We’ve known for over a year that Michel Gondry and his son Paul wanted to work together on an animated film, and that Daniel Clowes would be writing the script. Now that Gondry is taking a few minutes before The Green Hornet to promote his recent collection of music videos on DVD, Coming Soon got a few more details on the project.
Gondry says it is “an animated film that I co-directed with my son, called Megalomania, and it’s being produced by Curious Pictures in New York. Dan Clowes wrote the screenplay and we have Steve Buscemi doing the voice of the main character. I guess I will do that more efficiently after The Green Hornet but they already started to work on it.”
The plot as we know it is mind-bogglingly insane, and unfortunately the Coming Soon interview doesn’t clear up any details. “We’re [Michel and Paul] translating our relationship into a futuristic story with a dictator and a rebel. He’s the dictator in the story and it will be based on his art,” said Gondry last year. “[The movie is] about a dictator who runs a crazy world where hair is the source of energy. The people there are forced to create art, and if the art is too good they are executed. So the dictator there doesn’t want anyone to be better than him so he kills the inmates who make good art. They try to make rubbish art but sometimes the worse it is for them, the better it is for the dictator.”
Paul Gondry’s animation is primitive and crazy; in some ways it’s actually more out there than his father’s work. But he’s not even twenty yet, and a real youthful exuberance comes through in his stuff. Check out one music video below, and be vaguely afraid of what the Gondrys and Clowes might create.