Who you gonna believe? You, or your lying eyes?

David Colman's superb March 2, 2008 New York Times story/interview with French-born movie director Michel Gondry (above) goes into my permanent file, it's so thought-provoking.

The piece follows.

Does the Eye of the Artist Ever Wink?

We like to think that between the outside and inside worlds, there is a simple, impartial one-way window called the eye.

But a simple demonstration will show you — there is a good one at blindspottest.com — that our brains and eyes have a penchant for modifying reality to fit our preconceptions of it. Yes, there is a camera lens attached to the optic nerve, but there’s a projector whirring away in there as well.

Most of us discount this fact, preferring to see ourselves as totally objective. (Ahem: see “projection.”) But some people take a more imaginative view. Michel Gondry, the French-born director whose latest film, “Be Kind Rewind,” is about a pair of filmmakers remaking Hollywood classics on a 99-cent-store budget, has his own idea what “visionary” means.

Every day, Mr. Gondry, a charming mix of amateur and auteur, tries to see something as something else. It is a defiantly unrealistic exercise very much in keeping with the childlike romanticism that has defined his work, which includes Levi’s commercials, art exhibitions, YouTube shorts and Bjork videos, as well as films.

“I look at something, and then I scroll through the shapes in my mind until I imagine what it could be,” he explained. “Your brain is very creative. It makes up all sorts of meanings and shapes. We build up our reality from very little information.”

This process even includes a delete button. A nearly dead plant in Mr. Gondry’s East Village apartment resembles, sadly, just that. “I just don’t see it,” he said, looking at it.

In other words, he sees what he chooses, whether it is a conscious choice or an unconscious one, as illustrated by a curious memento. On a flight from Paris to New York a year ago, he was served a piece of bread [below].



And while it was most certainly the end of a baguette, he could see only one thing: the breast of his former girlfriend.

This is the same former girlfriend around whom, in 2006, Mr. Gondry had constructed an art show of relationship souvenirs at Deitch Projects, where his current show, a make-your-own-movie companion piece to “Be Kind Rewind,” is up. (You might think the affair was also an inspiration for his film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which won an Oscar for its screenplay, but Mr. Gondry said no.)

“I noticed that it had an unusual shape, and I started to eat it,” he said of the piece of bread. “And then it reminded me of her.”

So he took it home safe, and has kept it ever since, on a shelf.

“It’s a piece of bread,” he said. “I’m not going to cry over it. But there’s some sadness. It was a breakup that was never really explained. There wasn’t an argument.”

He does not really fetishize it, he said. But he can’t throw it out, either. Besides being an absurd yet tragic memento of his doomed flight on Air Love, it is also the most pure realization of Mr. Gondry’s double-duty approach to reality.

“Everything has the possibility to have a different use,” he said, adding that this principle guided the art direction of “Be Kind Rewind.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “when you’re forced to make things from scratch, you recycle. Like the famous Picasso bull made out of a bicycle seat.” And as this tale suggests, if you are short a movie projector, just use your eyes. Be assured, you will see what you want.