Who

Gondry is a director known for the dreamlike sensibility he brings to music videos, commercials, and feature films alike. He's probably best known for 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Backstory

Gondry grew up outside of Paris, and started making music videos while drumming in the pop band Oui Oui. After Björk saw Gondry's videos, she commissioned him to work on her song "Human Behaviour" in 1993. The resulting video went on to win major acclaim, and Gondry has been Björk's go-to director ever since. (Some of his other frequent music-video collaborators: Beck, Daft Punk, the White Stripes, and Kylie Minogue.) In 1997, he moved to LA, where he was introduced to reclusive screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. The two partnered to create the 2001 film Human Nature, which bombed at the box office, but their second film, 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, was a critical sensation and won them an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Gondry moved to New York in 2004, and has since directed Dave Chappelle's Block Party, The Science of Sleep with Gael Garcia Bernal, and Be Kind Rewind.

Of note

Gondry is one of the most sought-after music video/commercial directors, mainly because of his mind-bendingly weird concepts. Some of his career highlights include the 1994 Levi's ad "Drugstore," which won countless awards; his use of the "bullet time" film technique for a 1995 Rolling Stones video, which was later made famous in The Matrix; and the famous "Fell In Love With A Girl" video he directed for the White Stripes in 2002, which depicted the band in Legos. Gondry's trademark is his obsession with dreamlike effects, which has led some critics to claim that his storytelling talents don't measure up to his visual ones. His dreaminess most recently graced silver screens in the Jack Black comedy Be Kind Rewind, which he also wrote. In typical Gondry style, it's a quirky/fantastical tale centering on a video store employee who becomes magnetized in a power plant accident and erases all the tapes in his shop.

Personal

After his ex-girlfriend, stylist Karen Baird, broke up with him, Gondry made her a necklace out of his fingernail clippings. In fact, Gondry had a September 2006 show at the Deitch Gallery featuring an entire room devoted to the weird gifts he's made for his previous loves, such as a bra with two different cup sizes, which he fashioned for an ex-girlfriend with asymmetric breasts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gondry is currently single; he has a teenage son, Paul, with whom he lives in a Williamsburg townhouse. Gondry's brother, Oliver, is a special effects artist and frequent collaborator.

True story

In 2006, a widely circulated YouTube video purported to show Gondry solving a Rubik's Cube with his feet. Although the case is not yet closed, a second clip seemed to show that Gondry had filmed the stunt by taking a completed Rubik's Cube, "unsolving" it with his feet, then running the tape backwards to give the impression that he was actually solving it.