Michel Gondry stars in a Time Out movie

Inspired by ’Be Kind Rewind‘, Ben Walters heads to a New York gallery and persuades Michel Gondry to star in a movie made in a day

One recent Saturday, I joined a dozen young New Yorkers at the Deitch Projects gallery in Manhattan’s SoHo. Before long, we were deep in conversation. ‘Navel-trafficking would seem to be necessarily post-apocalyptic,’ mused Aaron, who wore white golf shoes, a burgundy corduroy jacket, black, thick-framed glasses and a bushy beard. ‘Yeah,’ agreed Camilla. ‘We don’t need to spell out the whole thing.’ ‘What about the cyborgs?’ asked Pablo, a Frenchman in a coloured, hooped jersey. ‘Are we still having cyborgs?’

For most of this month, Deitch has been transformed into a miniature movie studio, in which visitors can take a story from pitch to premiere in four hours. (A script meeting like the one above is the first step.) Created by Michel Gondry, the project is called Be Kind Rewind, like the fictional VHS rental store that gives his latest feature its name. In Gondry’s film – a delirious tribute to can-doism and the joys of collaboration – the store establishes a roaring trade in zero-budget, home-made (or ‘sweded’) versions of Hollywood titles. With this exhibition, Gondry gives punters the chance to make their own entertainment too.

Deitch’s exterior has been restyled as the rundown façade of Be Kind Rewind; inside, the trappings of its cramped interior open out onto the bright gallery space, which contains a dozen small, generic sets. There’s an office, a bedroom, a woodland clearing; ingenious contraptions of conveyor belts, video screens and toy vehicles allow for simulated exterior shots of moving traffic and trains. Rather than ‘sweding’, the emphasis is on creating new stories. One take is permitted per shot, all editing is done in camera and the result is shown within minutes of wrapping.

On the exhibition’s opening night, as in the film, a queue snaked from the store’s entrance round the block. A couple of weeks later, we had the place more or less to ourselves. Eventually, we settled on a 12-scene outline of our science-fiction thriller, ‘Womb Stone’. In a future in which natural pregnancy is a thing of the past, the possessor of the world’s last navel flees the authorities before learning that his bellybutton contains the power to overcome his foes (cyborgs were ultimately judged superfluous).

We had a few shelves of thrift-store costumes and props at our disposal, along with some extras: Aaron brought a yellow ukulele, which came in handy for the score, while Camilla’s pink-and-green plastic shotgun would arm the detectives on the hero’s trail.

Pete, a lanky, slow-speaking guy with a mop of dark hair and a lime-green polyester leisure suit, was cast as the chief pursuer; Matthew’s bleached mohawk was deemed sufficiently sci-fi to make him the lead. Well, him and his navel: ‘I’d have gone to the gym if I knew my belly would be in a movie…’

The opening sequence featured Pablo as a doctor, examining a couple of patients and then our hero. After his secret is uncovered, Patient Number Three – as he would henceforth be known – flees, and the doctor reports him by phone. He spoke in French, while a hand crept into the bottom of the frame holding a felt-tipped subtitle card: ‘You’ll never guess what I have in my office. A live one!’

As often on set, the learning curve was steep. These few brief scenes took more than an hour, and there was concern over the audio levels. But we found our rhythm and the next sequence – a high-speed pursuit involving a hollowed-out orange 2CV and some dodgy back projection – went smoothly, as did the scene in which Patient Number Three meets a friend who sends him to the guru who can unlock the secrets of his navel.

As that wound up, we spotted a new observer on the edge of the set, snapping away at us and everything else in sight with a small camera: Michel Gondry had arrived, looking chic in a grey herringbone coat and keen to see how his project was doing. Overall, he was satisfied: 25 shorts had been completed, he told us in his chewy accent. Gondry was less interested in the films themselves than the process. ‘I’m happy to see people having fun,’ he said. ‘It’s not about judging the results. We had a guy who came here with a storyboard and I had to tell him, “No.” It’s meant to be spontaneous.’

In that spirit, we thought it rude not to cast him in our next scene, as one half of the unfortunate couple staying in the hero’s apartment when it’s turned over by the cops – my big moment, in a police shirt boasting a cardboard badge. After ensuring the sex of his bedfellow – ‘A man? No, a woman!’ – he agreed. Soon enough, I was barking, ‘Where’s Patient Number Three?’ and Gondry was emerging bedraggled from beneath the blankets to tell the camera, in animated tones, ‘He took a train to see the Placenta!’ (this was the name of the guru). The train journey was not a smooth one: we simulated a crash by shaking the camera and jiggling the toy train on the conveyor belt.

But Patient Number Three reached the Placenta – Aaron, swathed in a rug and adorned with an ornate lampshade – in time to kick some serious ass with his navel.

The premiere followed within minutes, at a seated area in the store zone. As we saw our handiwork for the first time, Gondry stood next to the wall-mounted flat-screen TV, filming our reaction; it’s all about the joys of collaboration, you see. To our surprise, ‘Womb Stone’ hung together pretty well. The sound was fine, the ukulele music worked a treat and Gondry’s close-up was a definite highlight. He seemed pleased as the sheet of paper bearing the credits was hand-rolled on the screen.

‘It’s a good one, guys,’ he smiled. ‘Very good train crash.’

Michel Gondry, Be Kind Rewind is at Deitch Projects in New York until March 22. Read our full review of ‘Be Kind Rewind’.