Feel like revisiting Eternal Sunshine? Cinephilia & Beyond takes a look back at the film, and it's a great piece with some old interview excerpts with the cast and crew, a stack of stills from the film and behind-the-scenes clips, even Leigh Singer's Eternal Sunsets video that I posted recently, and Eliot Rausch's brilliant What I Have To Offer--the short film adapted from Charlie's BAFTA lecture.

Having heard his friend complain about her boyfriend for what seemed to be a hundredth time, French artist Pierre Bismuth asked her if she would erase him from her memory if such an option was at her disposal. He soon passed this idea to his friend and filmmaker Michel Gondry, who liked the sound of it and discussed it with Charlie Kaufman, with whom he worked on Human Nature. From a simple discussion in a cafe, therefore, sprung out a film that many believe to be one of the very finest produced in this century. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a heartbreaking yet beautiful, insightful and above all hopeful movie about love, memory and loss, is literally unlike anything we’ve seen before or since. [...]

A solid box office success at the time of its release and the Academy Award champion in the Best Original Screenplay category, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a film you cannot cut out of your heart once you let it in. A monumentally important screenplay. Dear every screenwriter/filmmaker, read Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind[...]

One small thing jumped out at me, probably of interest to no one else: a snippet from an interview with the film's editor, Valdis Oskarsdottir. Years ago, someone sent me a link to a foreign-language article (Icelandic? can't remember) and they told me there was an implication in there that Oskarsdottir's experience on the film wasn't 100% fun, that there was some tension. Later, Oskarsdottir emailed me herself and said that was a poor translation. So now here's this excerpt from a different interview:

What was your dynamic in the editing room?
He isn’t the most patient man I know. He couldn’t sit still. Sometimes he’d sit on the sofa in the editing room behind my back and talk—I couldn’t hear him because I was working, and he’d get really pissed if I wouldn’t answer him. Sometimes when he was talking I’d stop and turn around and miss what he’d said, and he’d say to the producer ‘I hate it. She doesn’t answer me and then she rolls her eyes.’ And I was like, ‘How can he see that? He’s behind me!’ It took a while to explain to him that when I was working, I couldn’t hear him.

Would you work with him again?
No, I don’t think so. And I don’t think he’d ever want to work with me. (Source)

Big thanks to Cristian for the find!