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NARRATOR: Meet Thierry Guetta, a.k.a. Mr. Brainwash.
Over the years, he's been called many things:
Genius, Mad Hatter, fraud.
In a short period of time,
he's gone from unknown street artist
to multi-million-dollar gallery shows.
And while more folks jump on the bandwagon
to celebrate his work, other continue to see him
as a shyster who pulls the wool over our eyes
with every stroke of his brush.
Since being featured in Exit Through the Gift Shop,
Mr. Brainwash has heard it all.
But beyond the speculation and eccentricities
is an artist who lives by one simple motto:
"Bigger is better."
This is a day in his life.
( upbeat theme playing )
( speaking indistinctly )
THIERRY: We're really late.
We should've been there, like, at 4:30, 5:00.
MARCO: The best pieces are gonna be gone, no?
We'll see with our luck.
We need to find, like, something that is kind of large.
MARCO: Yeah, we need some big pieces.
Hang in the show on-- On the wall outside.
We were going to the Rose Bowl in '96.
Six thirty in the morning, and I don't know.
I cannot play an actor. I'm this and that, and what happened.
And the real thing is the real life, you know?
To play monkey, I'm not.
You know what I like about this kind of...
Flea market. It's just people.
You know, I love-- I'm very much into people's faces.
Like this woman waking up. Like those two, you know.
They're like-- They're like kind of, you know--
There is so many characters.
And that's what I like the best about it.
It's not about just the object. It's the people themself.
( light dramatic theme playing )
WOMAN: It's $38.
Will you take 30 for it? Okay.
THIERRY: I'm like a bird, you know? I'm like a bird.
I like to go somewhere
and I like to fly and go somewhere else,
and I like to be free.
It makes me remember the police station in France.
They used to type,
"What's your name? What did you do?"
I like to be able to really, like--
To really be here, you know?
Rose Bowl 2011!
Los Angeles, California. Whoo!
( speaking in French )
THIERRY: Thank you, man. How are you?
Good.
Bye-bye.
Taxi! Taxi!
( classical theme playing )
How much is this? How much is the sign?
MAN: The sign is 250.
Stop. War.
This is like to go like this, no?
I don't know what I'm looking for, really.
It's what finds me.
I never know what the day is gonna be
until the end of the day.
Thank you.
Yeah, what's up, man?
Yeah, what's up, man?
How are you?
That's it for today.
It's kind of the same way that I was doing film, you know.
I filmed for 12 years non-stop, you know.
Non-stop taking tape,
and sometimes don't even label, and put it in a box.
That was my joy of it.
And it's same thing with the flea market before.
I used to come in like a-- Like a drug addict, you know.
Like-- Like I wanted things, things, things.
But I was filling up garage, but don't do anything with it.
You know, it was, "No, I'm kind of a little bit cure
of what I do because I make something out of it."
THIERRY: Hello?
Yes. What?
Um, what time is it now?
THIERRY: I'm like a baby. You know, like a baby.
They text me. They ring me.
They call me like six times and say,
"Don't forget! You have a meeting at 11."
So you have to call me almost at 15 to 11 to make it happen.
If not, I completely pass, you know. My time is...
I know that today is Sunday,
but you tell me the date, I don't know.
( telephone ringing )
MARCO ( over phone ): Hello?
I'm leaving from the Rose Bowl right now.
And I'm going home to eat. Did you eat something?
Okay, so come to my house.
Okay.
MARCO: Thierry, I remember when
he come into my life the first time.
I was coming up from boarding school
and the bus got into the station.
I was waiting for my parents to pick me up,
and little by little
the bus empty and empty and empty and empty,
until there was no more people.
They take me away. They take me to an office.
THIERRY: Hello!
MARCO: And I'm still waiting for another three hours.
THIERRY: Hi! Hi.
It's dark. Finally my father come,
kind of running, and said:
( imitates panting )
"You have a new brother."
Hello.
Huh? Twenty-one years.
( speaks in French )
My son. My big son. My small son.
And my team here.
This is Art. This is Justin. This is Roman.
Hi, I'm Beaver. Ha-ha-ha!
THIERRY: And this is Ethan.
( parrot squawks )
MAN: And Coco.
( acoustic guitar theme playing )
We all work as a team work, all together.
When I do large project, I cannot make it happen alone.
I have to have some people that has been with me
since 2008, the show, you know.
And we a team, you know. To work it out.
We did a wall and everything, and from that wall the cop said:
"You ***!" He goes to me, you know.
We all in the wall like this, and no--
And we have the chip of the camera,
so one guy took it off from the camera,
and I'm like-- In French, I'm like:
"Put the chip out. Put the chip out."
And... And...
And they pass it to him. And he--
And he put it in his ***.
( laughs )
THIERRY: Ciao. Thank you for lunch.
Call me if you want me to come to the thing.
Okay.
We going to meet the people,
they doing a music festival on the street, on Sunset.
They want us to be part of it.
We don't know exactly what they want us to do,
but the good thing is there is, like,
80 to 100,000 people who come,
and we are running to do some crazy stuff,
and I'll pay for it to make it happen.
JUSTIN: How you doing?
MICHAEL: Nice to meet you.
This is the one who create this for how long? How long?
Thirty-one years now?
Thirty-one years that you been--?
MICHAEL: Are you afraid?
Are you afraid of me?
No, I'm not afraid of you at all.
THIERRY: Not everybody can close a street on Sunset
and do a festival.
This whole area, spilling out over to the other side,
is gonna be, you know, like, DJ's and a big stage there.
THIERRY: He's been doing it for 31 years.
He's somebody that is really passion of what he does.
He's busy living his dream and making it happen.
So it's going all the way to the green light over there?
MICHAEL: Walk down with me.
It's an exchange with a-- With a people's dream.
My dream and them dream, you know.
To make a-- To make a future.
THIERRY: That'd be good to do something clean here.
So where can we put giant things?
This is a giant elephant.
A giant elephant that's gonna be--
Gonna be down on a bucket of paint and dripping some.
Okay.
I'm living in L .A. for the last 29 years.
MAN 1: Why L.A.?
Because that's where I ended. That's where I'm--
MAN 2:
Because my father decide he had some brother here
that was living in L.A., and--
And he kind of asked permission to live here.
And one day we got a letter that kind of accept us to come here.
Los Angeles, it's like a-- It's like a mirror.
You have nothing else to do than looking at yourself.
So it's like-- It's like the city
that you can make your dream come true.
( rock theme playing )
THIERRY: It's all ready for it.
MARCO: Thierry's dreaming, and he's living his dream. He's--
Every day,
if you are a reality man around him, you freak out.
Thierry took every risk that it's possible to take.
If it's a physical risk,
if it's material, if it's a money risk,
if it's anything,
when Thierry thinks about doing something, he just go for it.
I was thinking, maybe You know, I was thinking...
if I paste this with posters,
you know, like all around, all around, but still keep it
to make it very Brainwash, in a way.
JUSTIN: I put all my trust in him
for all the things that we start doing.
THIERRY: I have an idea.
JUSTIN: But I know
that Thierry's got something in his head,
and it's gonna all come together and we're gonna set it up
and it'll be, you know, successful.
I have an idea. I have an idea.
I see the can next to it. Far away, but next to it.
And I'm like, "This is it."
Why don't we take a can, a can,
and we put it under here, under his feet,
okay, and he's spraying the color
and he's going out, I think,
and after we put the other one in a bucket,
like, in a bucket with paint
and things like this. And we do, like he stomp,
we do like he went in the bucket,
got colors and going all around.
We have, like, the spray can, he's pushing the spray can
MAN: Yeah, that's great.
A wall or something?
A wall or a truck or something so we spray a big--
Yeah, exactly.
The one that we have over there at the other studio,
we take one and we just bend it.
You take it and you break it here, break it there
and it's gonna go under that. He's gonna break it.
( upbeat theme playing )
THIERRY: I'm good, you know, working and, you know, like always.
I'm very, like, I'm like, you know, coffee,
the instant one where you put and you put water.
It's instant, you have coffee, you know.
You don't have to do it with a machine.
One, two, three.
THIERRY: In reality, we have to have that... The tip.
JUSTIN: Yeah, I've got a tip right here we can put on it right now.
THIERRY: It's like I'm a kid, you know?
I come up and I think of something
and I don't care about anything else.
In reality, what we need to do is to break it
kind of way and patch it that it squeeze,
Yeah.
THIERRY: It's like being in the middle of the sea
and surviving, you know.
You're just going and you're trying to survive,
it's the same way when I do something.
I'm just going every way to try to make it happen.
And we built kind of the inside, from the inside.
So it's inside of it.
JUSTIN: Yeah.
And then we'll paint it, like, the color of the paint.
And after, we'll put paint everywhere,
like he just went, and went, and went...
And we do a giant paint with, like, nine different colors
JUSTIN: Just falling out of it.
There is some people who says, "Oh, I don't like what you do."
I don't care. You know, it doesn't make...
It's not gonna make me stop. I'm here trying to do something
that I feel good about it, without trying to hurt people.
And if they wanna judge me, they're allowed to.
You know, we are in a freedom world,
you're allowed to do whatever you want.
It's the Toronto Film Festival.
( speaks in French )
So it's like all, all...
What's funny, I wanted to do sculptures,
because it's all around the park about, like, Rodin and David.
And I wanted to put them, like a...
You know, to put them like a...
You know, the whole thing about what you guys are,
like him, you know.
But it's a sculpture of a... Of things.
And they wanted just the spray can. They were like,
"No, no, no, we want the spray can,
we want the spray can, we want the spray can."
So that's what we did, you know.
So we... This is a working process of it.
And they're gonna be all painted on the can.
LAURENT:
I stress him a lot, you know, because it's always like:
"Oh, we need it and we need today."
You see, like he has a book right now,
it's very organized.
We know every pieces that we sell.
We have track of everybody who owns a Brainwash.
We know the number 12 is you, you know.
So when you sell it, we know you sold it to somebody else.
I can show you. You want I do one?
So I pick myself here.
There is blood, it comes out.
And always in the heart, I put my blood, so it's DNA.
So people can really see my blood, that it's real.
So that means you can copy the whole thing,
if you want to be in China, copy exactly the same way,
but you can never copy my blood.
And after I take the bill here,
I put my blood on the bill here.
And while I do, there is this certificate here
that is not signed.
I thumbprint the certificate here.
I put George Washington here with a blind eye.
After what I do, I tore down the bill in half
so it's like security.
This is the way it happens.
There is some people who puts the painting
like this in them house.
You know, they just turn it around and leave it like that.
They buy the photo, but they use the back.
( upbeat theme playing )
THIERRY: Street painting, it's part of the joy of being illegal.
We like to get caught, we like to tell stories
of things happening. It's a way of life.
The street art is the biggest gallery in the world.
Somebody's gonna wake up in the morning
and going to work is gonna see it.
Even if they don't want to see it,
they're gonna be obliged to see it.
Everybody, like I say, has a diamond inside themself.
Everyone. You just have to polish it.
You just have to believe.
More you believe, more you're gonna polish it,
and one moment, it's gonna shine.
And as much as you polish it, it's gonna shine, shine more,
it's gonna go and break this warehouse here
and go even deeper and deeper.
And if you believe, believe it's gonna go even,
and people will come to you and see that light.
All of what you see is gonna be installation
or spaceships gonna go inside the wall.
Here is gonna be like a house,
it's gonna be built like a front of somebody's house
with a woman.
It's gonna be open with, like, little things in her hair,
and you'll see the window, you'll see a man,
fat and everything, watching TV.
So many installations are gonna happen here.
So here, I kind of decided this space here,
I'm gonna donate it to Los Angeles.
Every artist in Los Angeles can have from four...
Four by six feet to do whatever they want.
We'll be outside.