Michel Gondry Looks Back at 'The Green Hornet' and Forward to 'Microbe and Gasoline'

Michel Gondry directs Seth Rogen on the set of ‘The Green Hornet’ (Photo: Everett)

Earlier this year, Marvel’s “merc with a mouth,” Deadpool, made hundreds of millions of dollars (not to mention our Best of the Year So Far list) by merrily shattering the conventional rules of superhero movies. If you rewind the clock five years, you might recall that French filmmaker Michel Gondry attempted a similarly heroic feet with The Green Hornet, the Seth Rogen star vehicle based on the emerald-suited crimefighter whose origin story dates back to the 1930s. At the time, landing that high-profile gig was a major coup for the director, who rose to prominence through acclaimed art-house fare like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Gondry sought to retain his distinctive voice amidst the demands of helming a studio blockbuster. Updating the character to the present day, he invested the narrative’s ordinary “a superhero is born” proceedings with some of the same self-aware humor and stylistic flourishes (like slo-mo enhanced Kato-vision, named after the Hornet’s sidekick, played by Taiwanese superstar, Jay Chou) that marked his earlier work, and would one day give Deadpool its cool factor.

Unfortunately for Gondry, The Green Hornet didn’t come close to equaling the amount of — well, green — that Ryan Reynolds’ merc has raked in. Released in early January 2011, the film eked out $98 million domestically on a reported $120 million budget. Critics resoundingly disliked The Green Hornet as well, some of whom would go on to give Deadpool positive reviews. Even Gondry’s leading man has publicly dissed the movie. In a 2013 interview with comedian/podcaster Marc Maron, Rogen said of his Green Hornet experience: “While we were making it, it was a f–king nightmare. And [Michel] Gondry, the director, is wonderful at smaller scale stuff but I think he did not mesh well with [a blockbuster film].”

Speaking with Yahoo Movies recently, Gondry reflected on the five-year anniversary of his big superhero gamble. “We played with the genre, and not everyone was happy about it,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Mainly I wish I had been able to use more of my imagination [in that movie]. But maybe it would have been worse! I don’t regret it; it was a great experience and we worked hard. I knew what I was getting into when I chose to do the movie.” Asked if he thinks The Green Hornet might have enjoyed a more welcome reception had it been released in the wake of Deadpool, Gondry shrugs. “Maybe — we’ll never know!”

In the five years since The Green Hornet, Gondry has returned to the “smaller scale stuff” that initially made him a critical darling. In 2012, he directed The We and the I, an underappreciated slice of New York life that takes place entirely on a Bronx bus transporting rowdy high school kids home after the bell rings. The moody romance Mood Indigo followed in 2013, though it didn’t reach U.S. shores until the following year in a substantially shortened version. Most recently, he’s been traveling the world with Microbe and Gasoline, a coming-of-age story about the friendship between two pre-teen boys that’s based partly on his own life. “Growing up, I was always friends with the most rejected kid in my class,” he remembers. “They were always more interesting than the other kids.”

The title characters of ‘Microbe and Gasoline’ with their mobile home (Photo: Screen Media)

In the film, which opened in limited release on July 1, newcomer Ange Dargent plays Gondry’s stand-in, Daniel, a quiet dreamer and amateur artist living in the director’s hometown of Versailles. Mostly ignored by his classmates, who have gifted him with the nickname “Microbe” due to his slight build, Daniel quickly gloms on to a transfer student, Theo (Théophile Baquet), whose grease monkey proclivities earn him his own middle school moniker, Gasoline. Working together, they design and build a house on wheels and hit the highways as soon as school lets out for an eventful “kids only” road trip.

The fanciful image of two boys driving around the French countryside in their DIY version of a mobile home came to Gondry, appropriately enough, in a dream. “But I didn’t want to make it look like a dream,” he says, perhaps because that’s territory he previously explored in 2006’s The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal as an artist who has trouble keeping his waking life separate from his dream life. “I wanted this film to look as real as possible, because when you’re in a dream, you believe that it’s reality.”

In general, Microbe and Gasoline is Gondry’s least-stylized narrative feature, instead possessing the naturalism of one of his documentaries like 2005’s Dave Chappelle’s Block Party or 2009’s The Thorn in the Heart. “The style in Microbe and Gasoline is much more invisible,” he admits. “I did shoot with one camera and one lens, so that lends to some stylization. But I felt the story and characters were interesting enough that I wouldn’t have to add any specific aesthetics to it.”

After a pleasantly meandering journey, Microbe and Gasoline drops the central characters off in a surprisingly tragic place. It’s an ending that, in a Hollywood film, would potentially leave the door open for a sequel, but Gondry says he doesn’t have another chapter in mind. “The actors have already changed so much,” he explains, adding that, in real life, Microbe is taller than Gasoline now.

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (Photo: Everett)

Besides, he’s never been the kind of director who makes a point of generating material for sequels and franchises, another reason why The Green Hornet must have been a challenging project for him to take on. For example, when it’s suggested that he and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman reunite for a follow-up to the enduringly popular Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, he just chuckles. “I don’t think that would work. A lot of times people come up to me and say they were in a difficult place in their relationship before they saw Eternal Sunshine, and after they saw it, they re-discovered each other. That’s really nice to hear.”

‘The Work of Michel Gondry’: Watch the trailer: