19/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: The French director introduces a new kind of bedtime story in his animated stop-motion delight

(© Dario Caruso/Cineuropa)

Michel Gondry enlists the help of his own daughter in the animated stop-motion delight Maya, Give Me a Title [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Michel Gondry
film profile], a Generation Kplus title at the Berlinale. The rules are simple: Maya gives him a title, and he comes up with the rest of the story – the crazier, the better.

Cineuropa: It’s touching when, at one point, Maya says: “No more.” No more cartoons. And you, as a creator and as a father, wander around offering your stories to other people.
Michel Gondry: It happened exactly like that. It was very temporary, but I realised I was making these videos not only for her, but for me, too. They helped me, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown. We know children need their parents; we don’t really say that parents need their children. But yeah, I felt a void when she said she didn’t want my cartoons any more.

Of course you did – you’ve done it for how long?
We started when she was three years old, so for six years. There is a second movie that’s coming out because we’ve had so many stories. It will be voiced by Blanche Gardin [the first is voiced by Pierre Niney], and they will be different – we made one cartoon with Maya’s school, and everyone had to draw the characters. I even think we could do a third, but we’ll see.

For all these years, it was continuous. When I would send her one video, she’d already give me her title for the next one. Sometimes, it was challenging – like the one with gigantic chips being thrown from the Eiffel Tower into the sea of ketchup – but I always had a clear framework. I never thought they would end up in a feature, though. It was something just for Maya and for her mother. Especially at the beginning, when she still couldn’t read. Later, her mum would still read the text to her. It really was like a bedtime story.

They’re crazy, these tales. There are so many odd elements: horses cut in half, kleptomaniac squirrels, earthquakes...
Those horses come from a storyline we didn’t end up using, about her hair becoming super long. She would say: “Mum, you have to cut my hair.” But in French, “hair” sounds like “horses”: cheveux versus chevaux. Her mother would say: “Why do you want to cut a horse? That’s not very nice.” And you would see the half of the horse running around [laughs].

The process is always the same: you have a tree, and its trunk is the beginning. Then there are all of these branches growing out of it, heading in different directions. You follow them to solve a problem you just created. Generally, there are many, many happy accidents. I never asked Maya to change her title. Also, when I talk to children, I treat them like adults. I have a brain, or creativity, that’s childish – with some added complexity. It was natural to express myself this way. It’s my sense of humour, my personality. If you make a bigger film, you have to compromise sometimes and make it “entertaining”. With Maya, I didn’t have to compromise at all. You just play.

Were you worried that once it became a proper film, something would change? After all, it was something you two shared, a secret language of sorts.
It did occur to me, but then I told Maya these stories were like her toys. She could share them with her friends or with other people. From day one, she was fine with that. She really likes everything that’s going on around the film; she joins me for interviews. She’s not shy, not one bit. It’s funny because I once made T-shirts with some of the characters from my other film, and when I wanted to print them and sell them, she hated it. She was more upset about the T-shirt than this film.

Also, I wanted to preserve these cartoons forever. If, in ten years, she has a girlfriend or a boyfriend, she can show them these films and say I made them for her. She’s the main character. I tried to change it once, and there was a story when her mum goes to Stockholm and we don’t see Maya at all. I wanted to see how she would react. She actually liked it very much.

Do you think you could create other things with Maya, later in life?
I have a son who’s an artist. We wrote a story together, but now I want him to do his own work. I don’t know how creative Maya will be when she grows up, but why not? I’m lucky that I’m doing a job that’s kind of cool for kids or for teenagers. With my son, of course there was a moment when he didn’t want me to wait for him outside the school any more. But overall, I remember his friends coming over and asking me if I’d done music videos for this French band they liked. I didn’t go through that phase when parents go out of fashion. I have never felt outdated, except when Maya said she didn’t want my cartoons any more. That was harsh.