Michel Gondry Talks ‘Maya Give Me a Title’

How do you even categorize the work of Michel Gondry? As the grandson of the inventor of the Clavioline - a precursor to the synthesizer - imagination and innovation are in his blood. And it shows in his creative thinking and decision-making across his highly influential and massive body of work.

His critically acclaimed films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Oscar winning screenplay) and Science of Sleep received much attention for his “outside the box” directing and seemingly magical shots as he empowered his actors to perform with exaggerated props on warped perspective sets, constructing hidey holes to escape in off camera allowing the scenes to remain fluid – keeping us emotionally engaged.

Noting his legacy, he weaves between medium and format, from installation artist and live-action film director (features and shorts) to documentaries, commercials, and episodic TV director (Flight of the Concords, Jimmy Kimmel Live and Showtime’s Kidding, on which he also serves as EP). Gondry is also widely known, celebrated, and sought after by major musicians like The White Stripes, Rolling Stones, Beck, and Björk for his music video-directing prowess; he is legendary for problem solving and exploring original techniques using trick photography, practical and digital effects, and creative editing in every one of his 92 music videos made over the past 37 years.

This is a filmmaker that believes in his audience. He describes his approaches “naïve,” which in his definition means a “lack of information” as he challenges (giving permission to?) the viewer to make up the difference. Gondry provides the exact right amount of visual storytelling in each scene to feel the emotion and point of view of his characters but allows space for us to fill in the gaps as we comprehend ourselves and the world around us.

It is no wonder that Gondry is attracted to the world of animation, where he can design and control details down to the frame and use every element of filmmaking at his disposal to tell stories. Color, sound, design, timing, movement – none of it is taken for granted. In his newest film, Maya Give Me a Title, Gondry uses his creative ingenuity to explore his daughter’s ideas in a curated collection of animated shorts using paper cut-out techniques. Maya screened two weeks ago at Annecy, where Gondry was also presented with an honorary Cristal award.

The project was born out of the pandemic; Gondry wanted to create something close with his daughter Maya, as they were locked down in different countries. In this father/daughter collaboration, as Maya fed Michel titles, he would animate them, imagining how she would handle fantastical situations in a way only a young child could. Segement emerged... from an impossible relationship with an octopus, to an oversized hammer that breaks the world in two, forcing Maya to repair it and regrow people… including her parents. Gondry describes pieces of his film, alluding to another hidden motivation uncovered in this interview: he reminds us we are all broken, complex humans. What appears on the surface as a simple film about the imagination of a child becomes even more meaningful as we learn Gondry attempted to repair his relationships one piece of paper at a time.

Enjoy the trailer:

Gondry was a child of the 60’s who had no devices or screens, allowing him to develop pure imagination that became the superpower we have all benefited from. This film will remind you what it was like to be young, surrounded by crayons, scissors, tape, and a large blank roll of paper, when you saw the world differently, with excitement and limitless possibilities. This is a masterclass in creating something from nothing and telling stories using the power of animation, inviting us to play along.

Here are excerpts from an interview with ASIFA-Hollywood’s Executive Director and Animation professor Aubry Mintz, who sat down with Gondry at the Annecy Animation Festival on June 9, 2025.

AM: I want to talk about your newest film Maya Give Me a Title. I understand you began during the pandemic. It makes it even more special to have created this bond when the world around you was going crazy. It seems like a great way to bypass the heaviness and shift the focus to keep this in a child’s realm. Was it always in your heart to want to work with your child or capture how she thinks?

MG: I did the film before and after the pandemic. It was not my intention to turn it into a professional film. I did another one years ago with my son when he was young – it was during the time of fax machines. I would do a drawing of a scene, then propose 3 or 4 continuations, and he would read the possibles then pick a number and I would draw the new scene. We did this each week for months. He was in Paris, and I was in Los Angeles. I had my son in NY for most of his life but at this time we were in different places. I made this film for Maya.

AM: How involved was Maya throughout the project?

MG: She did the titles, and I did the rest. I wanted to surprise her with an animated film. I had this idea that she would present the titles. The first time her mom shot her with a telephone camera, Maya would say, “For the next project we will have Maya and the Earthquake.” She was three. We decided to continue with the same concepts throughout.

AM: The last scene of the film has a title, “Maya has Found the Solution to the Problem.” Last night in your interview on the Annecy stage, you said in your work you like to “solve problems.” Were you hoping to solve something when starting Maya? 

MG: Yes, that is the work. You keep having problems and you have to solve them. It is complicated to express. I was hoping with this film to show Maya’s mother’s value as a human being. She was reading the text to Maya, like a bedtime story, and I wanted to represent her in a very warm way. You are the first person I will admit this to. It’s a bit useless because it didn’t work out how I thought it would – I was hoping to fix our relationship. That is heavy stuff to admit, and I always knew it at the back of my head, but I never admitted this. I’m not ashamed – I think its noble. The mother is focused on the child and the husband is trying to find his place being a husband, being a father, trying to keep a relationship and be loved. But at the end of the day, I still did this film mostly for Maya.

AM: You really trust your audience. Last night, when talking about your work, you used the word “Naive” and defined it as “lack of information,” allowing the viewer to fill in the details. You talked about Hollywood studios sometimes being difficult. Do you think they are uncomfortable with trusting the audience to fill in those gaps?

MG: Yes, because they want the maximum audience to come see their films. It’s an industry and they need to make money. And also, some of the audience does not like to be presented with something that is not completely finished. They think their money has been stolen - they don’t see the value.

It’s the same how some people see modern art as a swindle. You don’t have everything explained to you – you have to make up the difference in your brain. That is the magic of art or cartoons.

AM: The traditional animation process is the reverse of live-action in that you need to work out most of the story and editing issues upfront in the storyboard and then work out the character performance as you animate. That’s the opposite of live-action, where you film the performance first and make final story decisions in the edit. Does working in animation change your creative process?

MG: When you do a feature film (live-action) you have the script with the character depicted. You don’t want the actor to go all the way to the screenplay because it will be forced and there won’t be too much transformation. But you also don’t want to change the script too much to fit the personality of the actor. So, they have to meet in the middle. That’s a very important part that you don’t have when you do animation because you create the character when you create the story. I fortunately have Maya, and I know how she is, her personality, so I created the story around her. Once you go realistic you are obliged to deliver a minimum. I like films that aren’t perfect, or the acting is a bit bolder and edgy, but people expect a bit more logic.

AM: Should we be telling different stories using animation vs live-action? What separates them?

MG: Sometimes I plug the idea of some cartoons or comic books that I thought would be very funny to make in live-action. They are really accepted in animation but would be more shocking if done in live-action. I find it interesting, but it’s also more dangerous. People could be more offended. Animation is very forgiving and gives you more freedom – in live-action, you have to be more careful.

AM: I had the pleasure of interviewing your writing partner Chalrie Kauffman (Eternal Sunshine) about his animated film, Anomalisa.

MG: Oh, I love that movie

AM: What came out was you could never make that film in live-action. If everyone had the same face people would get pulled out of the film

MG: And the same voice.

AM: Exactly. And because its animation, people can go along with it. Maybe they think it’s a budget issue… using the same puppet. But to your point, the envelope of forgiveness in animation is wider – you can do more that people will accept.

MG: What was great in this film… the animation was used to show something mundane like a person lecturing in a hotel, where everything was boring.

AM: Yes, and they showed it visually from the main characters POV. Animation doesn’t have to be exaggerated. It can be subtle too. I feel like you implore so much animation thinking in your work. In animation we design and control every frame. In your films you use every element of filmmaking to tell the story.

MG: It’s important to keep it fluid. If we have too much control it is hard to keep it alive. So, it’s two different ways of thinking.

AM: There are such wonderful childlike decisions in your film. Like when Maya takes everything she needs for a project from the store because it’s all free because there is no cashier since everyone disappeared after falling into the center of the earth from her hammering a coat rack to the wall. In your films, you are so good at specificity, imagining what characters would do in the exact moment, using all the elements of filmmaking to express this. How do you get yourself into the head of the character so well and exactly portray the feeling in a scene?

MG: I am from the 60’s. We didn’t have too many distractions when we were kids. We didn’t have video games. I used a lot of imagination. My uncle lived in the countryside. He had a big pile of wood, so I created a city with it. Except for LEGO, which we had, there was nothing that was finished to play with. You had to use your imagination to create things. We put the sofa upside down and we have a big cow, the stool on its side makes a wheel, shoes become cars – everything can become something else.

So, when I broke the earth in the film, that is how I see the world. I use the transformation I want. The shoes became the car and drives down the road, which is made with scotch tape. The rivers are formed from pipes Maya planted in the ground that she took from the store. It all started with a hammer that grows larger with each hit. I like this kind of fairy tale that grows.

AM: I love that you created something out of nothing because that’s what you had as a child. And that’s the key, finding a way to keep creative even when you become an adult, which is so hard to do. Life gives you hammers from all sides, and it is so hard to keep that innocence alive as you grow older. Most people lose that ability to see as they did when they were a child.

MG: I know because we have to make a living, find a job and go to school. School can sometimes take away your imagination. There is so much competition and focus on the results of test scores. My girlfriend has a son who is very creative and wrote a great poem. His teacher re-wrote one of his lines. I couldn’t believe it. She could not just appreciate it for what it was – it was special. It’s hard to be a teacher but it’s very important to try and keep the imagination going. If you are more imaginative you have ideas and are inventive.

You can also get slammed down in the context of your job. People don’t always like new ideas – if it hasn’t been done before they question, “Is this going to work”? I have to fight a lot with that in my job. When you show people there is a new way to do things, they question themselves too much, so they won’t accept it. They would have to realize they spent their life doing something that could have been completely different.

AM: And they don’t want to change.

MG: Exactly. It is important for me, and this is why I made this cartoon. I decided to put these shorts into a movie so people can realize they can be playful.

Filmmaker Aubry Mintz is Executive Director, ASIFA-Hollywood and an animation professor at CSULB.