In three Russian “romances” – cheerful ditties that might have graced Russian royal drawing rooms – complete with accordion and mandolin-cum-balalaika (the exquisite player, Natalia Shkrebko, nearly stole the show), we get to glimpse the recesses of this glorious gullet.In “Net, ne tebya” – an enchanting Lermontov setting about the nostalgia for lost youthful love – we heard a dead ringer for Onegin, one of Hvorostovsky’s finest roles. Dmitri Hvorostovsky seems the ideal of a Russian baritone. He marries boyish charm and tenderness with something of the Russian babushka. Sometimes it’s as if he’s longing to crack up, to unbutton: and when he does, the voice frees up and sounds less like a teenager trying hard at some conservatory: then all the refined, painstaking training comes into its own.
He was born in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk; and when he gives us the music of his native land, those glorious Russian vowels get their chance. “I’d hate to look at it like, you know, we graduated to movies, or something like that,” says Jonze.’The Work of Director Spike Jonze’, ‘The Work of Director Chris Cunningham’ and ‘The Work of Director Michel Gondry’ are out now on Palm Pictures’ Directors Label. “It’s mathematical,” he says, defending himself against Jonze’s comment: “Michel creates these visually conceptual pieces.”The same description can be applied to all three directors’ work. They and some of their contemporaries (future installments in the Directors Label series are expected from Jonathan Glazer, Quentin Dupieux and Mark Romanek) have effectively found a mass audience for experimental short filmmaking.Happily, although all three are currently working on features, they don’t intend to turn their backs on the form.

“One of the hardest things to do is to accurately portray dream logic.” Dreams often function by translating one sensory experience into another, so the translation of musical sound into pictures is inevitably dream-like – in Gondry’s video for the White Stripes’ “The Hardest Button to Button”, the duo’s instruments multiply on screen with each beat. But it is in the use of visual humour and fantastical stories, and the general sense of fun, that these works most evoke childhood.More striking is the preoccupation with dreams. “My primary objective is to try to recreate things that have the atmosphere of dreams,” says Cunningham. “The thing that we’ve got in common is that our work’s really childish,” says Cunningham, and a childish excitement at playing with new toys is evident in the directors’ work with special effects. His remark leads into a discussion about the merits of shooting a movie with no script, Mike Leigh-style, that ends with Jonze offering to send Cunningham the outline that his wife Sofia Coppola worked with for Lost in Translation.Though keen to emphasise their differences, they agree they share a fascination with childhood and dreams. The cerebral, ironic comedy of those films is seen in miniature in his videos. From The Beastie Boys’ cop show spoof, “Sabotage”, to rapper Fatlip’s clown act in “What’s up Fatlip”, he casts the musicians as characters and develops a plot.

“When I went to do a movie, I was nervous because I felt it was a different thing, but then I realised that the visuals in my videos come out of the story and characters.”"I feel that movies were at their best when they were purely visual,” says Gondry. Perhaps the most disturbing music promo ever made, this features near-pornographic images of bikini-clad dancing girls all sporting Aphex Twin Richard James’s bearded face.Anointed as an artist by the establishment after the Royal Academy showed his “Flex” video, Cunningham finds such scrutiny “unsettling”, and doesn’t see any difference between “Flex” and his other work: “I’d rather they were all sitting right next to each other.”Jonze, meanwhile, has found fame as a features director with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. So it is rather pleasing to discover that the three auteurs are great mates, and make up a strange and charming trans-atlantic triumvirate.Alongside the Versailles-born Gondry, the Englishman Cunningham is an art-school type who exhibits none of the freakish negativity you might expect from the director who put the Aphex Twin’s head on a gang of marauding midgets (“Come to Daddy”). The American Jonze talks in a high-pitched drawl and comes across like a skater brat who has only reluctantly grown up.The DVDs bring out the differences between the artists. His subsequent success has clearly given some confidence to the man who describes himself as “nerdy and shy”, and he dominates the conversation today.Gondry’s DVD is accompanied by releases from Cunningham and Jonze, in an attempt by the trio to do for the music video what the French nouvelle vague did for the feature film: reclaim authorship for the director.