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For about a minute, writer-director Spike Jonze and stars Max Records and Catherine Keener struggle to summarize—in five words or less—the experience of adapting Maurice Sendak's beloved "Where the Wild Things Are" for the big screen. Then Records has it, counting the words on his hand as he speaks.
"Let. The. Wild. Rumpus. Start."
That phrase will be recognizable to anyone who grew up with Sendak's classic picture book about a nine-year-old (newcomer Records) escaping frustration at home (Keener plays Max's divorced mom) for a fantasy world where he's the king of a group of giant beasts. And it may be the only appropriate way to describe the making of a live-action film that involved so much fun and baggage.
Long story short: "Being John Malkovich" director and first-time screenwriter Jonze (who wrote the script with Dave Eggers) was determined to use costumed actors, not CGI, for the Wild Things (voiced by James Gandolfini, Chris Cooper, Paul Dano, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker and Lauren Ambrose), which took a great deal of time and money to get right. Disagreements between Warner Bros. and Jonze over the film's style and tone led to delays and re-shoots. And, of course, Jonze and Eggers (with the blessing of Sendak), were tasked with adapting a 10-sentence book into a full-length feature.
Good thing this was more than a personal test of endurance for Jonze, 39, who says the movie, finally opening Oct. 16, has occupied his mind for the last five years or so but that "the book has been sort of floating in my head my entire life."
What should happen in an ideal wild rumpus?
Spike Jonze: If it's a successful rumpus, you're going to come out of it with a couple broken arms ...
Catherine Keener: A chipped tooth.
SJ: Yeah, a chipped tooth. Your stomach hurts from laughing so much.
Max Records: And there's a fire. And bears.
SJ: There's a fire, a wake of destruction behind you, and bears sleeping and laughing and telling you to come again soon.
CK: After a nap, you want to go right back and do it again.
MR: This is how we shot "Where the Wild Things Are."
With lots of bears?
SJ: If we needed them, they were on call.
MR: "And there will be bears, and we would have fish, and we would sleep with the fish in our beds…" We'd make stuff up on the spot. And wake up the next morning like, "What happened last night? What were we talking about?!"
CK: We had hangovers from fun. It was hangovers from craziness. Then we'd go do it again.
How worried were you about messing up a classic?
SJ: I think I was really worried about it up front when I first started working on the script. But Maurice was so adamant to take the book and make it our own and make something personal. He was so forceful in that, [to make] something that was honest and wasn't precious about the book and didn't pander to kids.
Spike and Catherine, you spent a little time in the wild thing costumes. What was it like?
CK: It was amazing. When I got into one of the costumes we were trying to figure out how much movement, physicality those costumes could give.
SJ: They evolved a lot. Early on we just put Keener in one to see what its limitations were, and we were looking for these performances that were very underplayed and subtle and internal and nuanced and not the way sometimes puppetry or animation can be where it's all like, "HEY, HOW ARE YOU DOING?!" and overarticulated and over the top.
CK: It was an interesting journey to find out to how little or how much you could do.
SJ: When we first got to Australia, we pulled the suits out. The whole movie was a dichotomy: really fun and really exhausting and stressful. When we pulled the suits out, part of it was exhausting and stressful 'cause they were not finished. We were starting to shoot in six weeks. They didn't work the way we wanted them to.
CK: The heads weighed about 40 pounds...
SJ: The heads were just impossible.
MR: Didn't you guys not have the suits completely ready until like a week before?
SJ: The day we shot, really. We had one suit ready the day we shot.
MR: I remember the test shoot right when I first got to Australia. It was two weeks before we started shooting and you still hadn't decided whether or not to do the mechanical faces.
SJ: There was no blueprint for how we were making the movie. There was just a blueprint for what we wanted it to feel like. That's the way we always work. Because this movie's so big, though, everything was on a much bigger scale.
So you didn't put on the suits and bump into each other like sumo wrestler suits?
CK: That would be very difficult to do. We took those suits extremely seriously. For real. For the actors who were in the suits, they had people who had to really support them and check in to make sure they were OK. It was a real feat to be wearing those and also to perform in them and to sustain being in them for a while. Our [Assistant Director] ... ran a tight ship, considering this huge deal that we did. He would call, "Heads off!" It got very serious, even though it was amazing and beautiful and a lark to be around.
SJ: [to Max] What was it like acting with the wild things?
MR: I don't know. This was my first acting job. I guess I sort of thought ... I didn't know people did it another way.
And that all movies involve giant creatures with people inside?
MR: I didn't know that there was really that much of a difference between acting with a person in a fatsuit where you can't see their face and acting with somebody 1-on-1 where you can actually see their face.
That's probably how the kids in "Big Momma's House" felt too.
MR: The people inside the suits, to me, they were the wild things. They memorized all the lines, they acted it out, they did everything that the voice actors did in these giant suits.
Spike, you've said you wanted to make a movie about childhood but not a kids' movie. It certainly doesn't have the usual obvious, kids' movie moments. What reactions are you expecting?
MR: The movie got screened for my school just a couple days ago, and there were kids crying at some sequences. And some of the younger kids at some of the scary parts they're just like, "I'm not going to listen to this" and covering their ears.
SJ: How young?
MR: Seven or eight or six or something. And then there were the kids who were just saddened by it and other times were like really, really [energized] and the kids who were in between who just sat there the whole time in a trance.
SJ: What Maurice's work is all about is not talking down to kids. When you give them something that has some depth to it, they're there with you. They talk about it and they get things [on so many levels]. I don't know what's going to happen when it gets out in the world. Who knows? I'm excited that we got to make something that feels like what it feels like to be a kid. I've seen kids watch it that they're with it, but also every kid is different. The movies I made before, some people love it; some people don't love it. I think some kids can really connect to the movie; other kids won't connect to it. To try and say, "We're going to make a movie for everybody," how do you do that? I don't know how to do that.
What would you want to do if you could actually hang out and mess around with the wild things?
MR: Jump on them more.
SJ: I think I got to do [that].
CK: I know!
SJ: And that's why I wanted to build them for real, as opposed to doing them CG. I wanted them to be there so I could hug them and touch them and push them and they could go up and grab Max and Max could lean on them. If I was five years old and knew, "When you grow up, you're going to have your own wild things," I'd be like the most excited person ever. We got to have our own wild things! How lucky are we?
CK: In the pile, it was incredible when all those guys ... they actually [jumped onto each other], and crawling through them was amazing.
SJ: It was fun 'cause we did it for real. And that's what we needed. That's what the movie needed. We wanted it to be visceral. We wanted it to have a danger to it. I just thought Max was going to go to the place with the wild things. He's not going to imagine going to some animated, CG-greenscreen version. If I was Max I would have gone to the place where they lived.
Do you think this ranks as one of the hardest movies anyone has ever made?
SJ: I don't know about anybody. It was definitely the hardest one I've made. I've only made three.
CK: But the other two were pretty hard.
SJ: The other two were really hard. The first one I thought was really hard until I made the second one, which was really hard until then I made this one. So I really hope the next one's not harder than this. I think I will crumble into dust if it's this hard.
What's next, expanding another children's classic? Maybe "Goodnight Moon"?
SJ: I don't know. Maybe one day. Not right now.
What other people are saying...
veki from River North - October 26, 2009 at 10:22 PM
I thin it was horrible. The worst movie I have seen in long time.
Report This CommentREDAWN from Wilton Manors - October 13, 2009 at 3:16 PM
I cant wait to see this!!!!!!!
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