Sunday, October 18, 2009
A+E, In this Issue..., Movies, Q&A
Into the ‘Wild’
Spike Jonze discusses ‘Where the Wild Things Are’
James Gandolfini as Carol and Max Records as Max
Photos courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
“WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE”
Max Records, James Gandolfini
Directed by Spike Jonze
Rated PG
Wide release
BY BERT OSBORNE
From Spike Jonze, the Oscar-nominated director of the decidedly non-mainstream movies "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation," comes . . . the screen version of Maurice Sendak’s popular (which is to say mainstream) children’s book "Where the Wild Things Are"? As if he weren’t hard enough to peg—lest we forget, the music-video veteran is also a producer of the MTV series "Jackass" – Jonze would seem a rather unconventional choice to helm your typical family film. Which explains, of course, why his "Where the Wild Things Are" isn’t your typical family film.
Jonze, 39, talked about the new movie during a recent interview in Los Angeles.
This is only your third feature film in 10 years. Why so long between projects?
I don’t know. Maybe it says something about the kind of movies I make. They just take a long time. It took me three years to make each of my other movies. "Where the Wild Things Are" took five. Everything about this movie was twice as complicated, from writing the script and being on location [in Australia], to the way we decided to shoot the creatures and building the costume suits. The special effects involved in designing their facial expressions took another year all by itself. The whole process was a lot more time-consuming than I ever would’ve imagined.
How did you set out to adapt the story from page to screen?
We definitely wanted the script to be from the point of view of a 9-year-old boy, and what that feels like. We didn’t want to overthink it too much. The first couple of drafts were written very intuitively that way. We wanted there to be a definite logic to the wild things. We wanted their world to be very specific. Max [the young protagonist in the story] may not understand everything about their society, but he gets the emotion behind it. The idea was, kids observe a lot of weird things in the adult world. They don’t always understand the specifics, but they get the feelings behind it. That was sort of the guiding force in creating this world in the film.
Is this a film for kids, or a film for adults who grew up with the book?
That’s the question, isn’t it? I just wanted to be true to Maurice’s work. When his book first came out [in 1963], it was actually attacked by some librarians and child psychologists, because it wasn’t a traditional children’s story. Somehow, that made it dangerous to people. It didn’t give kids the usual moral or teach them the usual lesson. But it was truthful and it didn’t condescend to them, and I think kids recognized that.
Wasn’t that also a source of some friction with Warner Bros.?
Yeah, but I guess that’s kind of to be expected. The main thing is, we made the movie we wanted to make, and now the studio’s embracing it. The marketing campaign feels true to the movie. They’re not mis-selling it as something else, like some sort of homogenized version of the film we actually made.
Do you have a favorite character among the creatures, one you most strongly identify with?
I like all of them. You really have to be connected to them all to tell the story well. In that sense, it’s like the characters in any of the Charlie Kaufman scripts I’ve done. I like them all.
As someone who read it as a child, what do you think it is about the original book that’s stayed with you all these years?
When you connect to something like that at an early age, I don’t know, I guess you sort of grow around it, you know? It’s always with you, in you—music or books or movies, whatever it is that you really love as a child. You just carry them with you in some deep way. SP