We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

When I spotted Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market, I couldn’t help but notice that one of the four kids with him was randomly dressed in a tuxedo. “Maybe he just came from church,” a friend suggested, but then why would he be the only one dressed so dapper? The only plausible explanation was that this precocious boy was just constantly stylish, channeling the effortless suavity of Don Draper himself. My hopes were confirmed upon the discovery of GQ’s profile of eight-year-old Arlo Weiner, complete with Arlo’s satorial commentary on mixed patterns, ascots, turning bathrobe belts into neckties, and the juxtaposition of red against black. He’s got his old man’s eye for detail!

The new GQ has an awesome article that we can safely categorize as a Wild Things/Spike Jonze extravaganza. The piece contains insights from Spike on everything from the movie’s inception to the writing process with Dave Eggers (in a rented room near the Castro in San Francisco) to the dire necessity of naps (”I don’t drink coffee,” he explains.)

Also included: honest disclosure about the studio challenges that the movie encountered during its production. “It’s not what they think of when they make a children’s movie,” Spike says in the article, referring to the studio overlords. “The tone of it..it’s not like ‘a movie kid.’ It doesn’t have that movie reality. I tried to make it true to my memory, my experience, of being a human being at that age of life––what it’s like to be 9 and alive. That was my goal.”

The piece also includes intricate description of how the wild things were created, describing the process as “a typical Spike Jonze decision: to embark upon an unmapped, inconvenient, cumbersome, labor-intensive process that others might consider unnecessary with faith that the end result will be imbued with a kind of realness that might, perhaps undetectably, make all the difference.”

Exactly. The piece is a good read on both Wild Things and non-Wild-Things levels, with musings on the creative process and the perennial difficulty of breaking the mold. Check it out online or pick up a non-virtual copy and tell us what you think.