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Q&A: DAFT PUNK
(EXCERPT)
SS: The two films that Electroma most evoked for me were Easy Rider and Zabriskie Point. Both encompass a journey, and Zabriskie Point specifically deals with the desert landscape as visual metaphor.
TB: Zabriskie Point, yes. What was very strong about Antonioni’s work is the void that it captures, the silence. Usually in Antonioni’s films, what’s not there is the story. In Blow-Up, this void is captured and left with the viewer; the audience waits to see it, but that only happens after the film is over. We like to play with old memories and different ideas and influences. Combining them produces something different and surreal, where you can’t really recall where you’ve seen this combination before.
SS: Electroma uses source music as opposed to a traditional score, à la the films of Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen. Why use other artists on the soundtrack as opposed to original Daft Punk music?
GH: It was a really interesting challenge, but ultimately a joy, to do this movie without Daft Punk music. It was cool to do something not linked to our music for the first time, yet have people get it as a Daft Punk work. All the tracks came from our own record collections. As well, Electroma is a combination of all the movies we like, paying a big, almost unconscious homage to them. There are so many different influences: In the end, it becomes such a melting pot of everything that it resembles something else altogether. We love cinema the same way we do music — we’re from a generation that doesn’t segregate. It’s a combination of activism on one hand and politics on the other, trying to break boundaries between genres without being “fusion.” I don’t really like “fusion” in general, but maybe you can like both punk and disco.
SS: On your first album, the track “Teachers” spelled out Daft Punk’s musical heroes — everyone from Dr. Dre and George Clinton to Li’l Louis, Jeff Mills and Kenny Dope. Who are your “teachers” in terms of cinema?
TB: There are so many: Kubrick, David Lynch, Tarkovsky, everyone from Chaplin to David Fincher — all the people who play with the “real.” Buñuel is probably our favorite director in his use of symbolism and how he plays with very strict stereotypes and codes. Did you see his Simon of the Desert? There’s a big column in the desert that the main character stands on for days and days; at the end, he’s in a club in the Sixties and people are dancing. It’s super cool.
SS: I hadn’t thought of Buñuel, but it makes perfect sense. You can certainly see the rigorous, absurdist subversion of, say, Belle de Jour, in Daft Punk.
TB: We like to play with clichés and to destroy or change the parameters. Then things can go wrong and we make a strange turn and go in a new direction.
SS: Were movies almost as important as music to the birth of Daft Punk?
GH: In the early years, much more important. We didn’t do music at first; going to the cinema was what we did. We met at age 12. Every Wednesday when we didn’t have school, we watched movies — science fiction, horror, all the Seventies and Eighties movies. Thomas really liked The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but we both loved Phantom of the Paradise. Every second is good: It combines dark emotion and atmosphere with music and drama. It’s timeless, one of the best movies I know, and the music by Paul Williams is crazy. There are a lot of similarities to Daft Punk: The hero wears a helmet mask and dresses in black leather. Phantom of the Paradise was such a big influence, it built a common ground for what Thomas and I do, as much as the Beatles, the Stones and Led Zeppelin. Then at 15, 16 years old, we began making music together and never stopped.
SS: When Daft Punk started making videos, you worked with groundbreaking directors like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Roman Coppola early in their careers. What did you learn from them?
GH: They encouraged us to do what we wanted. We thought they were doing something new and bringing in really original ideas. After we learned from them, we did a video ourselves [“Fresh,” from the Homework era]. Then we went to Japan to work on Interstella 5555.
SS: What did you learn from making Interstella?
GH: It can be really tiring working in Japan when you have only one translator. [Laughs] In animation, there’s no limit to what you can create, but it takes much more time. It took three years to get the animation right, with 70 people working on it. But working with Leiji Matsumoto was really great.