Malkovich and adaptation bull.

Kate Winslet was nominated for Best Actress, but she lost Hillary Swank, a million dollar baby, Jim Kerry was not nominated, and Nor was John Bryant for Original Score, which is crazy. The other nominees were finding Neverland, which won, Harry Potter and the President of Ascaban.

Let me think it's a series of unfortunate events, starring Jim Kerry, 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, Michelle Gondri 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 Sinect Kinyork, which was a commercial misfire. We'll uncover it, it got mixed reviews, but it's been re-valuated by many as a masterpiece. Michelle Gondri wanted to write, and he did, with the science of sleep, a modest financial success that pailed in comparison to Eternal Sunshine.

And Gondri was asked in 2007, if he was going to collaborate with Kaufman, and he said, "I would like to, but 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. Yeah. He said that he and Kaufman and the other producers spent a lot of time to reign in Michelle's creativity. Said he's brilliant, he has a hundred billion 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 Michelle was coming out of a bad relationship.

Right.

Human nature flopped, they could always tell him, "Listen, your last movie wasn't a success."

So stopping so confident that you're always right. And at just to end it, it reminds me of that cliché. 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 with a memories or too painful. And that brings us to the end of our coverage of Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind.

That was great, Chris. So Lizzy, I have to ask you, what went right? 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 exercise,

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. And it's too bad because I do think I'm not a huge fan of his other work. I'm not either. But I am of this. This is an outlier for me.

Yeah, and I think it's because he was forced to temper the tweenus. 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. 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 Jones and Michelle Gondry. Yes. And Kaufman's work on his own, although I think it's intellectually brilliant, leaves me a bit emotionally wanting.

Works more as, again, an intellectual exercise than it does as an emotional journey for me.

Yeah. And yeah, we discussed a little bit when we were talking about Bob Evans and Francis Fort Copla. 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. Yeah.

I would like to give my what went right to John Bryan.

“This score, I think, is incredibly influential.”

John Bryan, as since, of course, become an enormous composer. But I think that this 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 memory sort of disappearing.

Yeah. It almost acts as sound design because a lot of it is time to match all of the disappearing elements on screen. So mine goes to John Bryan. I stand behind that. Okay.

Before we go, I will share my, possibly true very much apocryphal story of Jim Carrey and Michelle Gundry on the set of Eternal Sunshine. I just told the story by another crew member 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 Gundry and it 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 gift. And in a movie he was in to help him dial in his performance.

“And this I think would make sense, especially on a bigger performance like the Grinch, you know, for example.”

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 Gundry was filming 24/7, you can't do that. So Carrey agrees he's not going to have this in his contract. One day they're filming out at the platform when he decides to go to Mon Talk at the beginning of the movie and he kind of will I go to work? Well, 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 Gundry's ready to move on. And Mr. Carrey says to him, "You know, hey, can I just do one more?" And you know, he's like, "No, no, no, it's time to move on. We're going to take excuse me. Let me just do one more. Just one for me." So they decide, "Okay, you can do one more."

And again, according to Gundry, 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 Carrey does a big Charlie Chaplin performance where he runs up the stairs down. And 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 studio style performance.”

And he gets done and everybody cheers and Michelle Gundry says, "Okay, let's move on." And Carrey says, "Can I watch the playback?" And Gundry says, "No, no, no, we don't have time."

He's like, "I know you're never going to use this, so I'm never going to see it."

"Could I just see the playback?" And Gundry 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, Carrey 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 Gundry rolled on everything in this movie. And so I very much think you'd probably if Carrey had asked him would have rolled on this too. But that is my Gundry carry 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?

Of course, you can always tell a friend or family member that you like what went wrong.

Make them listen to it. Sit 'em down and out eight hour car ride and just put on. I don't know five of our episodes during that time frame probably. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcast 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 their reviews, although we're entering Oscar season. So there will be some special Oscars episodes. That's right.

And this Friday, we're coming at you with a review of Emerald Finals. Wuthering Heights. Let's see what all the fuss is about. Or you can, of course, head over to our Patreon, where for five dollars. You get access to everything.

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 fifty dollars on Patreon, you get all of those things and a shout out just like this. In honor of Eternal Sunshine, I thought this week, the shoutouts could be handled by somebody who I hope

will never choose to forget me.

Mary Pohe, she was. There was no spirit for I can stand. And you'll need one for me to cook and then down for me. This one's hard. Jose, Emilano, Salto, Dale, George, Joe.

Do you want to just do Jose? Jose. Jose, Nathan, Sanctenal, Joey, help, paper. Felicia, Gee, dear. Scott, Ashima, Karina, Kenaba, James McEvoy,

Kairman Smith, Susie, George, and Josie move. Definitely, we're filming.

“Kairina, we're going to help broken glass kids.”

David, Frisco, Empty. They'll make yourself. Chris, soccer. Cake, Empty. Empty.

Seagrace, be. Place, arms. Roll, roll. Beat them nice. Let it all, Jay.

Half-grey, held. Brit me more, yes.

Dale, and Dale, concrete.

Matthew, Jay, tested. Grace, Potter. Ellen, simple, ten. Jay, Jay, happy, tell. Matthew, fairy, fairy, fairy, just fairy.

It's flying, darling, here. Adrian, Pam. I have a bride at my school in it. Coach, Brian. Coach, Brian, maybe this is the same one.

Adrian, Pigs, Korea. Chris, Leo. Kathleen, Jose. Brooke. Steven, open.

Yeah. Steven, tip out. Darwin, tribal. That's ganking.

Can you say that Rosemary, Southward?

Jameson, Franco. So much, hey, Johnny. Michael, grass. Lydia, Southward. Fogray, hard.

Mark, Potter. Amy, Goldish, now, gave a call. Good job, Nora. Goodbye. All right, Lizzie.

Thank you so much for joining me today in a journey into the memories of Michelle Gondri, 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? A league of extraordinary gentlemen. I believe it's the final live action appearance of Sean Connery in a film.

So boy, it is a movie, and it's quite a duty of a story. Pretty fun. 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. I wanted to go back to a real, a real stanker, a true big time flopper, and we're going to get it.

Well, you know, Electra, Daredevil, we'll hit them all. Yeah. Yeah. All right, guys, go rent a league of extraordinary gentlemen. And we'll go watch the movie that made Sean Connery say, "I'm out."

Yep. That's you guys later. All right, see you next week. Bye. Post production and music by David Bowman.

This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.