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

Collider posted a roundtable conversation with Spike and Max that includes some excellent anecdotes about the making of the film. Representative excerpt:

Q: Max, how gross was it for you to do that scene where you come out of KW?

Max: You don’t want to know. They put some sort of gross gel stuff on me.

Spike: He was covered and goopy. He hated it. We shot it once, and then we had to shoot another piece of it again, and he just did not want to get in it. He said, “I will only do it if, afterwards, you let me cover you in it.” And so, afterwards, we went back to his room and he just covered me in it. He was so happy and I was miserable, so it was a good retribution.

Yeah! That’s the way to deal with adults.

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.

The first trailer for Where The Wild Things Are made its way around the internets and everyone was so excited!