Michel Gondry accepts that life is a struggle. His films – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo, with Audrey Tautou – have a child’s sense of wonder and the soul of a neurotic, their papier-mache stop-motion reveries never quite patching over the holes in his characters’ hearts.

On an ordinary morning in Los Angeles, where the 55-year-old French film-maker recently finished work on the dark comedy series Kidding, which starts on Sky Atlantic on 29 November, Gondry just wants a simple coffee and croissant. But his sugar packet won’t open and neither will the strawberry jam. After much ripping and stabbing, his side of the table is coated in sticky crystals and his butter knife looks like a murder weapon. Gondry waves away the chaos. His sticky, human fingerprints are on everything he touches – why not his breakfast, too?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michel Gondry. Photograph: J Countess/Getty Images

Perhaps because of Gondry’s penchant for making wild animations out of everyday materials such as cardboard and felt, even the decision to order an inferior frozen croissant over the local avocado toast seems to imply a quirky defiance: he’ll survive in Hollywood on his own terms. “My home would be Paris, but if I go there I will be depressed,” says Gondry. “Here, when I want to do something, it is very easy to make things move. In Paris, it is much heavier. I like to do my ideas right away.”

Gondry is happiest when his hands are busy, whether animating construction paper for the opening credits of Kidding, or crafting silent short films for his three-year-old daughter. For her birthday, he rented a screening room and a jazz musician and read the subtitles aloud while she sat on his lap. Other projects force him to hold his tongue, including a music video he made with Beyoncé, which was shelved. “I’m not supposed to talk about her,” he sighs. “I signed a nondisclosure – but I don’t care.”

When Gondry first moved to the US to direct music videos in the 1990s for the likes of Björk, the White Stripes and Beck, he barely spoke English. Bands would hand him their lyrics, and he’d understand only one word in 10. So he filled in the gaps with his imagination, creating a string of inimitable fever dreams that somehow captured the song perfectly – such as the dancers in skeleton suits wiggling up and down stairs to Daft Punk’s Around the World.

From there, Gondry springboarded into movies. His first feature, Human Nature, starred Patricia Arquette as a hair-covered nudist seeking a mate, and flopped. Gondry poured his frustrations into a diary. On the left side of the book, he would write down a problem with the film, such as the one identified by a reviewer, who said it didn’t breathe. “The critiques that hurt are generally the ones that are true,” he admits. Then on the right-hand side, he wrote his proposed solution. Gondry reread the journal every day while making his second film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That film reoriented his career, proving that the MTV wunderkind could grapple with adult emotions of love and loss. Over the past decade and a half, its reputation has grown from being a cult marvel to one of the landmark masterpieces of the new millennium.

“Eternal Sunshine started quite small and grew and grew,” he says. Jim Carrey’s role as a depressive ex-boyfriend established that the blockbuster comedian was also capable of romantic tragedy. Now Carrey is the star of Kidding, Gondry’s first TV show (apart from a single episode of Flight of the Conchords). It is an impish, howling, heartbroken comedy-drama. Carrey plays Jeff, a superstar kids’ TV host known as Mr Pickles, who is smiling his way to a mental breakdown.

On screen, Mr Pickles and his puppet friend Uke-Larry sing songs about friendship in the service of a $100m family business that also employs his father and sister. “Isn’t growing up funny and sweet?” he coos. Not really. Off screen, Jeff’s teenage son is dead, and he is suffocating from the pressure to soothe the public. He has worn his Mr Pickles mask for so long that no one, not even him, knows how to rip it off. His ex-wife complains, correctly, that his stubborn cheer forced her to mourn their boy alone.

“Kids know the sky is blue. They need to know what to do when it’s falling,” Jeff insists to his dad, the show’s CEO, asking to grapple with his tragedy on air. But Jeff’s father vetoes his honesty. “Jeff needs to heal,” he counters. “Mr Pickles is fine.”

Gondry is more sympathetic to Mr Pickles’ plight. He agrees that children shouldn’t be shielded from calamity. “Since I was six, I panicked about infinity, the sun, the stars, all that,” he says. “I thought if you were dead, you had reached the end of time.” As well as being plagued by existential terror, Gondry has an innocent side, too. Show creator Dave Holstein scripted a running joke about how Jeff is too naive to understand what the “p” stands for (“pussy”) in the phrase “p-hound”, which a lothario crew member (played by Danny Trejo) has bronzed on a necklace. Gondry didn’t get the gag either. “It took me a while to understand that joke,” he says with a groan. “I was ashamed, too shy to ask some questions. It could make me look stupid to ask that.”

I don't believe in superheroes. I think it's a worse way of being a nerd

It’s 14 years since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind brought Gondry and Carrey together. Carrey says: “He, for me, was the linchpin. I was incredibly interested in the material, but when Michel came on board, I thought, ‘I get to go play with a teammate, and that’s really wonderful.’ It was a thrill.”

“We wanted to work together again,” Gondry says, “but we had never found the right script.” Instead, he dabbled in a comic-book film, 2011’s The Green Hornet starring Seth Rogen, which put a handcrafted spin on a factory-stamped product. Audiences weren’t sure what to make of the result, and Gondry didn’t fight to make a sequel. It wasn’t that he felt awkward about selling out. “I think it’s happy to be popular,” he says. “I would rather be the potato than the cabbage.” Yet he was wary of the hold huge franchises have on the cultural imagination. “I don’t believe in superheroes,” he says. “I think it’s a worse way of being a nerd. I’ve been to Comic-Con two times, and all those kids dressed as Spider-Man and Batman, I feel bad for them, because they should dress in their own character.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate Winslet and Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Photograph: HO/Reuters

Meanwhile, Carrey has spent years scaling back his acting to unearth his deeper creative inspirations, which have given rise to vivid, grotesque paintings of Donald Trump, almost as if he and Gondry were destined to reconnect over their shared passion for arts and crafts. “He said there is nothing that makes him happier than to wake up in the morning, take his notebook, his drawing pad, his Sharpies or markers, and draw. I totally understand that,” says Gondry. “We talk about art at this level, not art with a big A.”

Carrey, he says, is a Hollywood titan who’s prepared to get vulnerable. “You look at what they call the A-list and you have all these actors who carry this obligation of being cool. It’s hard for me to identify with them because they are a sort of elite,” he adds. “Jim and I have both aged. He is a bit more damaged. When he started, he had a rubber face. He could imitate people, contract his muscles, just amazing. But as you get older, the skin gets a little more dry, so when he moves you see what’s underneath. He doesn’t really like to see himself like that, but I see little glimpses of sadness, loneliness, and I bring them out.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Audrey Tautou and Romain Duris in Gondry’s 2013 film Mood Indigo. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex

For Kidding, Gondry again sought guidance in his Human Nature diary, which he carries photos of on his phone. His first instruction to the cast and crew was that everyone needed to stop watching the educational kids’ show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The saintly Fred Rogers was clearly a major inspiration for Holstein’s script, and is so adored that a recent documentary about him, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is one of the indie hits of the year. Yet, Gondry had not heard of Mr Rogers, and when he finally saw a few episodes, he couldn’t understand the appeal. “I was not a big fan,” he says with a shrug. “It seems that in America you have to love him, and that doesn’t make me love somebody. Like, 100% of the time, he’s too kind. I want somebody who’s more like a weird person.”

He certainly has a different idea of what an avuncular hero looks like. “The nicest American is Noam Chomsky,” pronounces Gondry. He got to know the activitst and philosopher while making the experimental documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, in which Gondry bombarded Chomsky with questions about the definition of a tree and the existence of pure truth, and Chomsky’s answers are animated in marker pen. He still tugs on Chomsky’s sleeve over email. “We talk about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. They mixed apparently in the south of Italy. There are people who have traces of Neanderthal!”

As Gondry heads back home to play with construction paper, perhaps the waiters cleaning up his breakfast wreckage might wonder if he, too, is fully evolved. Absolutely not – which is why audiences adore him.

• Kidding begins on Sky Atlantic on 29 November.