For Actors or Directors, or anyone involved in a creative process:
This is an amazing interview. Director Spike Jonze (‘Being John Malkovich’) reveals his original way of working on his new movie ‘Where The Wild Things Are’…his process, his goals, his crafting a way to get to the ‘real’ place he wanted this film to be.
If this wasn’t a Saturday afternoon; then I would spend more time giving you some excerpt-teases, take some more time to rope you in with description; but, instead, you are just gonna have to trust me and dive into reading this thing–it’s the bomb!
It’s full of creative ingenuity, individual artistry, and accomplishing “truth”; and how he kept the little boy’s acting “real”.

Book Illustration
The Film “Where The Wild Things Are”
Spike Jonze, director; due to be released in October, 2009.
Actors in this movie are: Forest Whitaker, Cathleen Keener, James Gandolfini. Most of the writing of the film was done by Dave Eggars, and Spike Jonze.
I am posting an interview with Spike Jonze, that I got from the “Aint It Cool” website. At the bottom, will be the movie poster for “Where The Wild Things Are”. If you click on the poster, it will open in a new page. You can either print it out, use it on your desktop, or email it to a friend.

Crowning Max--Film Still
Moriarty: …You’ve gone at it in a way that is really unlike any other production like this I’ve ever heard of.
Spike Jonze: Yup.
Moriarty: Is it the fact that you guys came out of the commercial background and the video background and things where you’d been able to experiment that freed you up to think about effects this way?
Spike Jonze: Yeah, we were talking about that recently. We’re working with this company, Framestore, it’s an effects company, and in dealing with them it’s so different from dealing with an effects company ten years ago because effects companies are so much more humble. And I think it’s partially because they used to hold the keys to the secret chest of magic or whatever, and a lot of directors who come up now through videos, it’s not as separate, doing effects; it’s just part of telling the story. And I do think with a lot of directors – and not even just like Robert Rodriguez or whoever, Fincher, Chris Cunningham, Gondry – it’s like effects are just one of the tools, as opposed to “Here’s a script that needs to be filmed, how do we execute this thing?” It’s more just one of the tools you use to create a feeling that you want the movie or story to feel like.
Moriarty: …Other guys…They just do what they’re told in terms of getting it onscreen. But you guys really seem like you break the mold of how these things are done when you approach it, and from the ground up you kind of build new ways of getting to these ideas.
Spike Jonze: Yeah, I think this one I just wanted to… from the beginning, I wanted it to feel a certain way. I wanted it to feel “real,” or not-real because it’s not “real,” I wanted it to feel like… like when I was a kid, and I would play with my Star Wars action figures, or read Maurice’s books and imagine me being Mickey in IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN, or whatever it was… it felt like it was everything, you know? It’s like your imagination is so convincing to yourself that… you’re there, you’re in it. And I wanted this movie to take it as seriously as kids take their imagination and not, like, fantasy it up. So I think it just started from that feeling, that it could feel like you were there with them, like Max was there with them, and not just in some fantasy movie.
Moriarty: I love that it’s not on a soundstage at all, that you just went to… is it New Zealand for the most part?
Spike Jonze: It’s actually Melbourne, right outside of Melbourne.
Moriarty: It’s phenomenal. It feels so rough, and organic, and there’s nothing about it that feels like a soundstage, or a backdrop, or a green screen. At no point do you believe that you’re on an artificial environment.
Spike Jonze: That’s great. Yeah, that was our aim, and it definitely was not easy. It made it a lot harder to take a little boy, these guys in suits, doing it all on camera. You know, so if they throw each other, it’s all on cables, and if we’re doing that, we’re doing it all on location. So it was definitely not the easiest way, but I tried not to think about that while I was conceiving it and just sort of conceive what would feel right. And I love the designs in the books. When I was a kid they were sort of seared into my subconscious – or unconscious.
[Laughs]
So I wanted to maintain the charm and feeling, because in the book the characters are so cuddly, but also dangerous. So I wanted to maintain the charm of Maurice’s characters, but then make them feel like they lived in this environment, and give them faces and eyes that could emote in the complexity of what the script needed them to be. And so that’s sort of where the designs came from. Also, I wanted him to be able to hug them, to be able to touch them and hug them, so…
Moriarty: I love how you didn’t have to sit around waiting for the Henson guys to get things to work, which is a separate art form, and you were just able to focus on the kid’s performance and not have fifteen tech guys trying to hit a cue at the same time. I think that must be insanity, trying to do that…



Spike Jonze: We were trying to make it as organic as possible, but even then… but the guys in the suits, the actors in the suits were incredible, and they really worked hard. I didn’t want performances of the suits or the animation to be like traditional puppetry or animation where everything’s sort of over-indicated, everything’s like “Wow wow WOW! Hey Max, how you doing!” It’s like they think everything has to be sold.
So we shot the whole movie with the voice actors on a soundstage, and we just shot it like a workshop. It looked like some sort of ‘70s experimental theatre or something like that, because it was just this blank soundstage with shag carpeting, and they were all in their socks so the sound was muted. It was just a really dead soundstage, sound-wise, and they could just act it out. We’d take foam cubes and build little trees or huts or whatever, and then we’d just workshop the scene like I would do with a live-action movie, and just find what the scene is about through blocking and improvising dialogue. And out of that stuff, then… because puppeteering and animation isn’t spontaneous in any way, but I wanted the movie to feel alive and immediate. I knew I could get that with Max, but I wanted the wild things also to have that kind of performance, so by doing that with the actors where everything is spontaneous, the guys in the suits would feed off of that. They would watch the tapes; we’d do playback for them so they’d be acting along to James Gandolfini’s voice in these speakers. And then the guy in the suit would just “feel” what Gandolfini did in his body and his shoulders, so after playback, when he starts to go, “Well… I don’t know, Max,” or whatever the line was, every little head movement would be intentional, because Gandolfini did everything with intention. They’re actors, so they aren’t even really thinking about it. With puppeteering, you have to decide what the intention is and then you have to figure out how to communicate it, because every puppet works differently. So nothing’s immediate or spontaneous about that form.
But with actors, it’s just something that happens between two or more of them. Somebody will say something, and the other will react in a way that just feels true in that moment. So we used that as the sort of basis for their performances and for the animation. It was like working backwards, finding what I wanted it to feel like and then creating a process.
Moriarty: Well the spontaneity works. I love the scene where they have the dirt clod war, because it almost felt to me like JACKASS. Like it’s got that kind of energy to it, where they’re aggressive and they’re big, and a little scary, and you feel like you could get hurt when they start going crazy around each other. But it also feels really loose, like they just have a giant dirt war fight. There’s nothing kind of ‘set piece’ about it. It just turns into this random bit of chaos. I liked that…
Spike Jonze: Yeah. The process now is just so second nature to us, but we spent a long time after writing that script trying to figure out how to do it. Eric’s been on the movie for two and a half years, because he edited the voice shoot two years ago.
Moriarty: That’s an unusually long gig for an editor.
Spike Jonze: Yeah, we spent months just working on that voice shoot before we even shot a frame of the film. Then we took that to Australia.
Moriarty: Now was that with this Max?
Spike Jonze: No, he wasn’t in there because we didn’t want him to do the whole movie twice. We wanted everything to be spontaneous, so in that version we just used Catherine Keener. Me and her would basically switch off being Max with all the other actors. So I’d be Max and work a scene from inside, or Keener would be Max and I’d be able to stand outside the scene watching it. I can’t remember what we wore… we had this fur…
Eric Zumbrunnen: It was like a hat with ears on it.
Spike Jonze: Yeah, it was this hat with ears on it.
[Laughs]
It was almost like a raccoon-skin hat with ears that Keener found and gave to me for Christmas one year. So it was like whoever had that hat on was Max. But so yeah, with Max we didn’t want him to rehearse much, we just wanted him to show up on set and deal with whatever was happening. A lot of the energy on set was creating stuff off-camera for him to react to and engage in. That was like a whole movie into itself, the off-camera stuff for Max.
(More, later….)
Have a great weekend,
;~Dana
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