So the mysterious “Where The Wild Things Are” clip made massive ripples on the internet this weekend and beyond, right?
Speculation ran rampant on where the footage came from and what it was exactly with consensus landing that the clip – that appeared Friday night and then quickly disappeared and then resurfaced again – was test footage. And it looks like those keen educated guesses were correct.
Spike Jonze has responded via email to Ain’t It Cool News.
“That was a very early test with the sole purpose of just getting some footage to Ben our vfx (visual effects) supervisor to see if our vfx plan for the faces would work. The clip doesn’t look or feel anything like the movie, the ‘Wild Thing’ suit is a very early cringy prototype, and the boy is a friend of ours Griffin who we had used in a Yeah Yeah Yeahs video we shot a few weeks before. We love him, but he is not in the actually film…Oh and that is not a wolf suit, its a lamb suit we bought on the internet. Talk to you later…”
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs video he’s talking about is the creepy “Y Control” video which would mean the test footage was shot around the mid-late summer of 2004. The video features a bunch of children cutting off each others limbs and disembowling each other.
We’re thankful that the footage isn’t from the actual film cause while it was somewhat charming, it was too damn rough for final consumption (plus the “robot” dialogue was terrible). We’re glad Jonze called it “cringy” (a few readers were upset we dogged it so hard).
As we’ve said a few times now, rumors have it that ‘Wild Things’ has been plauged with problems. SlashFilm goes even further claiming that Warner Bros is “extremely unhappy with the finished product.” Another rumor we heard in person was that the studio doesn’t know who the film’s audience will be (adults? children? both?). The film has been pushed back to 2009.
One test screener told Slash, “Some kids at my screening began to cry and asked their parents to leave, so that should give you an idea [of what its like].” Others complained that there were “no big set pieces, no ‘state-of-the-art’ lucrative sequences just some running around on some desert place and thats that.”
To be fair, it was a test screening, but so far, it seems the rumors are fairly accurate.
Watch: “Where The Wild Things Are” Test Footage
Watch: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Y Control”
