Where to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Trivia & production notes

• Pierre Bismuth came up with the core concept of memory erasure after a friend said she would want to erase her boyfriend from her mind if she could.
• Michel Gondry and Pierre Bismuth first met in the early 1980s when Gondry was the drummer for French pop group Oui Oui.
• Charlie Kaufman initially tried to withdraw from the project after Christopher Nolan's Memento was released, fearing the similarity in subject matter, but producer Steve Golin convinced him to finish the script.
• The film's title comes from a 1717 poem by Alexander Pope called Eloisa to Abelard, and Kaufman's original screenplay title was 18 words long because he wanted something that wouldn't fit on a theater marquee.
• The production shot for three months beginning in mid-January 2003 on a $20 million budget, with some crew members working 17-hour days in harsh conditions.
• Cinematographer Ellen Kuras disagreed with Gondry's insistence on using only available light, so she secretly added light bulbs hidden around the set to achieve proper exposure.
• The crew shot 36,000 feet of film per day using two handheld cameras filming near 360-degree coverage to account for the frequent improvisation and lack of marked positions for actors.
• Gondry had the special effects team removed from the set for refusing to place a house set in the ocean, then directed the production team, actors, and producers to do the work themselves, resulting in the union chief publicly reprimanding him.
• Ellen Pompeo filmed scenes as Naomi, Joel's girlfriend, but the production team removed them from the final cut against Kaufman's wishes.
• The original script had Clementine becoming increasingly robotic as each memory was erased, but Kaufman changed this approach so Kate Winslet played the character consistently while visual degradation of the settings conveyed the memory loss instead.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.