After laughter from the room and a brief silence, Kaufman comes back, deadpan again.
“I think I could take Michel,” he says, eyeing the auteur. “I can’t say that about a lot of people.”
Gondry agrees with a smile, conceding that he is “a very weak person” before qualifying that with the word “physically.”
Earlier in the afternoon, Kaufman relates the plot of an Ian Frazier short story he kept in mind as he wrote Sunshine. In it, he says, a man and a woman are sitting in a marriage counselor’s office; the man spends the bulk of the story pouring out his heart about the grave problems in their relationship, and the story ends abruptly as the woman says that she’s never met the man before.
Gondry calls the story “cool,” but is apparently hearing the anecdote for the first time. In a moment that typifies their off-kilter dynamic, Gondry uses the out-of-sync beat to point towards even newer creative possibilities.
“That could be a whole movie itself,” he says excitedly.
—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.