So we combined takes in the swish-pan, tracked the head from the first take onto Clem in the longer take, and put in a whole CGI background.” In that background, a car crashes behind a fence, unnoticed by Clem. I asked if they had a longer take of Clem walking, and they did – but in that one, she wasn’t turning her head properly. “Nobody could see it,” said Morin, “because it was so fast. The first attempt at the shot bore out Morin’s initial concerns. For a scene in which Joel transports Clem into his childhood memories, production built a forced-perspective kitchen set to render Jim Carrey child-size. “I said: ‘Okay, it’s possible – but this is a swish-pan, and it is going to be so fast, nobody will see it.’ But he wanted to try it so we replaced Clem’s real legs with CGI legs, did 3D tracking and remodeled the sidewalk she was walking on.”ĭetermined to limit the number of visual effects in the film, director Michael Gondry used in-camera trickery wherever possible.
“This was a hand-held, non-effects shot,” said Buzz visual effects supervisor Louis Morin, “but in the scene, Jim Carrey says a line about everything falling apart – and Michel wanted to emphasize that feeling.” To visually support the idea of a world falling apart, Gondry suggested removing one of Clementine’s legs in the scene. In a sequence early in the film, Joel – in his car – follows Clementine as she walks angrily down a sidewalk. The memory abstractions are sometimes blatant, sometimes subtle. Buzz Image Group took on only 16 shots, but each was a critical depiction of Joel’s altered mind as, one by one, his memories of Clementine (Kate Winslet) are deconstructed, abstracted and, finally, erased. That surreal world was the stuff of visual effects, more than 100 realized by Custom Film Effects. Joel’s attempts to interrupt the erasure mid-procedure – all from within his subconscious – set the story in a world that is part reality, part waking dream. In director Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman plumbs a consciousness-bending story about a man, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who attempts to ease the pain of a breakup by undergoing a procedure that will erase all memories of the relationship from his mind. Midway through the procedure, Joel realizes he is making a terrible mistake, and attempts to thwart the erasure by hiding memories of Clem where they cannot be found. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play Joel and Clementine, a couple coming out of a failed relationship, who decide to undergo a questionable medical procedure to erase all memories of each other.