Top 70 Michel Gondry Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Every great idea is on the verge of being stupid.”

— Michel Gondry

Featured in: Fun Quotes

2. “The problem when you edit a film together, when you shoot a film, you are drawn into the moment. You want each moment to be special and full of life.”

— Michel Gondry

3. “I like the days when all the filmmakers had was a film roll, a camera and a gangster. The Mack Sennett comedies were all like that. They’d create little teams to go out and shoot films.”

— Michel Gondry

4. “And I’m not a micromanagement guy. I prefer to spend my time doing other stuff than that.”

— Michel Gondry

5. “The idea that competition is pointless is really something that speaks to me, especially in America where competition is really prominent and very overwhelming, and it doesn’t bring the best out in you because what’s going to push you is to bring others down.”

— Michel Gondry

6. “I don’t mock things, which makes me more vulnerable to mockery myself. If you’re cynical, you’re protected from mockery. But I have to be nice. I don’t think I have irony. A sense of humour, yes, but not irony.”

— Michel Gondry

7. “In my opinion, it’s more interesting to see magic happening in a world that feels grounded. If the world is already crazy, then anything can happen. So it’s better to start with something real.”

— Michel Gondry

8. “If you take a child from South Africa and you put them in Boston, they’re going to speak with a Boston accent. And so, that’s a way to see the world as everybody is equal, not as a result of politics, but as human beings.”

— Michel Gondry

9. “Misinterpretation leads me to inspiration and creativity because I think my brain is trying to figure out some information that I’m confused about.”

— Michel Gondry

10. “When people are very original, sometimes they are original as a way to resist the mainstream.”

— Michel Gondry

11. “I’m not against the technology at all, I just don’t like to use it if it’s just to mimic what you can do with traditional methods.”

— Michel Gondry

12. “I love 3D a lot, I have a great interest in 3D, so if I am given the tools to do a project with 3D, it’s a dream for me.”

— Michel Gondry

13. “Orange is an underrated color, it’s the second most underrated color after yellow.”

— Michel Gondry

14. “All these gadgets, the phone and the computer, they expose the inside of your brain in a way that’s bad.”

— Michel Gondry

15. “I want to explore new ideas and put myself in a place where I can finish a project that is more unusual or that doesn’t seem doable.”

— Michel Gondry

16. “Perhaps my favourite story is ‘Le Passe-Muraille’ by Marcel Ayme. It’s about a guy who wakes up with a weird faculty that means he can walk through walls. He’s a very shy clerk, and he uses it to get revenge, or vent his frustration.”

— Michel Gondry

17. “I would define myself as being naive and perverse at the same time. And I think that if that is consistent it will make the tone consistent.”

— Michel Gondry

18. “If you’re not grown up enough to understand that a trailer is not done by the director, then fine. Judge the movie from the trailer.”

— Michel Gondry

19. “The first dolly track was somebody who had the idea to put the camera on a boat on a canal. So the boat would move very slowly but steadily. So they would see all that surrounds you and you’d see the landscape changing slowly. So that was the first time.”

— Michel Gondry

20. “I had a lot of encouragement and tolerance from my parents, but I also have many friends who didn’t get that from their parents and in a way they have more strength from spending years where nobody believed in them.”

— Michel Gondry

21. “At school I was very shy. I wasn’t funny really.”

— Michel Gondry

22. “My father had a Super 8 camera when I was a kid and sometimes he would use it. I did some animation with it. I did a lot of flipbooks.”

— Michel Gondry

23. “I don’t like vampire movies or zombie movies. I went to see ‘I Am Legend’ with an ex-girlfriend the other day, and I immediately realised it was a zombie movie! You know what I mean? There are certain rules, and those rules are things that you’ve seen many times.”

— Michel Gondry

24. “I don’t want to compare myself to him – I don’t want people to see me as this great genius – but when I see Charlie Chaplin’s movies there is a combination of drama, naivety and social meaning that I can see in myself, at a different level.”

— Michel Gondry

25. “My goal was to show that even if people work in a garage or a supermarket, they have very funny things to say. We never hear their voices.”

— Michel Gondry

26. “When I saw The Matrix and other movies of this type, I wished I had been given the opportunity to express myself with all this technology and do something sort of big in scale, but the right material never really came my way.”

— Michel Gondry

27. “I don’t like to put people in a competition to defeat the other.”

— Michel Gondry

28. “I’ve dreamed a lot, but i’m not a very good sleeper.”

— Michel Gondry

29. “Michael Jackson will always be my favorite pop musician; he was for years and years until his death, which was horrible to me. So I like pop culture. But to me, even if it’s popular, there is a quality in the music you have to be able to appreciate.”

— Michel Gondry

30. “I learned to drive when I was 35. I’m driving like an old lady and very close to the wheel. I don’t take many risks, and when people yell at me I say ‘sorry, sorry, sorry!’ I don’t have road rage yet.”

— Michel Gondry

31. “I don’t call cut between the takes – it’s my way to help the actor keep focused. As soon as you say ‘cut’ you have 10 people jumping on them and everybody’s trying to do a great job, and they do, but sometimes they forget that the more important thing is the performance, creating the performance.”

— Michel Gondry

32. “There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don’t really understand it until the film is finished.”

— Michel Gondry

33. “I don’t like movies that are too manipulative. A lot of movies thrive on really pushing your buttons and making you hate the villain.”

— Michel Gondry

34. “I think my imagination dictates the technologies I use. But at the same time, my imagination can be technologic. Sometimes I see a tool and I know immediately how to use it, but most of the time I use the tool for an idea I already have.”

— Michel Gondry

35. “Since I was a kid, I’ve liked to see how things are done. Sometimes when you see how things are done, it’s like watching a ‘making of’ within the story. You see the physical aspect, the construction of things.”

— Michel Gondry

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

36. “That’s what the internet is: it’s like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It’s like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square.”

— Michel Gondry

37. “I think the purpose of test screenings is different for the studio and for the filmmaker. For the studio, I think they want to know whether the film works or not.”

— Michel Gondry

38. “When I shoot actors, I have that dilemma. I want the actor to be good, and sometimes I have to push them to a place that isn’t pleasant. I always think: ‘Is it worth doing for the sake of the movie?’ But I have to remember the bigger picture.”

— Michel Gondry

39. “It’s very hard to say I’m surrealist. It’s like saying I’m poetic. It’s not something you want necessarily to be aware of.”

— Michel Gondry

40. “The competition is not really friendly or peaceful. It leads to oppression in some ways.”

— Michel Gondry

41. “I’m just saying to everyone. The director does not direct the trailer. It’s an edited version that takes so many moments of the movie, sometimes it’s not even in the movie. The director does the movie. So don’t judge the director based on the trailer. Please.”

— Michel Gondry

42. “Sometimes it’s interesting to see something that you’re not used to seeing, which is the main ingredient of life, and it’s removed from the usual entertainment. I think it’s important to give the opportunity to people to witness the life of somebody who was not public.”

— Michel Gondry

43. “You can’t feel sorry for a scene. If the movie works without the scene, then you don’t need the scene.”

— Michel Gondry

44. “In the ’90s movies were so serious, and so stylistic and slick that I could not identify with them.”

— Michel Gondry

45. “The problem is when you get forced to use ideas that aren’t good. When I can filter the ideas and use the best of them, I am happy to collaborate.”

— Michel Gondry

46. “People who get to express their voice are paid by the people who make profit from it. So they’re going to make you believe you have to spend your money buying these products otherwise you won’t be happy. This is really wrong. Especially the implication it carries.”

— Michel Gondry

47. “I like actors who just are who they are, with a little bit of qualification to adapt to their character. But mostly they just use their own personality to embody the character.”

— Michel Gondry

48. “I don’t thrive on control. I’m not looking for control. I think I get better results when I don’t control things.”

— Michel Gondry

49. “I’m just thinking of 2001, which I think is the most expensive independent film ever made – which is great, someday I hope I will do one. But I know the parameters when I got onto this project – I have to take care of everyone, make sure that they are all on board, and this process interests me.”

— Michel Gondry

50. “Pop music is created by repression – and then the system takes it and makes even more money with it!”

— Michel Gondry