Yet with one film out this week and another next month, the 43-year-old looks set finally to establish himself as one of cinema's leading auteurs And they couldn't be more different. Dave Chappelle's Block Party is a fly-on-the-wall documentary that follows the American stand-up comic as he organises a free street-concert in Brooklyn. Then comes The Science of Sleep, an idiosyncratic yet inventive study of a romance, set in Paris, between a student (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his neighbour (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Written by Gondry, it dips into the world of dreams in much the same way Eternal Sunshine dealt with memory (when Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet's couple set about erasing their relationship from their minds). There's no doubt as to why Gainsbourg feels the film is "close to" Kaufman's work, a comparison that sees Gondry screw up his pale face "Why would she say that?" he sniffs, half-joking. "I'm going to call her and complain." With his curly brown hair, checked shirt and soft manner, Gondry rather resembles his erstwhile scribe.

Slightly exasperated, he concedes they share some sensibilities. "Maybe, we have in common certain negative feelings," he says, "and some feelings about relationships and emotion." For all their work's mind-bending metaphysics, both are realists when it comes to the difficulties of intimacy, both films' central couplings dogged by failure.It's a feeling Gondry knows only too well. The Science of Sleep is inspired by his own "past experiences of rejection" by women. What's more, with the film made in French, outside the studio system and without Kaufman, Gondry was conscious that his first outing as writer-director could suffer from being rebuffed as he once was. "Without Charlie, who was very opinionated on a lot of issues, I felt naked," he says "I had to go through that and prove to myself I could do it And I was ready to fail I'm always ready It's something I talk about a lot with Charlie. We agree that when we do a project, we must have the chance of failing - otherwise we don't deserve any success."Gondry's first failure, in many critics' eyes, was Human Nature (2001), a flatly comic fable about a scientist who attempts to civilise a human raised in the wild. "After Human Nature, I didn't know if I had much to say," he says.

"A friend told me that I had nothing new in my brain." His answer was to shoot two music videos, including The White Stripes' "Fell In Love With a Girl". A visionary effort that reproduced Jack and Meg White as animated Lego figures, it indicates how childlike Gondry can be (a notion also summed up in the documentary I've Been 12 Forever that accompanies a Director's Series DVD of his early work). It returned him to the homespun feel of his early videos for Oui Oui, the band he played drums for during his art college days. "I found I could be creative again," he admits.Gondry continued with this approach for many ofThe Science of Sleep's more anarchic sequences, which take us into Bernal's character St?ane's lovesick dreams.

Blending live action with charmingly crude stop-motion, Gondry admits that "this hand-crafted quality was important" to him "I wanted the animation to look as if St?ane has done it. In a way, he tries to control his dreams and build them." Much the same can be said of Gondry, whose work frequently boasts an artificial, dreamlike quality, from a man dressed as a yellow and blue beetle crawling through the undergrowth in Oui Oui's "Ma Maison" promo to the magical forest of Bj?s "Human Behaviour" video.All of which makes his work on Dave Chappelle's Block Party all the more surprising. Shooting across three days in September 2004, Gondry trails Chappelle as he coordinates his own dream - putting together a gig featuring such artists as Kanye West, Mos Def and even The Fugees, reuniting for the first time in seven years. "I wanted to show the concert's energy, and it was a good exercise for me to do something I'd never done before," Gondry says "I wanted to present people on a simple and equal level.

In all the videos I have done, and the movies, I have tried to discourage people to bring attitude, which I consider bullshit."Gondry's musical ties go way back. His grandfather, Constant Martin, is credited as creating an early synthesiser, the Clavioline, and his father ran a music shop in Gondry's home town of Versailles. He gave the young Gondry and his brother a drum kit and bass guitar, respectively, which led them to form a punk band. Yet, pointing out his difficulties with Fugees singer Lauryn Hill's record company, who initially refused to let her perform, Gondry has little time for those who run the music industry.