SUBMITTED BY Timbo

March 9, 2004 — Newsweek takes a look behind the scenes of the imaginative "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind".

"Eternal Sunshine's" Joel is also quite Kaufmanesque, so who better to play him than... gonzo comic superstar Jim Carrey? "When I first met Jim, I was very nervous," says Kaufman. "He's a big personality and I'm, you know, not. But he was very nice. He was very quiet. It was winter, and when he took off his hat his hair was a bit mussed up. He looked exactly like we wanted him to look in the movie." Carrey, meanwhile, is bracing himself for a hail of questions about why he's flipping back to drama after a comic smash like "Bruce Almighty." "See, that's the thing people don't get: it's all acting," he says. "Maybe it's just that I calm down a little in a part like this and let you see what's already there. But it's always there, even in 'Ace Ventura'."

The movie's 14-week shoot, which spanned New York's bitterest winter in ages, was a ragtag guerrilla operation, with the irrepressibly spontaneous Gondry concocting new scenes on the fly. Carrey and Winslet loved it. As the movie unfolds, Joel's memories get blurrier and more surreal; in one lovely moment, he wakes up next to Clementine on a snow-covered beach. The script called for a clear, sunny day, but a storm wrecked the plan. So Gondry adjusted. "Suddenly," Winslet recalls, "he yelled, 'I know whats we do! We just put ze bed on ze f---ing beach!" Ze scene, like ze movie, is one of a kind.

Read the rest at the link below.