» Take a walk on the wild side
Glen Ferris talks to Spike Jonze, director of Where The Wild Things Are, about bringing everyone’s favourite monsters to the big screen
It’s one of the best-loved picture books of all time, selling over 19 million copies and etching its strange twilight world, in which a little boy is adopted by a kingdom of giant monsters, into the imaginations of generations of children. But when director Spike Jonze decided to set about turning Maurice Sendak’s 1963 classic, Where The Wild Things Are, into a feature-length film, he faced one fundamental difficulty: the original is only 10-sentences long. True to his indie sensibilities, however, Jonze (whose 1999 film Being John Malkovich became an instant cult classic) has not only created a movie that captures the spirit of the original story but enrolled the help of acclaimed American author Dave Eggers to expand the script, exploring the heightened emotions of a lonely young lad. We spoke to the director about the trials and tribulations of his walk on the wild side.
How did you become involved with the film?
I was lucky enough to know Maurice Sendak and talked to him about doing the movie. Initially, I was really apprehensive of it because it’s a book I love so much and I didn’t want to add something to it just to be able to make a movie. But at a certain point it hit me what the movie could be and I started talking to Maurice about how I wanted to write it with somebody and I suggested Dave Eggers – and, luckily, Maurice loves Dave’s work.
The book has been a massive influence on generations of children; what do you hope people will get from your version of the tale?
I think anybody can take away whatever they feel connected to or not connected to in the movie. The one thing I hope is that there would be some conversations and that a parent might actually be able to talk to their kid in a different way and ask their kid what they think and not worry about how they’re going to turn out, but be curious as to who they are.
“We tried to approach making the film the way a kid’s intution approaches things – to turn the cerebral part of my brain off”
Adapting a popular book is often hard enough, but it must have been even tougher stretching a 20-page story to feature length?
Dave Eggers and I approached it at the beginning by not over-thinking it too much. We tried to write it really intuitively and just write scenes. Later, it became a little more laborious, in terms of editing and shaping it, but we tried to just approach it the way a kid’s intuition approaches things. My other movies are much more analytical or cerebral but, with this one, because the main character was nine, I wanted to turn the cerebral part of my brain off.
Did the intuitive approach to the screenplay also carry over into the shooting of the film?
We approached it just as intuitively. It wasn’t necessarily an easy shoot, we made a series of decisions early on by shooting with real live-action creatures on location [CGI effects were added later on] and with a boy in the middle of it all. That was a very challenging way to shoot it but once we made those decisions, we just agreed to take whatever weather, lighting and wildness that came with that way of shooting. We tried to keep the whole film in the spirit of a kid and tried not to put our adult stuff into that. That being said, we had some tantrums along the way, because the shoot was so stressful and difficult.
The Wild Things themselves are giant puppets built at the Jim Henson workshop and inhabited by actors. Why did you take that approach?
I had always wanted to do the film live action. I wanted to maintain the charm and feeling, because in the book the Wild Things are cuddly, but also dangerous. But I also wanted it to feel like they really lived in this environment, and give them faces and eyes that could be emotive in a complex way. And I wanted Max to be able to hug them, touch them, play with them…
The film strikes quite a dark tone, were you ever concerned that it may be too scary for kids in the audience?
We were just trying to make a movie that feels true to what it feels like, at times, to be nine years old. I think, as you’re growing up, your emotions are just as deep as they are when you’re an adult. Your ability to feel lonely, longing, confused or angry is just as deep. We don’t feel things more as we get older. We just have a better understanding of how to navigate those feelings and a better sense of how to navigate our relationships and separate our emotions from them. I also don’t think of this as a dark movie. It has moments that are intense, for sure.
Where The Wild Things Are is showing across Brighton cinemas now. See Film for screening times. Glen Ferris is Managing Editor of Screenrush (www.screenrush.co.uk)
