The Untold Truth Of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

On his way to work, Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) impulsively skips his regular train and instead boards one for Montauk. On the freezing beach of the Long Island hamlet, Joel catches glimpses of a blue-haired woman. He sees her again in a diner where she spikes her own coffee with liquor, and later, she plays a flirtatious game of peek-a-boo with him. They finally speak to each other on the train, and while that early conversation gets rocky, Joel ends up in her apartment. Both are hours away from learning this isn't the first time they've met. In fact, it's not even the first time they've fallen in love.

So begins 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — an award-winning film about how romantic relationships can sour, how badly they can end, and how it's all worth it anyway. Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a visually wild and dizzying film, an absolute heartbreaker, and a story that displays the impressive acting range of its male lead, Jim Carrey. 

As great as the film is, making it wasn't all kittens and rainbows. To learn more about the heated battles behind the camera, controversial casting choices that didn't even make it to the screen, and directing strategies that made Gondry's actors want to smack him, keep reading for the untold truth of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  

(Warning — there are spoilers below.)

A couple of years before the comedian and actor started making gold out of parodying himself on NBC's 30 Rock, Tracy Morgan apparently was in a number of scenes for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that wound up on the cutting room floor. According to Gondry, Morgan played Joel's neighbor and would've appeared in "a few flashbacks."

Telling Vanity Fair about the experience, both Gondry and Jim Carrey called Morgan "a comedic genius." Gondry, however, seemed to think his celebrity and big personality would've distracted from the story because "the reality is he was Tracy Morgan."

Vanity Fair reached out to Morgan's representation for comment, and the surprising response was that Morgan "doesn't remember if he acted in the film." It's a curious answer. On one hand, considering Morgan's sense of humor and the memory-wiping that takes place in the film, it could be that Morgan's answer was meant as a joke. On the other, Morgan has suffered some public humiliations because of alcohol abuse – including a pair of DUI arrests in 2005 and 2006 – so it's not out of the realm of possibility that he really doesn't remember.

It may seem impossible in retrospect to imagine Eternal Sunshine without Jim Carrey, but at the time, he was a surprising choice. Not only was Carrey known more for his comedy, but even the characters Carrey played in more dramatic films like The Truman Show and Man on the Moon tended to have big personalities. Barish, on the other hand, is an introvert. He's quiet, thoughtful, and often painfully shy. So how did Carrey spring to mind for the role?

Gondry told Vanity Fair he chose Carrey in part because he saw a much different side of the actor. Gondry used the example of when he visited the set of the 2003 comedy Bruce Almighty. Gondry said that in between takes, Carrey seemed a lot more like Joel Barish than he did Ace Ventura. "It's the exact feeling when you walk into a party, and you feel everybody knows each other but you," Gondry said. "I always saw Jim [Carrey] like that. Like he doesn't belong."

Carrey added that Gondry worried he was going to lose his male lead before filming started. He said Gondry correctly predicted his debut film, Human Nature, was going to flop once it was released in American theaters. So, at some point in 2002 before Human Nature's release, Gondry and Carrey were at a restaurant when the director made his male lead sign a napkin stating he wouldn't bail on Eternal Sunshine once Human Nature bombed. Thankfully, Carrey stuck to his cloth contract.

With the reputation the actor has since built for crazy performances, it's kind of shocking to learn that before Jim Carrey was tapped to play Joel Barish, the frontrunner for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's male lead was none other than Nicolas Cage.

But as Michel Gondry explained to The Daily Beast, as strange as it may be to imagine Nicolas Cage shrinking from Clementine on the train from Montauk or making up constellations from the ice of the Charles River, it wasn't quite so strange a notion in the late '90s and early '00s. "We had approached Nicolas Cage a long time ago," Gondry recalled, "but every independent director who wanted to make a commercial movie asked Nicolas Cage to be in their movie after Leaving Las Vegas, except he would only do one out of ten of these projects."

The truth is if you look at Cage's entire body of work, he's no stranger to playing the kind of relatively meek, soft-spoken characters like Joel Barish. But a healthy amount of over-the-top characters and plenty of internet memes has just made it really, really tough for moviegoers to remember that. 

You might assume the best way to get a job is to act subservient. In some cases, that may be the way to go, but don't tell that to Kate Winslet. Gondry has said in a number of different interviews that one of the main reasons he picked Winslet out of the crowd was that she was the only actress up for the part of Clementine who read the Eternal Sunshine script and gave notes on it. Gondry told Vanity Fair in 2019, "I was really surprised by her honesty. Then I believed her when she said it was a great project."

Speaking to The Daily Beast five years earlier, the director got a little more specific about Winslet's criticisms of the early script. "She said that it was a little bit repetitive in some places, and we shouldn't shy away from being more sentimental," Gondry remembered. "She also said she was going to be just as big as Jim Carrey in the movie ... so Jim would have to tone his performance down." 

Gondry went on to say he was so passionate about Winslet being the best choice that he threatened to leave the project. He said the studio wanted another actress and tried to force Gondry to fire Winslet after the other actress won an Oscar. "I said, 'No! If you want to switch, you can't force me or else I will leave.'" Thankfully for all of us, the studio didn't force the matter. 

While making Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, part of Gondry's creative genius (and part of what drove some of the actors a little batty) was his conscious effort to foster chaos. In particular, Gondry apparently abandoned one of the basic tools of film directing — he stopped saying "action."

In a 2004 interview with Hatchet, Gondry admitted, "I like to create a little confusion, a little panic, and then shoot the scene. I'd say, 'Okay, let's go now,' so that most actors wouldn't be ready for it. ... They just don't have the time to worry about what they want people to think they are; they just are."

In the same interview, Winslet said that without knowing whether or not Gondry was filming at any given time, she would often be confused about when she should stop using her natural English accent and switch to American "just in case (Gondry) was trying to grab something." Mark Ruffalo pointed out to The Daily Beast, "We were shooting 36,000 feet of film a day, which, even by the most excessive standards, is out of control. There were cameras rolling non-stop."

And sometimes Gondry would give one actor a direction without warning their costars. For example, Carrey told Vanity Fair that Gondry had Winslet punch him in the arm in an early scene without bothering to warn Carrey. "She gave me a pretty good wack!" Carrey said. "I immediately knew it was [Gondry]."