Where The Wild Things Are roundtable
Who knew a book only 10 sentences long could inspire a film adaptation, let alone such controversy over that adaptation? Maybe it isn’t that surprising, considering that the book is Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are, a now-beloved 1963 children’s story which was decried as too grotesque for kids when it first came out. It’s dark, twisted, cognitively fuzzy, and wonderfully unsettling; it’s no surprise grown-ups had a problem with it. In the ’90s, Sendak was scouting possible directors for a film version; once he saw Being John Malkovich, he decided director Spike Jonze was the man for the job. The project got underway in 2000, but reached a standstill when Jonze bickered with one studio, switched to another, then got involved with co-producing Jackass. Finally, in 2005, Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius) completed a screenplay; Catherine Keener (The 40-Year-Old Virgin; Synecdoche, New York) and Max Records were cast, and shooting began. In 2008, rumors started spreading: The film terrified kids. Fans who saw leaked footage hated it. Warner Brothers was considering starting over from scratch.
With the combined blessing of Sendak and the studio, Jonze has finally completed the film, making the changes necessary to keep the suits happy while staying true to his vision. And what a vision. Where The Wild Things Are, like its book counterpart, is sure to make some people uncomfortable, since unlike the spare book, the film has room to delve deep into the recesses of a child’s mind. And not only is it strikingly accurate to the book, but it’s haunting, beautiful, and really damn weird. A few weeks before the film’s première, The A.V. Club sat down with Jonze, Eggers, Keener, and Records to discuss the Nerf-fueled audition process, the film’s depiction of home life, and its truth to both adults and children.
The A.V. Club: Why four of you in this interview?
Dave Eggers: I’m happy to opt out, actually.
Catherine Keener: No, come back.
Spike Jonze: Because we made the movie as a group. I mean, if it was my druthers, we’d have everybody here that made the movie. We’d have 25 people. But yeah, I feel like the way we make movies is sort of as a collective, so it seems more interesting and appropriate to do this part of it as a collective too.
AVC: Was it this collaborative from day one?
SJ: I think we worked like that already, in videos and movies before, but on this one, the process was even that much more complicated and drawn-out.
CK: When you said 25 people, it’s more like—that’s 25 core people. That’s sort of your band of people. And then it was, making this, in Australia—
Max Records: Three million and 34.
CK: How many people were on the crew in Australia?
SJ: Couple hundred.
CK: Yeah. It was so huge, but it still felt like a skate video or music video, didn’t it? Still felt really intimate and fun, and yeah.
DE: It was a happy set. I was only there for, what, three days or something. But that’s when you arrive on the set in Melbourne, and you see 150 people and this whole sort of mini-factory creating animatronic owls, you know? And people building mountains and everything. I saw them building them, and that’s when you actually feel ridiculous for having written some of this stuff. Because you just think, “Yeah, there’s a couple talking owls, and blah blah blah.” And then these highly specialized craftsmen have to spend months of their lives to do it.
CK: But then the owls got a lot of play in this movie.
DE: Well, yeah, they ended up being big players.
CK: They’re fantastic. Great characters. And those guys who operated the owls, I mean, they did the run-through—
MR: Yeah, they actually used their voices in the movie, didn’t they?
CK: Well, maybe they were in the rehearsals with us. The guys came and rehearsed as the birds.
SJ: That was my… Don’t steal my credit.
CK: Oh, you’re the owls?
MR: That was you? Oh, I thought it was the puppeteers that were hiding.
CK: No, but those guys were amazing.
AVC: This is the one thing Spike did the entire movie.
SL: The one thing I did. I was sleeping in my trailer, and at the point when they needed me to voice the owls, I came out. [Owl noises.]
AVC: What was the first scene you guys shot?
MR: The snow scene.
AVC: So the first scene of the movie?
SJ: We started at the beginning, yeah.
MR: “No. Don’t talk back to me!”
AVC: Was that intentional, to start at the beginning, or is that just how things shook out?
SJ: It was intentional to put all the stuff at home up first, so we’d start establishing that. And we’d establish who Max was at home, and then go to the island. So we did it that way. It worked out well.
AVC: What’s the brief version of how you all came to be a part of this film?
SJ: I came about it because I was lucky enough to know Maurice Sendak, and talked to him about doing the movie. For a while, 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, or put my stamp on it, or something like that. But at a certain point, it hit me what the movie could be, and I started talking to Maurice about it, and I started making notes. I talked to Maurice about how I wanted to write it with somebody, and I suggested Dave Eggers, and Maurice loves Dave’s work and loves his books.
DE: He had no idea who I was at that point, but thank you, though. That’s nice.
SJ: That’s not true. He had read your first book.
CK: I, on the other hand, had no idea who you were. [Laughs.]
DE: Thank you.
MR: The funny thing is, I actually knew who you were. I don’t know why.
DE: Liars! Everyone’s lying, lying, lying.
SJ: How did you?
AVC: What did you think of him before you met him?
MR: I think I thought you were, like, a pro football player or something. But I knew your name, and that’s the important part.
DE: Wow. I really appreciate that. That was my wish.
MR: I either thought you were a pro football player or a writer. Because we have a friend who’s a writer who knows you and stuff.
AVC: Catherine, you’d worked with Jonze in the past. Was it easy to get involved this time?
CK: Yeah, I’ve worked for him three times now, as basically his sort of… First, the actor in that movie, and then the joke in the second movie. And then this one is sort of like his… Well, Natalie’s the top-dog assistant, and then I was sort of the next person.
SJ: You weren’t my assistant.
CK: No, but you know what I mean.
SJ: She was my sort-of partner. She was like our utility player, when we needed a creative brain, she could work with Max, or she could work with the wild things.
CK: I assisted. That’s what I meant. I didn’t mean…
SJ: It was like an assistant director, but in a different way.
MR: You were secondary top dog.
CK: There was no department for it. I just mingled.
AVC: So you were around for most of the process?
CK: Mm-hm. When we did the first voice shoot, Spike and I would play Max; we would alternate playing Max for all the other actors, and there were nine shooters with cameras who would just take one character each. So it was an amazing kind of dance they all did, [to Eggers] and you were there for that. You were outside in the holding, on that couch. That red couch.
DE: Well, I was in the room, it was a big soundstage, and everyone was in vague costumes sometimes, but with headbands on their heads, and a microphone hanging down or something. It was so ludicrous.
CK: Yeah, those terrycloth tennis ones, you know?
DE: It was like everyone playing jai alai or something.
CK: [Laughs.] It was.
DE: They looked like some ridiculous costumes, but that was my first experience on any set. And I just couldn’t get used to the repetition, because I would hear the perfect take the third time, and then Spike would do 30 or 40 more. I went around the bend, I had to leave the room repeatedly and just rest so that I didn’t have to keep hearing the lines. But that shows how much I know about film. I don’t think I would last very long.
CK: But didn’t you have headphones on out there?
DE: No, I would take those off, too, and do something else for a while.
AVC: At the beginning of the film, Catherine, your character gets angry at Max and yells “What is wrong with you?!?” It’s a jarring moment—
CK: Really? Is it?
DE: Did you ever have a parent say something like that to you in the heat of something? Or—your parents are more together.
AVC: Well, my parents are perfect.
DE: [Laughs.] Yeah. He says, into the microphone.
SJ: Was it jarring because it struck a nerve with you as a kid?
AVC: It feels like a very knee-jerk reaction to something relatively mundane that Max does, and it’s almost like a question posed to the audience that deals with what we’re about to see.
DE: Yeah.
SJ: When the book came out, the book got a lot of negative attention from child psychologists and librarians and Better Housekeeping-type magazines.
MR: People who pretend to know things.
DE: Well said.
AVC: The main detractor never read the book.
SJ: The main guy, this famous child psychologist.
DE: Bruno Bettelheim.
SJ: Yeah. He hadn’t read the book, but I think a lot of people, they had read the book. And one of the things they criticized it for was showing a child that out of control, and that the parent wasn’t there to teach them a lesson and hold their hand through it, and at the end of the book, there wasn’t a simple lesson learned. Instead, the mom acted out, yelled at him, sent him to his room, didn’t help him with anything, and called him a wild thing. And, like Maurice says, “Well, that’s true.” That would have been nice if the mom could have done that, could have stayed calm and reacted that way, but a mom is a person too, and we all lose our way. He speaks about it much more eloquently than I’m paraphrasing him, but I think that’s the same thing. It’s like, we’re making a movie where we were trying to capture what it feels like at times to be 9 years old.
DE: We’re in an era where they’ve sanitized home life in movies to such a degree that there is a certain home life that might be true if you have two perfect parents, and a nanny, and a couple babysitters, and support, and lots of money, and there’s no strain at home, or whatever. But for most people, there’s strain, you know? There’s a lot of pressure, things can’t be perfect, parents can’t be perfect all the time. There’s a divorce, there’s money issues, whatever. People work, so you don’t always have these vast reserves of patience every time your kid goes crazy. So I hope that line is jarring, because it seems true.
