Did Academy-Award winning special effects wizard Howard Berger (he won an make-up Oscar award for “The Chronicles of Narnia” in 2006) see the writing on the wall for the obstacles that eventually befell, Spike Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are”?
Obviously, the film sounds mostly in the clear according to the recent Jonze interview with AICN, but they’ve been working on it for years and clearly there were technical setbacks (there were reshoots and one of the producers admitted they “misjudged” the shooting of some scenes that had to be redone; hence the reason its taken so damn long). Hell, Jonze notes that in the aforementioned AICN interview that there’s only one-scene of special effects so far that he’s happy with and the current group of digital-effects people won’t be done with the film until May 2009.
We digress… Berger. He knew this film would apparently be a monumental task and apparently turned down an offer to work on the film way back when it started.
“We were approached four times, and we turned it down four times,” he told Sci-Fi Wire. “[We turned it down] because I’m in love with it so much. I met with Spike Jonze a couple of times, and they kept asking us if would we do it….I respect it too much. What is happening is what I thought would happen.”
When rumors starting plaguing the shoot earlier this year, Berger wasn’t surprised do to their approach which was a mix of computer-generated animation and animatronics. “The direction that they were taking in the movie was certainly not the direction that I would have taken. It was potentially a catastrophe. I had a sinking feeling about it. I didn’t want to get myself in it. It’s a horrible idea.”
Sort of gives one further insight as to why this thing has taken so long, huh? Oh well, sounds like they’ve finally figured it out, regardless, but interesting stuff to note.
