Crave Online: You obviously had to add things to the movie version. Did you have ideas you rejected because they didn’t feel like Wild Things?
Spike Jonze: Yeah, definitely. There was definitely a logic to the wild things that when Dave and I started working together, we wanted their world to be very specific to themselves.
Crave Online: How did you come up with the suits that look so real but just like Sendak’s drawings?
Spike Jonze: It took a while. Basically we’d been working with creature shops and creature designers in Los Angeles. They kind of end up making the wild things looking very movie like, like creatures you’d seen in other movies, like trollish things or goulish things. They were really kind of disturbing. I love what Maurice created. There’s a strangeness and a sweetness and a cuddliness and a danger all in one, and a charm to them. There’s a real charm to Maurice’s initial designs. We were just not getting it so I started asking - - actually, the day I realized we needed to hire somebody from outside the movie world, I went out to dinner with Karen who did the score and a friend of ours Julian and asked them, “Do you guys know any illustrators or painters or any artists that could draw a big, cuddly, sweet, soulful wild things with real depth.” Julian’s first thing is like, “Oh, my friend from high school, Sonny, you’ve got to meet him.” Sonny [Gerasimowicz] e-mailed me. They weren’t like these overwrought drawings. They were just these pencil sketches. So we brought him in to do this and we brought him in basically just for a month to do just sketches. Now five years later, he’s still working on the movie. He became Alexander. He did everything.
Crave Online: There’s also a documentary on HBO about Sendak, right?
Spike Jonze: Oh yeah, we did a documentary on Maurice Sendak if anybody’s interested. It kind of in a way helps explain some of the things we’re talking about because it’s a video portrait of him and who he is as an artist. It comes out on HBO in October. It’s a 40 minute documentary.
Crave Online: Has Maurice seen your movie?
Spike Jonze: Yeah, he’s seen it many times.
Crave Online: What was his reaction?
Spike Jonze: He’s very proud of it.
Crave Online: Do you think little kids will like it?
Spike Jonze: What age is this movie for? What about you, what do you think?
Crave Online: Honestly, I’d show it to anyone. If they get it, they can handle it.
Spike Jonze: Yeah, I think what Maurice said is you can tell the child anything you want as long as it’s honest and you just tell them the truth.
Crave Online: But what about the rumors that you had to re-edit after children cried at test screenings?
Spike Jonze: No, that’s a rumor. As we were editing, it became that there were a lot of rumors and one of them was that children ran out of the theatres screaming. That didn’t happen but it’s a good story! But the movie is the movie and we just kept working on it. I think the main thing was that I think the studio was freaked out by it, not kids. I think that kids can handle it but it might not be for four-year-olds. I think the studio was freaked about it because they were like, “What are parents going to think about it?” They weren’t really thinking about what the kids were going to think, They were just thinking about what the kids would think. That planted that sort of thing and that became the basis for this gossip about the studio thinking it was too dark and too scary, because I don’t think of it as too dark or scary. It’s intense. There’s moments that are intense emotionally.
Crave Online: How did you sell the studio on your vision in the end?
Spike Jonze: Well, we had many a conversation, and sitting around conference tables and blah blah blah. But, no, we just kept making the movie and making it better, and making the movie that we wanted to make. And in the end, they let me finish my movie. There was no way I was going to work on something and care about something as much as I have for this, and then compromise it.
Crave Online: Did you do some crazy stuff to get a performance out of Max Records?
Spike Jonze: The idea was not to just stick him out there and go, “Okay, be happy! Be sad! Be scared!” But to give him something to react to so like in the spirit of a little backyard play, we would set up something behind camera for him to react to. Sometimes it would be like giving lightsabers to the guys who played the Wild Things in costumes so they could have a lightsaber battle off camera. I remember once where Sam who played Ira and Nick who played Judith, recited the whole ending dialogue of The Empire Strikes Back with, “I am your father”, and we wanted Max to laugh at something. I knew how much he loved Star Wars, and we both love Star Wars so we had this little treasure chest of goodies, and lightsabers were in there, and so we came up with that. So when he came running up into the shot, and then suddenly we pulled the lightsabers out and go into this, he thought it was hilarious. So just giving him stuff to react to. The movie had to feel real, and we didn’t want this movie to like have like a “kid actor” or a “kid performance” or a “kid mom.” It wasn’t like a “movie kid” thing. It wasn’t a movie kid kid or a movie kid mom, it was real. So it was along the lines of giving Max something to react to and play with.
Source craveonline.com
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