I found the opener a bit funny....
He made the unfilmable filmable. He turned ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Adaptation’ and a bunch of trippy videos into perfect vehicles of his surreal, almost childlike vision. But what he’s done with ‘Where The Wild Things Are’—a children’s movie that’s not really for kids—is truly scary
By Chris Heath
Many years ago, when he was a twentysomething skate kid turned video director, Spike Jonze was asked to direct a film adapted from the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. For a year and a half he worked away, planning out an unusual mixture of animation and live action, but this first encounter with the movie industry would not be a happy one.
“I realize now I didn’t really know what I was up against,” he says a little ruefully, “trying to work in a machine like that.” There were so many dispiriting moments along the way: “It had slowly, day by day, moved away from what I was trying to do. I didn’t realize how things get corrupted not all in one fell swoop, they get corrupted millimeter by millimeter by millimeter, and only when you look back and you see where you were trying to go and where you came from, only then do you really realize how far adrift you’ve gone.” On the day the plug was finally pulled, Jonze and his collaborators held a ceremony at sunset to mark their liberation. They carried an eight-foot plastic crayon they had been given to the roof of the twelve-story building they were working in. “We threw it off and watched it fall and then shatter into a million pieces,” he remembers. “And I just had this huge sense of relief.”
Determined that this would never happen to him again, Jonze would soon go on to make two remarkable, and remarkably unusual, movies, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, each a different kind of proof that when people did trust him to follow his own peculiar instincts and seek his own idiosyncratic truths, the results could be wonderful. What reason, then, to flinch from making a film of another classic children’s tale? He had now shown what he could do when left to his own devices. Besides, the book was just ten sentences and forty pages. What could there be to worry about?
‘Adaptation,’ Spike Jonze’s last movie, was released in 2002. Where the Wild Things Are, which he began work on not long afterward, finally comes out this month. When I first meet with Jonze, in May, he is on the top floor of a building in central London at a company called Framestore, in a room that is filled with row upon row of computer screens, the faces of various wild things frozen upon many of them. “I’m just deep in the throes of this thing,” he says.
For the benefit of anyone who was never a child, or who has somehow forgotten, the slender text of Maurice Sendak’s book describes how a misbehaving boy called Max finds himself on an island inhabited by a motley collection of toothy monsters known as wild things who make Max their king and romp with him while also letting slip that he might make good eating. For Jonze’s movie, the wild things have been filmed in real life, played by human “suit performers” in wild-thing costumes with static, impassive wild-thing faces. At Framestore these faces are being brought alive with the painstaking digital additions that will animate every single wild-thing expression. It’s quite a job.
Jonze shows me how the wild things’ expressions are determined. Worried that digitally created facial movements tend toward cliché, resorting to a constrained repertoire of simplistic emotions, Jonze devised a complicated work process. When the actors who provide the wild things’ voices recorded their parts, they did so together, acting out each scene as well as voicing them, and as they did this each actor had a separate camera focused on his or her face. It is this footage—of real-life expressions with all their unpredictable nuances—that the special-effects experts here are using as a reference. I watch as a technician clicks from the face of the wild thing called Ira to the raw footage of Forest Whitaker saying the same line. “Just making sure everything has an intention, comes with a thought,” Jonze explains. This seems a typical Spike Jonze decision: to embark upon an unmapped, inconvenient, cumbersome, labor-intensive process that others might consider unnecessary with faith that the end result will be imbued with a kind of realness that might, perhaps undetectably, make all the difference.
The history of Where the Wild Things Are is strangely tied up with the children’s-book adaptation Jonze didn’t make, Harold and the Purple Crayon. When Jonze was first taking studio meetings in the mid-’90s about possible films (early on, he turned down the second Ace Ventura movie), at one such meeting he spotted a copy of Maurice Sendak’s book lying on a table. Where the Wild Things Are was a story his mother had read to him as a child. “I can still totally hear the inflection of all the lines through her—I hear her delivery of them,” he says. “I do remember it being hypnotic. Just totally engrossing. Not even wanting to be Max, but just in being Max.” The book was there because Sendak had a production deal with that studio; Harold and the Purple Crayon was one of the projects he was producing. That was how Jonze got to know Sendak, and Sendak Jonze. The author, who is known for being prickly and protective when it comes to his work, liked what he found. As Sendak would later describe: “He was the strangest little bird I’d ever seen. He had fluttered into the world of the studios, and could he not be swatted dead, I knew he would manage. I had total faith in him.” It was then that Sendak first suggested Jonze might be the man to film his most famous book. Jonze wasn’t sure. “I’d percolate on it for a month and put the book next to my bed and read it before I went to bed and think about it,” Jonze remembers. Eventually he said no: “I turned it down because I had no idea what I could add to it.”
read more about it: Spike Jonze Will Eat You Up: Movies + TV: GQ
He made the unfilmable filmable. He turned ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Adaptation’ and a bunch of trippy videos into perfect vehicles of his surreal, almost childlike vision. But what he’s done with ‘Where The Wild Things Are’—a children’s movie that’s not really for kids—is truly scary
By Chris Heath
Many years ago, when he was a twentysomething skate kid turned video director, Spike Jonze was asked to direct a film adapted from the children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. For a year and a half he worked away, planning out an unusual mixture of animation and live action, but this first encounter with the movie industry would not be a happy one.
“I realize now I didn’t really know what I was up against,” he says a little ruefully, “trying to work in a machine like that.” There were so many dispiriting moments along the way: “It had slowly, day by day, moved away from what I was trying to do. I didn’t realize how things get corrupted not all in one fell swoop, they get corrupted millimeter by millimeter by millimeter, and only when you look back and you see where you were trying to go and where you came from, only then do you really realize how far adrift you’ve gone.” On the day the plug was finally pulled, Jonze and his collaborators held a ceremony at sunset to mark their liberation. They carried an eight-foot plastic crayon they had been given to the roof of the twelve-story building they were working in. “We threw it off and watched it fall and then shatter into a million pieces,” he remembers. “And I just had this huge sense of relief.”
Determined that this would never happen to him again, Jonze would soon go on to make two remarkable, and remarkably unusual, movies, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, each a different kind of proof that when people did trust him to follow his own peculiar instincts and seek his own idiosyncratic truths, the results could be wonderful. What reason, then, to flinch from making a film of another classic children’s tale? He had now shown what he could do when left to his own devices. Besides, the book was just ten sentences and forty pages. What could there be to worry about?
‘Adaptation,’ Spike Jonze’s last movie, was released in 2002. Where the Wild Things Are, which he began work on not long afterward, finally comes out this month. When I first meet with Jonze, in May, he is on the top floor of a building in central London at a company called Framestore, in a room that is filled with row upon row of computer screens, the faces of various wild things frozen upon many of them. “I’m just deep in the throes of this thing,” he says.
For the benefit of anyone who was never a child, or who has somehow forgotten, the slender text of Maurice Sendak’s book describes how a misbehaving boy called Max finds himself on an island inhabited by a motley collection of toothy monsters known as wild things who make Max their king and romp with him while also letting slip that he might make good eating. For Jonze’s movie, the wild things have been filmed in real life, played by human “suit performers” in wild-thing costumes with static, impassive wild-thing faces. At Framestore these faces are being brought alive with the painstaking digital additions that will animate every single wild-thing expression. It’s quite a job.
Jonze shows me how the wild things’ expressions are determined. Worried that digitally created facial movements tend toward cliché, resorting to a constrained repertoire of simplistic emotions, Jonze devised a complicated work process. When the actors who provide the wild things’ voices recorded their parts, they did so together, acting out each scene as well as voicing them, and as they did this each actor had a separate camera focused on his or her face. It is this footage—of real-life expressions with all their unpredictable nuances—that the special-effects experts here are using as a reference. I watch as a technician clicks from the face of the wild thing called Ira to the raw footage of Forest Whitaker saying the same line. “Just making sure everything has an intention, comes with a thought,” Jonze explains. This seems a typical Spike Jonze decision: to embark upon an unmapped, inconvenient, cumbersome, labor-intensive process that others might consider unnecessary with faith that the end result will be imbued with a kind of realness that might, perhaps undetectably, make all the difference.
The history of Where the Wild Things Are is strangely tied up with the children’s-book adaptation Jonze didn’t make, Harold and the Purple Crayon. When Jonze was first taking studio meetings in the mid-’90s about possible films (early on, he turned down the second Ace Ventura movie), at one such meeting he spotted a copy of Maurice Sendak’s book lying on a table. Where the Wild Things Are was a story his mother had read to him as a child. “I can still totally hear the inflection of all the lines through her—I hear her delivery of them,” he says. “I do remember it being hypnotic. Just totally engrossing. Not even wanting to be Max, but just in being Max.” The book was there because Sendak had a production deal with that studio; Harold and the Purple Crayon was one of the projects he was producing. That was how Jonze got to know Sendak, and Sendak Jonze. The author, who is known for being prickly and protective when it comes to his work, liked what he found. As Sendak would later describe: “He was the strangest little bird I’d ever seen. He had fluttered into the world of the studios, and could he not be swatted dead, I knew he would manage. I had total faith in him.” It was then that Sendak first suggested Jonze might be the man to film his most famous book. Jonze wasn’t sure. “I’d percolate on it for a month and put the book next to my bed and read it before I went to bed and think about it,” Jonze remembers. Eventually he said no: “I turned it down because I had no idea what I could add to it.”
read more about it: Spike Jonze Will Eat You Up: Movies + TV: GQ
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