Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

The art of the DVD extra has not been studied with any degree of seriousness, which is a shame, because when you have Charlie Kaufman, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet on hand, surely this is the time to take risks and be inventive. Sadly, this doesn't happen.

A Look Inside and A Conversation With are conventional Making Of docuettes, complete with talking heads, goof-offs and people being nice about each other. Winslet gushes, "What would I do without my little frog?", referring to French director Michel Gondry, which, taken out of context, might sound racist, or patronising. Of course, you could never accuse Kate of even thinking it; she's such a good sport.

The impression given by all - Jim, Kate, Elijah, Mark, Kirsten, Michel, Tom - is that the experience of shooting Spotless was a crazy, good natured, inventive period of filmmaking. There comes a point in these "say something for the DVD" post-production moments when the soft hand of the PR dept is felt gently guiding the way.

A Conversation With is better, because it allows Carrey to indulge his child-like qualities, and if you are a fan, like me, that's all you need. Gondry doesn't say much, which is surprising, because in the audio commentary he never stops.

Deleted Scenes are minimal. There's a love/sex scene when Kate gets the giggles, which is so spontaneous and unexpected you can't help laughing, and another where Tom Wilkinson, as the doc, listens to Joel talking about Clementine and you are constantly aware of how good Carrey is.

The Light & Day music video is weird. Joel (Jim) walks on the beach and his lips are animated to mime the lyrics of a bland pop song in the way that animals speak on film sometimes. It appears grotesque and quite spooky.

The Lacuna commercial has Wilkinson fronting an advertising for the doc's memory deletion company, which is so well done you wonder whether the filmmakers thought they might use this instead of a trailer.

The big disappointment is the audio commentary, with director Gondry and writer Kaufman. For one thing, Charlie hardly speaks. He's like a shy, unwanted guest, who pipes up occasionally and is ignored.

Gondry, with his annoying accent, dominates. He doesn't have anything interesting to say. It's in-house stuff mostly. Carrey complains that he's stopping him being funny and he tells Winslet to provocate him. They worked on the final scene over and over, discarding chunks of dialogue. In the first meeting-on-the-train, Clementine punches Joel. "That was Kate. It wasn't in the script."Kaufman says that this was originally written as a 20-minute scene. Later, he talks about another sequence that was drastically cut and you can tell by his tone that he's not happy.

The producers wanted to film in Canada, because it's cheaper, but Gondry and Kaufman fought for New York and won. Do you care?

What feels odd is the absence of repartee, as if there isn't, and never was, a collaborative union. It's so not-Charlie.

Harry Angel writes: Inside The Mind of Michel Gondry is an entertaining look into the weird world of the eccentric French director - a "visual genius", according to Kate Winslet. There's a fair amount of backslapping in the early comments from cast and crew, with everyone agreeing with Winslet, but the man himself takes it all with a liberal pinch of salt, declaring in his almost impenetrable French accent that "my trick is that I have no confidence at all. I always assume it will be a disaster."

Despite the self-deprecation, Gondry does appear to have a unique approach to filmmaking. His biggest challenge, he says, was trying to find a way to make the "transitions" work - those moments in the film where Jim Carrey's character, Joel, begins to "lose" his memories of Kate Winslet's Clementine. Gondry preferred to do as much as possible "in camera", coming up with ever more ingenious ways to shoot scenes that other directors would prefer to leave to post-production special effects. We see a scene in which Joel and Clementine are walking down a street and Clementine begins to fade into the background as Joel's memory of her starts to blur. What we, the viewer, don't see is the simplicity of how it's done - as the camera pans out we see two grips holding up a pane of frosted glass that has been strategically placed between Winslet and Carrey.

The Anatomy of a Scene dissects the pivotal scene towards the end of the film when Clementine leaves Joel. It's more testimony to Gondry's inventiveness, but sometimes the Frenchman's eccentricity left everyone else scratching their heads. "The scene was constructed in Michel's head and I don't think any of us totally understood what he was doing," admits producer Anthony Bregman. "I don't even know if he knew," adds co-producer Steve Golin.

The Conversation With Winslet and Gondry is a laid-back chat between the actor and director that offers little in the way of blinding insight but is enjoyable nonetheless, with Kate making fun of Gondry's "Frenglish". It's all good-humoured, though, and Winslet makes no secret of her admiration for the director and her surprise at landing the role in the first place. "It's so far removed from all the period films I've done," she tells him. "Clementine is nothing like any of the characters I've played before, so I almost fainted to think that there was some crazy director who was prepared to take this big old risk on 'classical Kate'".

Gondry looks a tad uncomfortable with the conversation format - it's supposed to be a chill-out on the sofa but he seems unsure whether to talk to Winslet or to the camera - but he does give some insight into his working method, which amounts to having no method at all. "I was not in control of this," he says. "I wanted everyone to be lost."

To which Winslet replies, "Michel, trust me, everyone was as lost, if not more lost, than you."