Hot damn, Ain’t It Cool have a good scoop, very envious. They have a long extended chat with Spike Jonze, director of “Where The Wild Things Are,” (and his editor Eric Zumbrunnen) which includes one new image (one that was really, really dark, but we lightened up for our purposes; guys, MTV leaked that other image months ago).
The interview is super long, but here’s some relevant passages and quotes, and keep in mind, ‘Wild Things’ is still set for an October, 16, 2009 release.
The film has evidently finished editing and all that needs to go is effects, but that’s going to take almost have a year to complete.
“We just locked picture about three weeks ago, and we’ll probably finish all the effects by, like, May or so. Then we mix in May and we have our dates in October, so…”
As we first reported back in the day, Karen O of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and Carter Burwell (who has scored all of Jonze’s films so far) are doing the music (Bradford from Deerhunter has been helping her as well). Originally, it was reported they were doing music separately, but it appears there’s a collaboration at work as well.
“Karen did some of the [songs] and is doing some of the score. Her and Carter Burwell are sort of doing it together. It’s working out well. Karen’s sort of writing more, not trying to go score to picture so much as she is just writing themes. There’s a couple of cues in there from before, but she’s done more since then.”
Jonze admits that Warner Bros. were a little scared by his version of the Maurice Sendak story and gives an interesting metaphor on what he eventually delivered. Sounds like they’re ok with it now though.
“I think that’s what freaked the studio out about the movie too. It wasn’t a studio film for kids, or it wasn’t a traditional film about kids. We didn’t have like a Movie Kid in our movie, or a Movie Performance in a Movie Kid world. We had a real kid and a real world, and I think that’s sort of where our problem was. In the end they realized the movie is what it is, and there’s no real way to… it’s sort of like they were expecting a boy and I gave birth to a girl [laughs] So they just needed their time to sort that out and figure out how they were going to learn to love their new daughter.”
Jonze says when he first showed the film in it’s effects-free form in that controversial screening, he was hoping for more dough to do pick-up shots and he eventually got it and he mentions an online petition that helped which was signed by people like Michel Gondry and Bjork (or at least we assume it was an online petition). Spike also notes that Sofia Coppola cinematographer Lance Acord shot the film (“Lost In Translation,” “Marie Antoinette”) and calls it, “some of the best work he’s ever done.”
One of the best things to note in the interview? It sounds like the melancholy tone of the film (which is certainly palpable in the script) and the ending has outlived any fears by Warner Bros. Acord’s 10-year-old daughter saw the film and afterwards she asked Jonze:
“I was thinking about the movie, Spike, and what’s the moral of that story? ‘Cause it made me sad.’ ”
God, that’s the perfect question a kid should have, it should stir up a lot of emotions and questions and Jonze elaborates on those kind of exact intentions with the film’s “feel” and tone.
“The idea that Maurice talked about is not to be scared of those feelings. Kids are complicated, and they’re in touch with all those feelings. I didn’t want to make a movie that was just sad, or just heavy, or just anxious. I think I tried to make a movie that had a lot of the other sides of kids too; there are also soft feelings and sweet feelings and I think I tried to make the movie have Max’s imagination, Max’s sense of play, of love and hope and caring, but just let him be complicated, and the world that he goes to in order to figure out what’s going on be as complicated as he needs it to be. And so, I don’t know. For better or worse, we made it.”
Fantastic news, sounds like they stuck to the script (thank god) and any changes that were made stuck to the overall tone set by Jonze and Dave Eggers (a new writer was brought in at one point to do what are believed to be touch-ups). Apparently there are already many different versions of the poster (that AICN has seen), and the monsters are about eight feet high (“they’re very, very close to the original Sendak drawings”). Holy crap are we green with envy here.
Child actors are tough, Jonze said. The director said they would shoot endless takes that would go on for 35-45 minutes trying to capture the “magic.” And this is one of the reasons the film took so long: having to sort through hours and hours of footage in the editing room.
“We’d never cut. We’d let the camera roll, sometimes through forty-minute takes. I also realized how spoiled I am working with such great actors on my first two movies. It’s like, how they could take direction was amazing. I mean, I knew they were great, and Max is a great actor, but not trained in that way where you could do a take and let it go through and just do another take. So if there was a two-page scene, we would work sections of the scene.”
Jonze said emotions had to be created and couldn’t be just fabricated through direction.
“If you [force it with children], it just feels fake. Like if you go, ‘Okay, you’re really sad. Be sad.’ And then they make a face, and it doesn’t really mean anything because they don’t believe it.”
Final thoughts on the “feel” once more.
From the beginning, I wanted it to feel a certain way. I wanted it to feel ‘real,’ or not-real because it’s not ‘real,’ I wanted it to feel like… like when I was a kid, and I would play with my Star Wars action figures, or read Maurice’s books and imagine me being Mickey in IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN, or whatever it was… it felt like it was everything, you know? It’s like your imagination is so convincing to yourself that… you’re there, you’re in it. And I wanted this movie to take it as seriously as kids take their imagination and not, like, fantasy it up. So I think it just started from that feeling, that it could feel like you were there with them, like Max was there with them, and not just in some fantasy movie.”
God, sounds fantastic. We cannot wait for October, 2009.
