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[Exclusive] Audrey Tautou On Animating The Final Scenes Of 'Mood Indigo'

Watch a behind-the-scenes featurette where the famed actress explains how director Michel Gondry challenged her to animate their new film's closing moments.

To convince Audrey Tautou to star in Mood Indigo, Michel Gondry's fantastical adaptation of the 1947 French novel Froth on the Daydream, the director (maybe unsurprisingly) sent the actress an animated short. While filming the feature, however, the famed thespian reciprocated and crafted a cartoon herself that ended up filling the film's last scenes.

Her illustrated addition to the movie almost didn't materialize, though. As the final weeks of shooting approached, Tautou still hadn't finished the animation. So when Gondry said he was ready to do it himself, she took that as a challenge and completed the 300-frame scene during "every free moment" she had in her trailer. "He did one for me, and I did one for him," she told VICE in a recent interview.

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In a behind-the-scenes featurette, viewable above, Tautou talked about what it was like to change art forms and test her hands (literally) as she tried to live up to a skill the director is renowned for. "It’s a very smooth animation, very impressive," says Gondry. "I had to push her."

Watch the short documentary above, courtesy of Drafthouse Films, and see some stills from Mood Indigo's ultimate scene, where Tautou's character Chloé creates a comic that a humanoid mouse delivers to a whimsical production house, subsequently creating an animation of the star-crossed protagonists floating away in a magical cloud car.

And for more on Gondry, [revisit our documentary on the director's stop-motion-filled](http://[Video] Michel Gondry Turns Noam Chomsky's Life Into Art) project on Noam Chomsky, Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?

Images and video courtesy of Drafthouse Films. Mood Indigo is now playing in theaters across the US.

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