Currently slaughtering festivals all over the world with their amazing robot revue, French dance titans Daft Punk are about to release their first feature film, Electroma, next month. We won't mention the fact that it's an hour of no dialogue, because that might put you off seeing it. We will say that it's a surreal space odyssey in which the robots try to become human. They almost never do interviews but we managed to sit down with Daft Punk to find out more about the movie…Vice: You've had the robots for a while and have done on all your own music videos. Why bother to do a real deal movie?
Thomas: When we started to work on our first music videos with directors like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Roman Coppola, we were always interested in a hands on approach to the process. On the last album's videos I began directing single scenes myself. When that was done, we started to think it was a good moment to experiment with film, in much the same way as we approached music in the years before, in a very free way, not caring about any rules or what already existed, just having fun creating something in a way that hadn't been done before. There are, of course, influences. We are not inventing but approaching things existing already in a way they had not been done before.Now that everyone is ripping you off, does it make creating something original hard?
Yes, not only for the creator, but as a consumer it becomes harder to define yourself by what you like. There is no underground, it has become Catcher In The Rye or A Clockwork Orange for everybody. It is good in terms of cultural awareness but it becomes impossible to use what you know as a cultural marker.There is no dialogue. What's the deal with that?
We were more concerned with imagery than plot and heavily influenced by Surrealism – Magritte for the cinematography and his very physical subjects and Escher, you know, all black and white staircases looping into labyrinths. When we started taking images out of our heads we weren't worried about arranging logical connections between them.But this isn't video art, it's a movie, right?
Video art is the same all the time because audiences do not know how to receive it. Film is the same all the time, because audiences don't understand what is possible. Both are slaves to the economy and industry which produce them. But, of the two evils, we were more interested in the thrill of going to an old, dark movie theatre to see a cult film at its only midnight showing.Interesting. Why not give it an original score?
The retro-futurism aspect: we felt our music would betray us. We wanted Electroma to be impossible to date. You can date almost any movie to within 5-10 years of its making so, without it being the ultimate purpose, we liked the idea of really shuffling that round, which is as much to do with style as technology or technique. This is also why we shot in California, we wanted the two extremes of this very cult Hollywood imagery, combining the warmth of Easy Rider to the coldness of 2001…. When you make all these things collide you end up with something people can't conceive.* Electroma is released nationwide in selected cinemas at the end of July and released on DVD on September 3.DOM TUNON
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Thomas: When we started to work on our first music videos with directors like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Roman Coppola, we were always interested in a hands on approach to the process. On the last album's videos I began directing single scenes myself. When that was done, we started to think it was a good moment to experiment with film, in much the same way as we approached music in the years before, in a very free way, not caring about any rules or what already existed, just having fun creating something in a way that hadn't been done before. There are, of course, influences. We are not inventing but approaching things existing already in a way they had not been done before.Now that everyone is ripping you off, does it make creating something original hard?
Yes, not only for the creator, but as a consumer it becomes harder to define yourself by what you like. There is no underground, it has become Catcher In The Rye or A Clockwork Orange for everybody. It is good in terms of cultural awareness but it becomes impossible to use what you know as a cultural marker.There is no dialogue. What's the deal with that?
We were more concerned with imagery than plot and heavily influenced by Surrealism – Magritte for the cinematography and his very physical subjects and Escher, you know, all black and white staircases looping into labyrinths. When we started taking images out of our heads we weren't worried about arranging logical connections between them.But this isn't video art, it's a movie, right?
Video art is the same all the time because audiences do not know how to receive it. Film is the same all the time, because audiences don't understand what is possible. Both are slaves to the economy and industry which produce them. But, of the two evils, we were more interested in the thrill of going to an old, dark movie theatre to see a cult film at its only midnight showing.Interesting. Why not give it an original score?
The retro-futurism aspect: we felt our music would betray us. We wanted Electroma to be impossible to date. You can date almost any movie to within 5-10 years of its making so, without it being the ultimate purpose, we liked the idea of really shuffling that round, which is as much to do with style as technology or technique. This is also why we shot in California, we wanted the two extremes of this very cult Hollywood imagery, combining the warmth of Easy Rider to the coldness of 2001…. When you make all these things collide you end up with something people can't conceive.* Electroma is released nationwide in selected cinemas at the end of July and released on DVD on September 3.DOM TUNON