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Through The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind and the forthcoming Master of Space and Time, filmmaker Michel Gondry is examining the process of being creative.

Michel Gondry only recently realized it, but the idea for his latest surreal comedy Be Kind Rewind, new this weekend on DVD, started germinating nearly 30 years ago. The movie takes place just down the highway from Manhattan in Passaic, New Jersey in the here and now as Mos Def and Jack Black turn guerrilla filmmakers in a frantic attempt to replace a video store’s erased tapes with their singular remakes of Hollywood favorites like Ghostbusters and Driving Miss Daisy. But for Gondry the story really begins thousands of miles away and a lifetime ago in France.

It was in 1980 that the Versailles native moved to Paris when he was just 17, to find a city littered with abandoned movie houses. Just like in the United States, the single screen theater gave way to the multiplex in the 1970s. But where most other people would see derelict buildings, the teenager saw possibilities.

“I was thinking that we can recycle one of those theaters and get people together to shoot their own film and they would pay to watch their own films,” Gondry recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew. “With the money they would collect, they would produce their next movie. It would be a completely self-sufficient system that would bypass the [industry]. I just realized that this is what the movie is about, to me.”

On one level, Be Kind Rewind - which made a modest $11.1 million domestically and another $17 million overseas - is a great big valentine to the movies. Gondry jokes that he chose Ghostbusters for one of the remakes in a bid to catch the attention of an ex-girlfriend who loved the 1984 sci-fi comedy.

“I thought maybe if I do this one, maybe she’s going to like me again,” he chuckles, adding that picking which films to remakes was based on their universal popularity. “They are iconic and everybody knows them and they are great movies. I mean, I love RoboCop, for instance.”

The remakes that Def and Black christen “sweded” delight customers who become so enamored with these Hollywood knockoffs that they become active participants in tackling new titles. And that is the filmmaker’s point. To him, Be Kind Rewind is not intended as the typically passive DVD-watching experience. Instead, the film is Gondry’s way of encouraging movie buffs to get off their duffs and pick up a camera.

“It’s more about making movies than watching movies, because the idea is they are making the movies themselves, so uniquely and so cheaply in a way that they become very special,” he avers. “So it’s more of a comment, make your own entertainment, and participate.”

“People tend to gather together to watch these kinds of films,” Gondry notes. “They watch it in a different way because they made it. I think that’s very important to me, the idea that people can reinforce the community by being creative together.”

Even Be Kind Rewind’s low-rent special effects are in service to Gondry’s message. He is not hostile to state-of-the-art effects. He points out that he has been known to use them, especially in his music videos. But both Be Kind Rewind and his last film, The Science of Sleep, are of an entirely different nature, a crafter’s dream in a sense with their emphasis on what magic such household items as paper, scissors, and glue can create.

“I like the idea that you can show people how things are make them think they can do it themselves,” Gondry enthuses. “Of course, heavy technology doesn’t allow that. I have a tendency to like low-key technology better.”

In a way, this do-it-yourself movie magic harks back to the 45-year-old’s first adventures in “filmmaking” when he was 12 or 13-years-old and he and his cousin would experiment with animation on flipbooks they constructed out of cash register rolls. It is another example he uses as he tries to demonstrate that a creative life is within everyone’s grasp.

Even the decision to weave the life of jazz great Fats Waller into Be Kind Rewind’s narrative is part of Gondry’s DIY message. A longtime fan, Gondry sees parallels between the straits the fictional video store and the surrounding impoverished community find themselves in and the desperate circumstances that Waller and his cohorts faced in the 1920s and ’30s, when people would throw rent parties to try to make it through another month. The parties were also contests of sorts as Waller and his fellow musicians would compete against one another there.

“I really liked this idea of how through difficulties, you bring the community together and you yourself develop your art,” Gondry says. “Those pianists became so good, because of the competition. It wasn’t like you do something and you become a star, because it plays on MTV. You have to be the best of the best to have any recognition in this music. I respect that.”

Currently, Gondry is collaborating on an animated project with his 16-year-old son Paul (Master of Space and Time). “He’s very unique and very funny and very violent in his drawing and his art, and everything that you think I should have stopped him from being in contact with, but I failed,” laughs the proud father. “He grew up watching Tex Avery, Tom and Jerry, Ren and Stimpy, SpongeBob, you mix all that, plus gangster movies with blood, that’s his universe.”

Ghost World’s Dan Clowes is writing the screenplay, which like Be Kind Rewind and The Science of Sleep, is very much concerned with the creative life. “[It's about a] dictator who runs a crazy world where hair is a source of energy and where people in jail are forced to create art and if their art is too good, they’re executed,” Gondry says. “The dictator doesn’t want anyone making art better than him.”