ARCHIVE
Q&A: DAFT PUNK
(EXCERPT)
SS: Next, you guys decided to make all the videos yourselves for Human After All. Supposedly, Thomas learned how to shoot film by reading back issues of American Cinematographer. Is this true?
GH: Yeah, exactly. We shot three or four videos almost in a row in the year before Electroma. It was good training.
SS: Who did what on the set, or did your responsibilities blur?
GH: It’s like how we do our music: a discussion. Before we do anything, we talk and get on the same page. If we have comments for the actors, we talk about it before, together. Thomas is usually the technician, the general. Me, I try to have the bigger picture of what’s happening. We’ve known each other since we were 12, and we agree on most everything; we don’t have to talk too much when the vibe is there.
SS: In Electroma, were you consciously playing with the Daft Punk mythology?
TB: Electroma’s story is very close to us and the characters that we’ve built around this micro-myth. We like the idea of combining clinical science fiction with very warm Americana, clashing technology with nature and the environment.
GH: There are two robots in the desert on a journey: They don’t speak, they don’t have facial expressions, yet you get emotion out of them. There’s a big space for using your imagination and projecting your own ideas on the movie. It’s unclear what it’s about — people all have their own interpretation.
SS: From the Westerns to Easy Rider, the American desert has served as cinema’s iconic landscape. With Electroma, I feel like Daft Punk “samples” and transforms this tradition.
GH: It’s obvious Easy Rider is one of our favorite movies, and it’s about these two guys who are some kind of brothers who go on the road together on a journey. It’s one of the movies that, as kids, we watched together the most.
SS: What’s interesting about Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point is that they feature a distinctly foreign view of America. Easy Rider’s cinematographer was Hungarian-born László Kovács; Antonioni, of course, came from Italy. What statement is Electroma making about America?
GH: We grew up more with America than Americans grew up with France. It’s really part of what we are.
TB: Rather than using the American island state as a backdrop, there’s a slight offset, like in Planet of the Apes or a Twilight Zone episode. There’s a very strong sense of nature and cliché in Southern California, because Hollywood is where people began to make movies.
GH: Electroma was inspired by California in a way. To me, the nature in the movie is even more important than the characters or the story.
SS: Had you spent much time in the American desert before?
GH: Not really. It was the first time I was in a desert like that — short and flat, like a dry lake. It was really inspiring and calming. In such big empty spaces, you can truly feel alone. We shot in all these small cities along the way, which affected the movie, too. We had never been to those places before, and we saw that people aren’t the same everywhere.
To read the complete Stop Smiling Interview with Daft Punk, purchase the Expat Issue here
Click here to purchase Electroma on DVD