Director Spike Jonze remembers his mother reading Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s tale, Where the Wild Things Are, to him when he was only four years old and imagining the creatures vividly. In this Q& A, he talks about fulfilling a life long ambition by bringing its characters to life on the big screen.
To what extent was Maurice Sendak involved with the movie?
I had known Maurice for about ten years before we started making Where the Wild Things Are. He knew how I felt about the book and it was his idea initially that I work on adapting it. Once we got started, he was a fully involved producer on the film. He had based the book on themes and feelings from his own life and I picked up the baton from what he created from his life and childhood. I intended it to include aspects from all our childhoods in there.
What have you added to his story?
For a child, emotions are unpredictable and often uncontrollable and hard to understand. Even as an adult, emotions and relationships are hard to process. After thinking about this, it became clear how I could take the story further. There was such great potential in all of the Wild Things as characters and I felt that finding the wild things in all of us was something I could add to the story and explore infinitely without trying to make it into something else.
What was your approach?
First and foremost I was concerned with who Max was and what was going on in his life. I wanted to make a movie that takes kids seriously. Just because they’re young doesn’t mean their feelings aren’t as complex and deeply felt as any adult’s.
Maurice also said: “Don’t just take the heavy side of the kid seriously; take his imagination seriously, his sense of joy.” Overall, we wanted it to feel as if it was being told by the characters themselves rather than some outside observer. We never set any rules about whether it would be for kids or adults. We just went where it took us.
How did you cast the hero Max, and what does actor Max Records bring to it?
I wanted a real kid – not necessarily an actor who was going to give a ‘movie kid’ performance, but someone who was going to give a real, emotional performance and I found that in Max Records after a very long search.
Max was my partner in making the heart of the movie come through. He is the heart of the movie. He has a real depth to him as a person. It doesn’t feel at all like he’s acting, and that was very important to me and to the story.
Would you agree that capturing the voice performances was a bit unconventional?
A lot of movies that have voice performers often record each actor individually in a sound booth and so the actors don’t get to interact with each other. But it was important to me that we captured the spontaneity of what they did in the moment.
So we got all the voice actors together and acted out the whole movie on a soundstage over a period of three weeks. We had Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano and Michael Berry acting out their roles as the Wild Things, wrestling and shouting at each other on a bare stage with Styrofoam cubes standing in for rocks and trees.
Later, the Australian actors wearing the Wild Things costumes on location would watch footage from the voice recording and mirror what the voice actors did. They took the essence of what they were doing and adapted it to what the costumes could do. But everything started with the voice performances.
What kind of experience has this been?
I knew it was going to be a complicated process. It seemed that every choice we made turned out to be the hardest possible way to do it. Building the creatures alone took eight months, and there were a lot of logistical challenges. But we decided what we wanted it to feel like and worked backwards from there on how to achieve that, and we stuck to it.
In the end, I love that we did it the way we did it. We didn’t do it the easy way, but we would always find a way, and we made the movie we set out to make. And I love the movie we made. It’s us.
To find out what it was like to be one of the Wild Things on set, read the next issue of IF FX inside the December/January issue of INSIDEFILM.