Anne Thompson has given her take on the whole “Where The Wild Things Are” conversation with Playtone producer Gary Goetzman (Tom Hanks’ Playtone imprint is producing the picture). It’s not much different from what the guys at CHUD and AICN have already said last week, but she does flesh out the problems a tiny bit.
In the last reports, Goetzman had hinted at some of the problems, but it still sounded vague. “[Director Spike Jonze] wanted big animatronic Wild Things in the jungle, which look great. As you go deeper in the jungle and weather sets in… We misjudged that, production-wise.”
What did that mean exactly? Thompson says the live-action animatronic wild things definitely did not work [within] the context of shooting in the jungles. CGI is currently being added to these scene right now. “CG can always look right,” he told the Variety writer.
Goetzman also told Thompson that Max (played by the boy Max Records) was hand-picked by Jonze and approved by Warners. so he’s not going anywhere despite some of the past rumors. As for the other rumors that kids ran out of early screenings in tears. “There was no screaming, no crying, none of that,” Goetzman said shooting it down. She also notes that the producer seemed a “tad nervous” that no current release date is set.
We also saw this report buried in a story at IWatchStuff.com. It’s a hearsay conversation between a television producer and a “famous” special effects post producer on ‘Wild Things’, reiterated through a friend via email (follow that Chinese whispers trail if you can), so take it with a grain of salt, but it is kind of interesting.
“This post producer guy sounded more like an efficiency expert, admonishing Spike Jonze and his crew for their work habits and fostering a vision that would ‘never fly.’ The dude went on and on about how cool the producer was and how Spike Jonze was just fucking the film up. The producer had told Spike “what to do” and when Spike didn’t listen, the producer was more than happy to pretty much tell Spike, “I told you so.”
He spoke through his frothy chilled glasses of expensive imports of how “cool” this guy was who had been joyfully working to squelch Spike Jonze’s vision.”
Again, take it all with a grain of salt, but it woudn’t be the first time there was an asshole working in Hollywood.