For love of 'Where the Wild Things Are,' director Spike Jonze goes long (Los Angeles Times)

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By Dennis Lim

February 28, 2010

Spike Jonze's adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are" turns the slimmest of books -- 10 sentences, 18 pictures -- into a feature-length film. This feat of expansion is perhaps all the more surprising when you consider the director's track record -- in music videos, skate videos, short films, commercials and various off-the-cuff goofs and larks -- as a miniaturist par excellence.

"Wild Things," out on standard and Blu-ray DVD this week, is only Jonze's third feature in a decade, and it's clearly a labor of love. In fleshing out the adventures of young Max (played by newcomer Max Records), Jonze and co-screenwriter Dave Eggers preserve the mysterious sense of delight and danger that defined Maurice Sendak's 1963 children's classic. The furry wild things, undifferentiated in the book, are given names and personalities, and brought to life through an elaborate process combining puppetry, digital animation and voice work.

But as labor-intensive as it was, "Wild Things" is hardly the only project that has been occupying Jonze since 2002's "Adaptation." While the industry norm dictates that filmmakers graduate from calling-card shorts to feature-length assignments, he continues to work and thrive in the short form. Within the last few months alone, he has premiered two new shorts every bit as inventive as "Wild Things."

"We Were Once a Fairytale," available on iTunes, is a 12-minute collaboration with a self-spoofing Kanye West, who plays "Drunk Kanye" rampaging through a club and eventually purging the demonic rodent in his stomach. (Produced before last September's MTV Video Music Awards, it now seems to presage West's notorious outburst.) The half-hour "I'm Here," a lovely, dark-edged story of the fraught romance between two robots, overshadowed most of the features at Sundance last month.

It's fitting that a true appreciation of Jonze's sensibility requires a familiarity with his shorts, videos and promos, which mainly circulate online. A born prankster, a descendant of the silent slapstick comedians, a master of the high concept, he was a YouTube artist before the fact. (There is one DVD compilation of his music videos, dating from 2003. The Museum of Modern Art in New York organized a retrospective last fall -- Jonze came up with the show's tongue-in-cheek title: "Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years.")

He's no one-trick auteur -- serving a wide range of bands and corporate taskmasters requires flexibility -- but Jonzeian hallmarks are discernible through almost all of his work: absurdist humor, a melancholic streak, the ability to commit with a straight face to an outrageous high concept. (Jonze has worked with more or less the same team of collaborators on big and small projects alike: cinematographer Lance Acord, production designer K.K. Barrett, editor Eric Zumbrunnen.)

"Wild Things," often interpreted as a story about the childhood id, is a logical fit given Jonze's taste for anarchy. A founding member of the "Jackass" crew (he appears as Gloria, a saggy, naked nonagenarian, in the second "Jackass" movie), he also directed the spooky kids-run-amok video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Y Control" and a controversial 2005 spot for the Gap that ends with the comprehensive trashing of a store.

The most vivid scenes in "Wild Things" are also the most physical: the rough-and-tumble brawls and dirt fights. In keeping with his skate-kid roots, Jonze is usually at his best when communicating his sheer love of movement. Think of the lead character's Dance of Despair and Disillusionment from "Being John Malkovich" or the ecstatic choreography in the videos for Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" and Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" and "Praise You."

Another side of Jonze -- the sensitive documentarian -- can be glimpsed in "Tell Them Anything You Want," a portrait of Sendak co-directed with Lance Bangs and out this week on DVD from Oscilloscope. Deftly edited down to a brisk 40-minute near-monologue from several interviews with Sendak at his Connecticut home, the film shows the author -- bleakly, amusingly and very movingly -- reflecting on his childhood, his homosexuality, his books and, most of all, his obsessive morbidity, which he traces to seeing a newspaper photo of the dead Lindbergh baby.

Precedents can be found in Jonze's earlier work: his shorts on Al Gore (then a presidential candidate) and the rapper Fatlip are equally intimate. Even in films squarely focused on others, Jonze's presence is felt. Revealing plenty about their subjects, they say almost as much about the filmmaker's easy rapport with them.

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Where the Wild Writers Are: Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers (Written By)

Where the Wild Writers Are
ROB FELD

You wonder what children see. The life of a child; what they see and what they hear, and what they don’t discuss with you. Or choose not to discuss.

—Maurice Sendak

IN 1963, Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are, a slim book of illustrations and 10 sentences of narrative about a misbehaving boy, Max, who is sent to his room without supper. Max imagines himself traveling to a land of wild creatures as raucous as himself, who crown him their king. It was condemned as a dangerous book by reviewers and influential psychiatrists, in part because Max’s mother loses her temper too and had failed to discipline her child. But children returned to borrow it from the library, and it soon entered the canon of American children’s literature.

Though the brief book offers oceans to the imagination, it puts forth little in the way of plot and thus seemed an unlikely movie adaptation. Sendak wanted to see it done, however, and throughout the course of 10 years frequently raised the issue with Spike Jonze, whom he had met while attempting to produce his own mentor Crockett Johnson’s book, Harold and the Purple Crayon.

That project never came to fruition, but Jonze developed a friendship and appreciation for the author, filming conversations between them over time and piecing them into a short documentary for HBO, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.

In the documentary, the intimacy between the two men is transparent. They share a natural appreciation for each other’s work, but Jonze’s profound sense of play is offset by Sendak’s darker fixations with his own mortality, alienation, and inability to accept happiness.

During one revealing sequence, Sendak confides to Jonze, “It seems I never can satisfy some need in me to achieve something of incredible height. It puzzles me deeply, and it sours my life. So there’s a permanent dissatisfaction . . . It’s like something is dead inside.” Jonze hugs the older man.

“I wish I could satisfy you as a friend,” Sendak offers.

“You are. You do.” “... And be a normal human being,” Sendak adds, smiling up at Jonze.

“I wish I could just strangle you and slap you,” concludes Jonze, “and make you realize you do find joy, and why isn’t that enough?” But in his documentary, Jonze explores the depths of Sendak’s solitude and perhaps even the source of Sendak’s “permanent dissatisfaction” as well as his artistry: “My obsession with death, which a lot of my friends laugh at because I’m always on it, comes from the Lindbergh baby and the idea that you could die as a child—it’s an infamous insight for a child. Infamous.” Jonze’s skateboarder manner brings light into their dynamic.

Their creative collaboration might beg a comparison with Jonze’s affinity for, and emotional bond with, a not dissimilarly burdened friend and collaborator, iconoclastic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Although seeming no less aware of life’s more painful propensities, Jonze broke ground in music videos, short films, and commercials.

His work exhibits childlike playfulness, often sardonic or tinged with pathos, but never heavy or lacking in wonder.

The Wild Things script is painted more in emotion than with plot; the journey itself is the nine-year-old Max’s trip Through his turbulent feelings, struggling to understand them and those of his divorced mother, who is desperate to simply maintain their lifestyle and keep her head above water. After Max acts out at home and bites her, he runs from the house and then sailboats to the land of the Wild Things. He lands ashore and creeps through the woods to find the creatures acting out their own frustrations and loneliness, ready emotions on their sleeves, while their actions, relationships, and difficulties mirror many of Max’s own back home.

Once Jonze found his own lodestar into the story, Jonze enlisted Dave Eggers in 2004. “Maurice was the first person to read each version of the screenplay, and he was our best editor and our strongest supporter,” remembers author Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), with whom Jonze eventually shared screenplay credit on Where the Wild Things Are. Perhaps accordingly, Eggers published a novelization of the film, taking scenes and a backstory that didn’t make it into the final version.

“[Spike’s] the filmmaker, and I knew he was the one who would have to take whatever we wrote and spend the time and effort—years of it—to get it made,” Eggers explains. “So there was always vigorous discussion about any given line.

But I deferred to him, to his vision for the movie. Over the years, the movie evolved in the editing and tweaking, and the final movie has a lot of writing in it that Spike did after we finished writing together. In the end, Spike and I figure that the movie is more his version of Maurice’s book, and the novel is more my version.” There is something guileless and childlike about Jonze that would make him the obvious hire for an adaptation of Sendak’s work. The result is an unconventional film, to say the least, and a studio “learning to love and accept” the film he delivered to it, as Jonze has said—much like any parent must with an unruly but precocious child. “It’s like the studio was expecting a boy, and I gave birth to a girl,” he told the New York Times. “And now they’re learning to love and accept their daughter.” Rob Feld: What was your way into the story? What made it finally click?

Spike Jonze: I’ve known Maurice [Sendak] for 14 years, and whenever he’d bring it up I’d be very excited. It’s a book I loved, images that are deeply ingrained in my consciousness from when I was a little kid. It’s a powerful, original work that would be exciting but also daunting to adapt; I’d be deeply hesitant for all the same reasons. Twice I really thought about it; like a month where I’d brainstorm it and consider what I could bring to it—and at the end of the month, both times, I would call Maurice back and say, “I just don’t know what I could add storywise to this that would feel necessary.” I didn’t want to add something just to add something. Like, Wow, I get to make a movie about the Wild Things!

So both times, reluctantly, I passed. It was only the third time that I started thinking about it differently. What would the Wild Things be like? I started thinking about who they would be, and what they would be like when Max showed up and encountered them on the island, and less about what would happen. My first reaction was, Wouldn’t it be funny if they just talked like us? But that wasn’t really an idea for a movie.

Going further, I started thinking about them as us and as our wild emotions. As soon as that idea came in, it seemed like it was inherent in the book. Maybe I always knew that— though I never confirmed it with Maurice and don’t even know if it’s true—but it always seemed very true to me.

Max is emotionally wild in the beginning of the book, and I got really excited about this idea that he goes to this place where everything is wild; the geography is wild, the weather is wild. That started to make sense to me in terms of making a movie about what it’s like to be nine years old. The world is uncertain. You’re trying to navigate it all and decipher this place where you just arrived. There’s no map for it and things that are out of control are scary as a kid and still can be—certainly among [scary things] are the emotions you can’t control in the people around you and those inside yourself. Those are scary. When that came, it tumbled into something that had infinite possibilities in what you could write about it. Suddenly, the excitement far outweighed the hesitation and anxiety of it.

What did Sendak say to this?

I called Maurice, told him I was excited and that I had an idea that made me want to do it. We probably talked for two hours and one of the strongest things I remember him telling me came without any note of an artist protecting his work; it was a mandate pushing me to make something that was my own. He said that I need to make it personal and not make something that panders to children; to not be precious with the book. As for the book, when it came out, it was considered dangerous for children because of the way it showed Max’s and his mom’s behavior. The kid lost control of himSelf, but the mom lost control of herself also. She wasn’t there to help the child through his emotions. There wasn’t an easy lesson taught that you could walk away with, but it captured what it feels like to be a kid. For those reasons, that book was revolutionary. And for those same reasons, it still resonates so deeply with generations of kids.

I agreed, no mother should do that. But I also agree that mothers and children are human beings and they will lose their way occasionally and do the wrong thing and say the wrong thing.

Maurice Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want Once you made that decision, what was your subsequent development process? Did you start sketching out this constellation of characters/emotions?

For probably six months I wrote notes with no rhyme or reason. Images, ideas for characters, scenes, dialogue. Kind of like the way I write music video treatments; I’d put the song on and disappear into the song, writing any image that came to mind, not thinking about how they were going to go together. Just free associate off the feelings the song gave me.

Then I’d come back and look at this long list of ideas—most of which are bad—but one might make me say, Oh, that’s exciting! And that kind of goes with this thing; and those two things combined might make a strong idea. So I wrote in that form, no sense of what was going to stay or go, fit or not fit, or where it was really going. Then I came to Dave [Eggers] with probably 40 pages of images, notes, ideas, characters, dialogue, moments; some that were fully formed scenes, some that were fragments.

What did you articulate to him at that moment about what you were trying to do? The core idea, that each Wild Thing represents a wild emotion?

Probably, with a lot more details about what the characters were, who Max was. It was taking the book and going deeper into it. Who was Max and who were the Wild Things? Letting the plot and narrative come out of the characters and their relationships and interactions.

So you were still talking much more in terms of themes than plot?

At that point definitely more themes and scenes. We tried not to approach it from the outside in; not to approach it from an outline, then working out the scenes. We went the other way, which is probably more painful because you wind up writing and throwing out so much. We tried not to over-think it on the first draft. We wanted to write more like the way a kid would write—intuitively and from the gut. Then, as we wrote more drafts and got our heads above water, we got a different perspective; probably we did more construction. But the initial idea was to not think about it too much.

Were you trying to craft moments that might articulate a specific emotion, like abandonment or jealousy?

Honestly, I don’t know if initially we were that predetermined.

I can’t really remember. We rented a house, and I think got through the first draft in four months. Then we took a beat for the two of us to read it separately and come back together. But those first four months, we just started on page one and wrote. We would overthink things that didn’t make sense, like, Why is this character doing this? Or, Where is this character at? Trying to make this ensemble come to life, rather than just focusing on two characters. We didn’t want to shortchange the group dynamic, which we felt was powerful and important. This group is like an organism and a family, and they each come out of a different place. We’d write or improvise a scene, speaking the dialogue and writing it down, then go back and reread it.

So the stuff that mirrors his home life in the Wild Things’ world—like Max helping to literally destroy the homes being similar to his fear that he’s figuratively doing the same with his family—it sounds like you didn’t plan or outline that stuff, that it emerged more organically?

I think so. Some of those places naturally arrived, and Some we did when we went back to the script. We wrote in such a loose way, and we wrote so much—our first draft was really, really long and we didn’t question or edit it. We just went with it, knowing we could go back later from a more analytical place. I learned that from and was inspired by the way Charlie Kaufman writes. He doesn’t know where he’s going and just writes from his intuition and gut, and what he’s interested in, and just follows that through. The first pass of his scripts are sometimes 250 pages long before he goes and whittles it down. Watching him work and the way his brain makes connections was very inspiring.

In Wild Things there’s a detail that stuck with me of Max playing with his mom’s stocking under her desk, which was a scripted moment. Tell me how you use those.

In a film what captures your imagination, or my imagination, are all the little details that make it vivid and visceral. In The Black Stallion, which Maurice also loves, the little boy is sitting there holding the mane that had to be cut because he was holding onto it so tightly he passed out—it’s such a vivid detail, just the way he’s looking at it. That’s what makes a script be alive and exciting to film. Not generic. Specific. On some level every scene is made up of details. Sometimes you write or shoot stuff that doesn’t make it in, but it’s those details that help me know what the scene is and to be grounded in it. Even sometimes things that don’t make it into the script.

Maybe a specific visual detail or the texture of something. Or sometimes it’s an intention behind a character’s line. I sometimes overuse the parentheticals, putting in a whole line of description, and end up pulling those out before we shoot so I’m not overwhelming actors with that stuff. It’s more for me.

It could be a shot or a detail of what the character’s doing or a close-up that gives texture.

We’ve talked in the past about the subjective stance from which films like The Black Stallion and E.T. were presented. Wild Things is very much in that position.

I’m not sure there was even a discussion about it. I just think it was decided from the get-go that this was about being inside the head of a nine-year-old and feeling the world from his point of view. The confusion, excitement, anxiety, yearning— wherever he’s at, to be with him. We wrote a challenging role—I didn’t realize how challenging until we started auditioning kids—but I feel like with the role we wrote we were looking for a nine-year-old Sean Penn, somebody whose face you could hold on without him speaking and understand what he’s thinking and feeling, in a very complex, emotional way. It’s interesting because The Black Stallion obviously had an influence on me (a boy and a creature on an island, the subjectivity and the naturalism of the performance), but it also seeped into my consciousness in ways that weren’t as specific.

How did you talk about the thought processes and dialogue of the Wild Things themselves? “I have to eat my feet,” or childhood emotional things like, “It’s necessary to destroy the huts.” That’s always a hard thing to put into words and was at the time too. I knew it in my head but in talking about it, it was only through examples of what was and wasn’t their world.

There were specifics that we didn’t understand or relate to, but we understood the emotion of it or the feeling behind it. It’s my memory of the way I would experience the adult world, where you’re just picking up clues along the way about how everything works and what everything means. You’re picking up clues usually off of somebody’s emotional reaction to it; if it’s good or bad, dangerous, negative or positive. I don’t know if I was fully conscious of why we were writing it that way at the time, but now I can see more clearly what we were doing and give it some pseudointellectual analysis.

Did you go off to listen to the way kids speak?

At some point later on, I interviewed some kids, but not so much for the way they talked as for the way they thought.

We had already written the script, and it let me feel that we were sort of going in the right direction. [It reinforced] that the depth of kids’ emotions are just like ours, it’s just that the specifics and ability to understand it all are different. Talking to kids about things that they were scared of, or that upset them, or their nightmares and bad dreams. I wanted to make sure that we weren’t trying to overly burden Max with things that weren’t in the mind of a kid. But talking to kids reminded me that no, we weren’t.

I love that you have this really short scene where he’s playing in the school yard and you didn’t make him into the outcast, loner type, like you see in so many children’s movies. He’s a kid playing with other kids. Was that a decision?

It was definitely a conversation along the way. It’s not like he has major social problems, a loner. He’s a normal kid that we wanted to make this about. It wasn’t drawn out though. When we got to that page, we had that conversation and moved on.

People talk over each other a good deal in the movie, which is uncommon enough in commercial film, let alone one with an expected child audience. What was your influence or thought behind that? I’m fishing for Cassavetes.

Cassavetes wasn’t actually an influence in writing it.

The motivation for writing was more to be Max’s point of view on this island with all these Wild Things, just landing there and trying to decipher it. The way we shot it, too, always puts you in the middle of it as Max tries to take it all in, and we’re bursting out of the frame, always from below and from his point of view. The overlapping dialogue came from that place. As we were going to shoot it, it was Catherine Keener who suggested we watch Cassavetes movies. We watched Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence and got excited about that idea of how alive it feels when you can get performances like that. It was an influence and inspiration in shooting the dialogue more than writing the dialogue. There wasn’t a lot of stuff for the writing that came from other movies. There’s other movies we loved that we thought had done it really well, but we weren’t analyzing them to see how they did it, that this worked or didn’t, or that we could do that better, or learn from their mistakes.

We weren’t writing from that place. We were more trying to feel who Max was and understand how we could make a movie that felt like being nine could feel like at times.

I think what I offered was different but not because I drew better than anybody or wrote better than anybody, but because I was more honest than anybody. In the discussion of children and the lives of children and the fantasies of children and the language of children, I said anything I wanted because I don’t believe in children. I don’t believe in childhood. I don’t believe there’s this demarcation, “You mustn’t tell them that! You mustn’t tell them that!” You can tell them anything you want if it’s true.

Maurice Sendak, Tell Them Anything You Want So you really set out more to make a movie about being nine than to make a children’s movie, whatever that is. In the short documentary you made about Maurice, he talks about how he doesn’t believe in childhood, in delineaTions of what is appropriate for children or not, other than the truth.

My friends would ask me, “So wait, it’s a children’s movie?” I really didn’t know how to answer. Of course I wanted children to see it, but I wasn’t writing it for an audience in that way. That’s again sort of coming at it from the outside, and, again, working with Charlie, we never did that. Our other movies are in the comedy section in the video store, but we never looked at them as comedies or classified them in any way. We were just making what we wanted to make. I knew this would be in the children’s section of the video store, but the goal was to make something that felt like childhood.

Kids respect and respond to being told the truth, even if they can’t fully digest it.

Yeah! And it’s weird—I think about movies I loved as a kid. I was about 11 when I saw The World According to Garp, but for some reason I totally identified with that movie!

They lose a son in a car wreck while the mom is giving a blowjob to some other man. It’s totally intense, but I think the spirit of Garp and his relationship with his mom, I totally related to. I didn’t relate to the specifics—I related to what he felt. He’s trying to be light, but life doesn’t always allow him to be light. The experience of life and the things that happen to you as you go through life, even as a kid you feel that sort of tug. As a kid you can listen to a song you don’t necessarily understand. I remember as a kid, like seven years old, loving the song “I Will Survive.” For some reason I loved that song, and when my mom wasn’t home, I’d put it on really loud and sing along to it. Or “The Day The Music Died,” at seven years old. Those are songs that, as a kid, you don’t fully understand the experience that the songwriter is writing about, but you fully understand the feeling the songwriter is writing about. And, speaking for myself, as a kid I gravitated toward like, That’s a feeling I know. And you crave that. And that’s why I would sing along to “I Will Survive” at top volume. You kind of know what the song’s about, but that’s not what it’s totally about to you. It’s about the sentiment of being scared and alone, and coming back and being able to do anything, and being self-empowered. Those are feelings kids totally relate to and I related to—being alone, feeling self-empowered, and triumphing over it.

Things are never in Max’s control, even when he’s king. He’s just trying to keep up. His life is constantly under threat. KW [a Wild Thing] becomes a safe place for him, is never a threat, though there is an earlier version of the script where she too doesn’t want to let him go after hiding him in her mouth; there’s a moment of panic before she finally releases him.

I guess I’m less into analyzing how things changed. But more generally, you start out wanting to include all your ideas, then the fight is to try and include as many of them as possible while not burying your movie in them. The movie at a certain point rejects the things that don’t belong there, in the same way a body would reject an organ. It’s your job as a filmmaker to listen to that or try to keep forcing it in there.

Tell me about the secret life of children as it relates to Wild Things and the delineation between Max’s fantasy world and that with his family. We once spoke about a brutal fight you saw as a child, which made no sense and terrified you as you hid, watching, but you didn’t tell your mother about it.

I guess my experience of being a kid was not knowing how to talk about these things. You’re reading all these things as a kid. When people are talking, there’s two levels of communication going on—one is the spoken and the other is the unspoken.

Things are being implied by the intonation or body language or expression, and kids are so in tune with that, eating it all up. Even if they’re being told one thing they’re feeling another. That’s why Maurice comes back to “be honest with them.” Because they see it all, though they’re getting messages not to talk about this or that. I guess the difference is that as adults we feel a lot of the same things, but as we’ve gotten older we’ve formed a construct in which we’re going to navigate the world and relationships.

Hopefully, it’s still changing and we’re open to change. But at that age you haven’t formed that yet, you don’t have a construct to decipher and navigate all this stuff.

The range of emotions Max and the Wild Things experience in the film felt very raw and familiar to me even now, as an adult.

We’re not all that different. It’s exciting to hear you say that. Our goal was simple: to make an experiential movie that feels like what it felt like to me being a kid.

The New York Times Oscars Special: Boy and Beasts, Human and Not

By A. O. SCOTT

MOST of the action in “Where the Wild Things Are” takes place on an island of monsters, who roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and, above all, try to work out their terrible emotional issues in the presence of a young boy named Max.

The creatures are brilliantly realized, with giant costumes, digitized faces and the voices of some very gifted actors (including James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper and Catherine O’Hara). The rough, strange naturalism of their world is the great achievement of the director Spike Jonze, who has a way, in all his films, of making impossible feats of visual invention look like child’s play.

Vivid and enchanting though the land of the wild things may be, it also distills and reflects the impulses and anxieties that Max (played by Max Records) has tried to leave behind. The prickly friendships and unstated tensions that arise among Carol, K W and the other big, furry monsters are recognizable to anyone who has lived among humans and are implicit in the scenes of everyday life that precede Max’s voyage. Nearly everything that happens on that island is foreshadowed in the first few minutes of the movie, in which nothing very extraordinary happens at all.

It is a winter day on a North American street, where the wood-frame houses sit close together and the kids amuse themselves without much adult supervision. Maurice Sendak’s wild rumpus is reached by way of Longfellow, who observed that “a boy’s will is the wind’s will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

Like most children traversing the territory between toddlerhood and adolescence, Max makes his own world, but he does not make it as he pleases, in circumstances of his own choosing. The globe his absent father gave him has a small plaque at the base identifying Max as “the owner of this world.” That’s only a plaything, though. The boy’s imagination may be unconstrained, but like any child he is tethered to the will of others and a set of painfully familiar limiting facts. He is small, dependent and alone.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is partly the story of how Max finds companionship among the monsters, a situation that turns out to present its own challenges and difficulties. His solitude, however, is the film’s starting point; after the boisterous opening credits, in which homage is paid to Mr. Sendak’s picture book — here is our hero in his wolf suit, noisily harassing the family dog — we jump to a shot of Max’s legs sticking out of the igloo he has made from a plowed-up pile of snow across the street from his house.

Sweet, warbly music (by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) cushions him like an extra layer of winter clothing, signaling the unhurried pleasure of play taken as seriously as work. The editing, its jump cuts mirroring the fluctuations of Max’s attention, subtly disorients our sense of time, compressing a whole afternoon into a few minutes and expanding seconds of perception into languorous stretches of concentrated activity.

Max is absorbed, almost literally, in his project, and the only thing left is to show it off to someone. His older sister, in the house talking on the phone, shoos her brother away when he invites her outside to see what he has made in the snow. “Go play with your friends,” she says, but his only playmate is the fence bordering the lot where his fortress stands.

Undeterred, he assembles a stockpile of snowballs and plants his battle standard (a blue plastic bag fastened to a stick) atop the icy roof. Some canny reconnaissance locates a suitable foe, and Max crosses back to his own house to lay siege to his treacherous sister and her gigantic, wild, teenage, boy friends. The battle begins with whoops of laughter — he has captured some attention and drawn enemy fire that can be regarded as friendly — and ends in tears. Max’s tears, of course. His igloo is smashed by one of the giants, and the world he has built lies in ruins, along with the day and his mood.

That mood will swing a few more times, from rage to regret and then from tenderness back to rage. Although we have not yet met Max’s mother, a well-worn maternal admonition hovers over those first moments, especially as the giddiness of the snowball fight veers toward catastrophe. It’s always fun until someone gets hurt.

And it might not be fun unless someone did. Children’s entertainment these days tends to swerve between treacly sentiment and sugar-rush rambunctiousness, but few movies embrace the aggression and passion of childhood as ardently or accurately as “Wild Things.” Nor are the subtle continuities between adult and juvenile behavior often handled with the care and insight shown by Mr. Jonze and his co-writer, Dave Eggers. Precocious kids and grown-ups (men in particular) who take refuge in immaturity are ubiquitous, of course, but we don’t often see the likes of Max on screen, even though our neighborhoods and our houses might be overrun with Maxes.

He’s a regular kid, in other words, and our first encounter with him does not seem to suggest anything more. Max himself could sum up the first minutes of his movie more succinctly than any critic or pair of screenwriters. “I built this awesome igloo, and then some bigger kids came along and wrecked it.” We’ve all been there. But we may have forgotten what it felt like — how we were immune to the cold until suddenly we were freezing; how we were happy and angry, bored and entranced, all in the space of a few minutes; how we felt like kings and then our kingdoms were destroyed.

All of this will happen again, on the other side of the water. Just as Max’s sister has moved onto new friendships, leaving behind the brother who loves her best (and just as his mother seems to him to prefer the company of her boyfriend), so will K W abandon Carol for a couple of owls named Bob and Terry. The smashing of the igloo foretells both Max and Carol’s joyful demolition of the wild things’ houses and Carol’s climactic, out-of-control smashing of the grand edifice he and Max have planned and built. The snowballs come back as clods of dirt, which hurt when they hit their targets even though they are so much fun to hurl.

As for the wild things, though they are large in size and grown-up in voice and manner, they seem not to have outgrown the emotional drama Max thought he was fleeing. On the contrary, their moody, manipulative, anxious ways mark them as creatures of civilization, not instinct. They are less emanations of his unconscious, as a Freudian or orthodox Sendakian interpretation might suggest, than specters of his future. Alone with our thoughts and our toys, close to home and its comforts, we are tame even when we feel otherwise. It’s only later, when we’re set free among the other monsters, that things really start to get wild.

Dave Eggers interview: the heartbreak kid (The Telegraph)

There was a time not so long ago when Dave Eggers didn’t do interviews. Or rather, he would only do them by email. This was after a row with a New York Times journalist that ended with Eggers calling him a ‘bitter little b-----d’. All of which makes me feel rather nervous as I wait outside the office at his British publishers, where Eggers is waiting.

He turns out to be a chunky, outdoorsy-looking man of 39, wearing hiking boots and with dark, curly hair that’s only partially tamed by a centre parting. But he seems in a thoroughly affable mood – even if this will later be punctured by long bursts of frowning introspection.

For all his affability, Eggers, you suspect, has a pretty dark side – which will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who has read his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In the book, Eggers described how, aged 21, he brought up his eight-year-old brother Christopher – ‘Toph’. This was after their parents both died of cancer within weeks of one another.

Ten years after it was published, Eggers is a literary star. He’s written a novel, film scripts, two non-fiction novels and numerous short stories.

He’s also founded the most influential literary magazine in the United States, McSweeney’s. But childhood – his own childhood – still churns away inside him, which is why he teamed up with film director Spike Jonze to make the recent film version of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. As well as writing the script, Eggers has also written a novel, The Wild Things, a kind of companion piece to the movie, but very different from it.

Eggers remembers first reading Where the Wild Things Are when he was five and being absolutely terrified. What scared him so much? ‘Argh…’ he says, throwing up his hands. ‘I just reacted with pure terror. But then I used to hide under the couch during The Wizard of Oz. I think what frightened me the most was that I couldn’t work out if the Wild Things were nice or nasty. There was a moral ambiguity to them which really disturbed me.’

His own upbringing was much less riven with uncertainty – at least on the surface. Eggers grew up in a prosperous Chicago suburb where his father was an attorney and his mother a schoolteacher. But behind the happy façade, all was not well: his father drank and spent long periods out of work.

‘I can remember very clearly being seven or eight, which is the age the boy, Max, is in the book. And when I was raising my brother, that started off when he was eight – so it’s a very vivid moment that I’ve thought about a lot. I can remember feeling responsible for my mother’s happiness. If she was sad, I would think: “Can I do my robot manoeuvre and make her happy?” And slowly you come to realise that there’s only so much you can do.’

Eggers’s childhood was also weirdly cloistered. In all the time he was growing up, his parents never went out in the evening. ‘Not once. Isn’t that extraordinary? But while mum and dad were incredibly caring, it was also a very chaotic household where everyone fought about everything. So I know what it’s like to internalise all that chaos.

'For years, I resisted keeping any kind of schedule. Because my parents were very rigid and everything happened at a set time every day, I really fought against that. I mean, I didn’t even have a wallet until I was 27.’

When Eggers wrote The Wild Things, he basically turned himself into Max – except that the young Dave Eggers was much, much wilder than his fictional counterpart. ‘I think I was pretty crazy, looking back. For instance, when I was a kid we used to do stuff like soaking tennis balls in kerosene and playing football with them. At the same time, though, I remember being quite good in school and also fairly docile. So there are all these weird contradictions that are hard to reconcile.’

But he probably wouldn’t have written the book had he not got a phone call from Sendak, now 81, the original creator of Where the Wild Things Are. ‘Maurice was very involved in the film and he told me that people had been talking about a novel based on the screenplay. He asked me if I’d do it. I had to think about it, but I thought it might be a good place to explore all those thoughts that I’ve had about childhood.’

Eggers has a breathy, laconic way of talking that gives everything he says a carefully measured air, a sense of being repeatedly pored over. He’s plainly pored over Where the Wild Things Are in microscopic detail – first as a terrified child and now as a father. He and his wife, the writer Vendela Vida, have two small children, a girl and a boy.

‘I wrote it between our two children being born. I wanted to write something that might have the same sort of effect on a kid as the books I read when I was young had on me. I can remember exactly where I sat when my teacher first read Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. It’s like the cement is still wet when you’re that age; every little mark can become permanent.’

Fatherhood has brought other changes, too. When Eggers first started writing, he used to do so between midnight and 5am – always in what he calls a desperate, over-caffeinated, blood-strewn, tear-your-own-ear-off sort of way. ‘I had this romantic idea that I had to be at the end of my rope. But now with kids, I have to work bankers’ hours. Believe me, it’s hard to think of anything less romantic – or more sedentary.’

Given the success Eggers has had – President Barack Obama recently recommended his 2006 book, What is the What, to his cabinet – it comes as quite a surprise to hear him say that he’s never had any confidence in his work.

‘Even now, when I start something, I never think I’ll ever be able to get to the end, or that it will make any sense,’ he says. ‘Actually, The Wild Things is the first book I’ve ever written where I enjoyed it. Normally, there’ll be about one day a month where I think: “Wow, I had a good time today.” But with this, I just sat there chortling away.’

Eggers was in his mid-twenties when he started on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and if his confidence remains shaky now, it was in a far worse state then. ‘I remember turning in some chapters to an editor and when he said he liked them, I said: “What are you talking about?” I even accused him of not doing his job properly.

'Then when it came out, I felt so conflicted – partly because the title was so ironic. I just thought it would be funny to give the book this grandiose title when, of course, it’s a disaster. I thought about three people would read it and that would be the end of it.’

Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Even now, Eggers says, barely a day goes by without someone coming up and saying how much the book means to them. Not that this makes him feel much better.

‘I’ve had a really complicated relationship with it for some years. In a lot of ways the guy in it is me, but also he isn’t. We were very private people, my family, and that kind of self-revelation is something that was not in any way native to them. In a lot of ways, writing it was an act of rebellion.’

One of the reasons Eggers feels so ambivalent about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is because of what subsequently happened to his sister, Beth. When the book was published, she accused him of downplaying her role in their brother’s upbringing and beefing up his own. She later recanted saying she’d made a dreadful mistake – ‘I’m so embarrassed. I was having a terrible LaToya Jackson moment.’ Then, in November 2001, Beth Eggers committed suicide.

Eggers has never talked about his sister’s death. But it seems telling that he’s opted to write two books since in which trust has played the key role. In both What is the What and Zeitoun – out here next March – he is telling someone else’s story.

What is the What is the autobiography – albeit written by Eggers – of a real life Sudanese refugee who was separated from his parents, trekked across large swathes of Sudan and eventually came to the US.

Zeitoun is the story of a Muslim family from Syria. Abdulrahman Zeitoun stayed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, after which he saved the lives of several survivors, only to be interned as a suspected terrorist.

‘As far as I was concerned, I was there to tell their stories,’ Eggers says. ‘But if there was something they didn’t want in, then obviously I’d respect that. I suppose the most important thing with both books was to do no harm – unless it was harm to the Bush administration, which I was absolutely fine with.’

When he’s not sitting on his couch being sedentary, Eggers leads an extremely busy life. He’s the founder of 826 Valencia, a tutoring centre in San Francisco where children between the ages of six and 18 can go to develop their writing skills. He also has a shop in San Francisco that sells nothing but pirate gear.

Then there’s McSweeney’s, which publishes a quarterly literary magazine, a website, a monthly magazine called The Believer and a quarterly DVD magazine, Wholphin. All Eggers’s proceeds from What is the What went to Sudanese refugees in the US, while those from Zeitoun are going to the Zeitoun Foundation, which is helping in the rebuilding of New Orleans.

Eggers has also become a tireless campaigner for the power of the printed word in an internet age. His magazines aren’t afraid of publishing novella-length stories and his books luxuriate in the kind of playful design that could never be reproduced on a screen.

To hammer the point home, Eggers recently published the San Francisco Panorama, a 320-page, full-colour broadsheet newspaper; it sold out immediately.

He’s clearly seeking to do as much good as possible and I wondered how much his faith in human nature fluctuates between optimism and despair. ‘I think I’m far too hopeful and trusting. That’s something I got from my mum. Because I grew up with this naïve expectation of people doing right, I get shocked by every little violation. But however naïve I might be, I do feel that books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: “Let’s not forget this.”’

He breaks off. Our time is up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m babbling again. That’s the thing with me, you see. I never end tidily. I just kind of trail off…'

"Where the Wild Things Are" - Original Soundtrack - crítica (Clarín)

Link

Por Diego Lerer

A mediados de los '70, un maestro de primaria canadiense tuvo la idea de armar una banda de rock con sus alumnos. Pero en lugar se seguir los métodos y canciones tradicionales, puso a los chicos a cantar temas de David Bowie, Beach Boys y Wings, entre otros.

De allí salió el album (de culto) The Langley School Music Project y no es extraño escuchar que Spike Jonze, el director de la adaptación al cine del cuento para niños Where the Wild Things Are, de Maurice Sendak (que aquí se estrenará en marzo con el título local de Donde viven los monstruos) y la lider de Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Karen O, se inspiraron en ese modelo a la hora de crear la banda sonora del filme.

Karen y un extraordinario grupo de colaboradores (miembros de bandas como Deerhunter, Raconteurs, Queens of the Stone Age y de su propio grupo) se unieron así a un coro de unos quince niños sin experiencia musical, con los que ofrecen una decena de canciones que pasan de la ternura melancólica de Worried Shoes (excelente cover de Daniel Johnston) y la hermosa Hideaway, a la algarabía festivo/destructiva de Capsize, Rumpus o Heads Up.

All Is Love es, sin duda, el tema central del filme, casi logrando capturar todos los estados emocionales de la película en una sola canción: de la dulzura a la tristeza, de la melancolía a la contagiosa excitación.

Y si bien es cierto que la experiencia de este álbum recién se completa viendo el filme, no queda duda de que se trata de un bellísimo disco en sí mismo. Karen y Spike suman a las canciones breves interludios instrumentales y algunos diálogos, y así terminan captando la esencia de esta historia de un chico que se escapa de su casa y va a parar a una isla (¿imaginaria?) en la que vive un curioso grupo de criaturas de apariencia extrañísima -y de costumbres, a la vez, juguetonas y violentas-, pero absolutamente tiernos y queribles. Como los niños...«

"Where The Wild Things Are" B.O.S.
Karen O And The Kids (Bradford Cox, Dean Fertita, Imaad Wasif, Nick Zinner y otros)
Sello: Universal
Muy bueno

Algunas ideas sueltas sobre el uso de la tecnología en "Avatar" y "Where the Wild Things Are"

Como muchos lectores ya saben, no suelo hacer críticas de las películas que van a estrenarse previo a su publicación en el diario en el que trabajo por motivos que, bueno, son más que obvios. Pero también es obvio que "Avatar" es una película que ha despertado la curiosidad de muchísima gente y que se ha estrenado en casi todo el mundo este fin de semana, salvo en la Argentina en donde recién se estrenará el 1° de enero. Y que también muchos colegas han escrito sobre ella aún antes de su día de estreno.

Yo lidiaba con la idea de escribir algo acá sobre la película de James Cameron, pero no quería repetir lo que tal vez escriba en el diario (si es que escribo yo sobre la película). Y tampoco tenía mucho sentido lanzar un par de frases sueltas, como una especie de adelanto de lo que escribiré después. Hasta que ví, dos días después, "Where the Wild Things Are", de Spike Jonze, y me pareció que se podía armar un contrapunto entre ambas películas, que tienen mucho más que ver de lo que parece a primera vista.

En especial, lo que me interesaba analizar era la relación de ambas películas con la tecnología digital. Se puede decir, a simple vista, que "Avatar" es lo más sofisticado (hi-fi) que se puede hacer tecnológicamente hoy en cine, mientras que el filme de Jonze opta por una estética "lo-fi". No sólo en las criaturas (los Na'vi frente a los "Wild Things", que también son en parte CGI pero Jonze hace todo lo posible por que no se note) sino en la dirección de arte (maximalista, sobrecargada de objetos, cosas, animales, plantas, etc, por parte de Cameron; despojadísima en la de Jonze: arena, sol, mar, tierra y maderas, poco más). Y hasta la música: los bombazos de James Horner frente a Karen O y su coro de niños...

Se puede decir, a la vez, que son dos películas que en cierta manera contradicen esas visiones en sus formatos narrativos. Más allá de sus desafíos digitales, "Avatar" es una narración clásica, tradicional, que funcionaría de la misma manera con o sin efectos. El drama y la acción están organizadas de una manera clásica, casi podríamos decir retro comparada con los Michael Bays de hoy. Jonze, en cambio, tras los primeros 20 minutos, llega a una especie de quietud narrativa que poco tiene que ver con esa tradición y más con el cine europeo de los '60 y el norteamericano de los '70. De cualquier manera, "el viaje del héroe" en "Where the Wild Things Are", indirectamente, se mantiene dentro de los lineamientos tradicionales de la estructura narrativa clásica.

Las experiencias son casi opuestas. Cameron, en 3D, te absorbe desde los sentidos, te atrapa desde la observación de objetos, de criaturas fantásticas, desde el montaje, la creatividad puesta en cada detalle del plano y de los personajes: sus rostros y expresiones, el nivel de complejidad de cada segundo en pantalla. Nada de eso hay en WTWTA: de hecho, a la tercera o cuarta vez que Max y algunas de las criaturas caminan por las dunas, o ven el amanecer frente al mar, uno tiene la sensación de ya haber pasado por ahí antes. La primera es una película multicolor, la segunda es amarronada, gris, y los saltos de las criaturas son lo más parecido a un "efecto especial" que tiene. La primera quiere ser táctil y, tal vez por el mundo que describe no lo sea del todo. La segunda lo es, casi sin esfuerzo, ya que todos reconocemos el mundo que habita Max más allá de las "criaturas salvajes".

Sin embargo, el filme de Jonze --al menos a mí-- me provocó un grado de emoción al que jamás se acerca, ni por un segundo, la película de Cameron. Más allá del asombro que producen sus maravillas técnicas y su inmersivo 3D, resulta difícil meterse emocionalmente en la película. La sensación es la de estar viendo una muy atractiva feria de vanidades, un despliegue que provoca el aplauso y el shock, pero que a la vez ese shock te mantiene a distancia. Raro, después de todo, viniendo de una película cuyo 3D está armado para acercarte a ese mismo mundo.

El filme de Jonze te arranca lágrimas porque te invita a encontrarlas de a poco, a descubrirlas. No hay romances evidentes, enfrentamientos claros, choques culturales delineados. Todo funciona en una confusa zona gris que es la infancia, una infancia en la que la mayor diversión es lanzarse rodando por una duna, tirarse arriba de una choza y romperla, o lanzar bolas de tierra a la cara de un amigo... Pero esas pequeñas amistades, esas emociones que surjen de esas conexiones son las que te dejan pensando en la película mucho tiempo después que termina. "Avatar", en cambio, te empapa, te noquea y se esfuma con mayor facilidad.

Son dos acercamientos distintos al cine y al manejo de la tecnología en relación a la narración. No quiero con esto ir en contra del CGI porque no es lo que pienso --muchas de las películas más emotivas que vi en estos años fueron las de Pixar--, pero sí de la forma en la que una cosa debería relacionarse con la otra. Tal vez, en un futuro no tan lejano, los increíbles avances formales de "Avatar" se topen con un director con mayor sutileza para el tratamiento de las emociones. No digo que Cameron no lo sea, recuerdo grandes momentos emotivos en casi todos sus filmes (sí, adoro el final de "Titanic"), pero tengo la sensación de que aquí priorizó la tecnología dejando lo demás en segundo plano. La mucho más difícil película de Jonze se jugó a que sean los momentos robados a la infancia --y no los efectos-- los que ganen la partida. Son sentimientos más difíciles de encontrar, pero cuando se toca esa fibra sensible, se gana cualquier partida.

Con sus diferentes modos, son las dos primeras grandes películas del 2010.

Nominaciones: Chicago Film Critics

BEST PICTURE
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
A Serious Man
Up in the Air
Where the Wild Things Are

BEST DIRECTOR
Kathryn Bigelow (-) The Hurt Locker
Joel & Ethan Coen (-) A Serious Man
Spike Jonze (-) Where the Wild Things Are
Jason Reitman (-) Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino (-) Inglourious Basterds

BEST ACTOR
Jeff Bridges (-) Crazy Heart
George Clooney (-) Up in the Air
Matt Damon (-) The Informant!
Jeremy Renner (-) The Hurt Locker
Michael Stuhlbarg (-) A Serious Man

BEST ACTRESS
Abbie Cornish (-) Bright Star
Carey Mulligan (-) An Education
Maya Rudolph (-) Away We Go
Gabourey Sidibe (-) Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Meryl Streep (-) Julie & Julia

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Peter Capaldi (-) In the Loop
Woody Harrelson (-) The Messenger
Christian McKay (-) Me and Orson Welles
Stanley Tucci (-) The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz (-) Inglourious Basterds

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Vera Farmiga (-) Up in the Air
Anna Kendrick (-) Up in the Air
Mo’Nique (-) Precious
Julianne Moore (-) A Single Man
Natalie Portman (-) Brothers

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Away We Go (-) Dave Eggers & Vendela Vida
The Hurt Locker (-) Mark Boal
Inglourious Basterds (-) Quentin Tarantino
A Serious Man (-) Joel & Ethan Coen
Up (-) Bob Peterson

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
An Education (-) Nick Hornby
In the Loop (-) Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci & Tony Roche
The Informant! (-) Scott Z. Burns
Up in the Air (-) Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner
Where the Wild Things Are (-) Spike Jonze & Dave Eggers

BEST DOCUMENTARY
Anvil!: The True Story of Anvil
Capitalism: A Love Story
The Cove
Food, Inc.
Tyson

BEST FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM
Broken Embraces
Red Cliff
Sin Nombre
Summer Hours
The White Ribbon

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Ponyo
The Princess and the Frog
Up

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Avatar (-) Mauro Fiore
Bright Star (-) Greig Fraser
The Hurt Locker (-) Barry Ackroyd
Inglourious Basterds (-) Robert Richardson
Where the Wild Things Are (-) Lance Acord

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Avatar (-) James Horner
Fantastic Mr. Fox (-) Alexandre Desplat
The Informant! (-) Marvin Hamlisch
Up (-) Michael Giacchino
Where the Wild Things Are (-) Carter Burwell & Karen Orzolek

MOST PROMISING PERFORMER
Sharlto Copley (-) District 9
Christian McKay (-) Me and Orson Welles
Carey Mulligan (-) An Education
Max Records (-) Where the Wild Things Are
Gabourey Sidibe (-) Precious

MOST PROMISING FILMMAKER
Neill Blomkamp (-) District 9
Scott Cooper (-) Crazy Heart
Cary Fukunaga (-) Sin Nombre
Duncan Jones (-) Moon
Marc Webb (-) (500) Days of Summer

"Where the Wild Things Are" - Guion original de Spike Jonze y Dave Eggers

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'Wild Things' delivers $32.5M box-office rumpus (AP)

Movie fans are eagerly making the journey to "Where the Wild Things Are."

The live-action adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved picture book led the box office with a $32.5 million opening weekend.

"Where the Wild Things Are" was followed by Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler's vengeance thriller "Law Abiding Citizen," which debuted with $21.3 million.

Expanding into wider release, the low-budget horror sensation "Paranormal Activity" moved up to No. 3 with $20.2 million.

"Paranormal Activity" outdid the premiere of the big studio fright flick "The Stepfather," which played in nearly four times as many theaters but managed just a No. 5 opening with $12.3 million.

"Where the Wild Things Are", de Spike Jonze (The New York Times)

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: October 16, 2009

Most of the snuffling, growling beasts that roam and often stomp through “Where the Wild Things Are,” Spike Jonze’s alternately perfect and imperfect if always beautiful adaptation of the Maurice Sendak children’s book, come covered in fur. Some have horns; most have twitchy tails and vicious-looking teeth. The beasts snarl and howl and sometimes sniffle. One has a runny nose. Yet another has pale, smooth skin and the kind of large, wondering eyes that usually grow smaller and less curious with age. This beast is Max, the boy in the wolf costume who one night slips into the kind of dream the movies were made for.

Max, played by the newcomer Max Records, is the pivotal character in this intensely original and haunting movie, though by far the most important figure here proves to be Mr. Jonze. After years in the news, the project and its improbability — a live-action movie based on a slender, illustrated children’s book that runs fewer than 40 pages, some without any words at all — are no longer a surprise. Even so, it startles and charms and delights largely because Mr. Jonze’s filmmaking exceeds anything he’s done in either of his inventive previous features, “Being John Malkovich” (1999) and “Adaptation” (2002). With “Where the Wild Things Are” he has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.

First published in 1963, the book follows the adventures of Max, who looks to be about 6 (he’s closer to 9 in the movie) and enters making mischief “of one kind and another” while dressed in a wolf suit with a long, bushy tail and a hood with ears and whiskers. After his unseen mother calls him “wild thing!” and he threatens to eat her up, he is sent to his room without dinner. But his room magically transforms into a forest and, finding a boat, he sails to a place populated by giant, hairy, scary beasts that make him their king. Eventually the tug of home pulls him back to his room, where supper (“still hot”) sits waiting.

There are different ways to read the wild things, through a Freudian or colonialist prism, and probably as many ways to ruin this delicate story of a solitary child liberated by his imagination. Happily, Mr. Jonze, who wrote the screenplay with Dave Eggers, has not attempted to enlarge or improve the story by interpreting it. Rather, he has expanded it, very gently. The movie is still a story about a boy, his mother, his room, his loneliness and various wild things of his creation. But now there are new details and shadings to complement the book’s material, like Max’s older sister, Claire (Pepita Emmerichs), whose lank hair and adolescent gloom are touchingly mirrored by a wild thing named K W (voiced by Lauren Ambrose).

Like Mr. Sendak’s unruly boy, the movie’s Max is a storm without warning, throwing himself into the story while noisily chasing the family dog down some stairs. Shot with a handheld camera that can barely contain the boy’s image inside the frame, these clattering, jangling introductory moments are disruptive, disorienting — it’s hard to see exactly where Max and the dog are as you all tumble down — and purely exhilarating. Yet after jolting the story to excited life, Mr. Jonze quiets the movie down for a series of flawlessly calibrated scenes of Max alone and with his sister and mother (Catherine Keener), an interlude that tells you everything you need to know about the boy and that announces all that will happen next.

These scenes, lasting 20 minutes or so, are achingly intimate and tender. Mr. Jonze, working with his regular cinematographer, Lance Acord, brings you close into Max’s world as he builds an igloo in the street, starts a snowball fight with Claire’s friends and is left to weep alone after the igloo is destroyed. (When Max slides into the igloo, the camera is right there, which means that you’re there too when disaster strikes.) The world is cruel, children too, lessons that Max absorbs through a smear of tears and hurt. The wound doesn’t heal. Max clomps and then stomps and then erupts: he roars at his mother. She roars back. And, then, like his storybook counterpart — like everyone else — he sails into the world, adrift and alone.

This is the existential given at the heart of both Mr. Sendak’s book and Mr. Jonze’s movie, which might come as a surprise to anyone who misremembers the original, with its dark, crosshatched lines; spiky emotions; Max’s many frowns; and the “terrible teeth” and “terrible claws” of the creatures. Though their conceptual bite remains sharply intact, Mr. Jonze’s wild things are softer, cuddlier-looking than the drawn ones because they have partly been brought to waddling life by performers in outsize costumes. (The fluid tremors of emotion enlivening the fuzzy faces were primarily created through computer-generated animation.) The vexed, whining, caressing voices — James Gandolfini as Carol, Catherine O’Hara as Judith, Forest Whitaker as Ira, Paul Dano as Alexander and Chris Cooper as Douglas — do the expressive rest.

Max discovers the wild things on an island, destroying their homes in fury and for kicks. Introductions are made, wary sniffs exchanged. But these are his kind of beasts, after all, and so, amid the rough splendor of a primeval forest where the air swirls with pink petals and snowflakes, he becomes their king. “Let the wild rumpus start!” he yells, as all the creatures, Max now included, rampage. It’s all very new (and scary) but also vaguely familiar, because we’ve seen it before. The tantrums, tears and angry words from the film’s first 20 minutes all start to resurface during this idyll, much as our waking hours invade our dreams: the snowball fight is recast as a dirt-clod battle. Max plays the angry child and then the reproving parent.

Much is left unexplained in Mr. Jonze’s adaptation, including Max’s melancholia, which hangs over him, his family and his wild things like a gathering storm. But childhood has its secrets, mysteries, small and large terrors. When a hilariously bungling teacher explains, rather too casually, that the sun is going to die, the flash of horror on Max’s face indicates that he understands that the sun won’t be the only one to go. There are other reasons, perhaps, an absent father, a distracted mother. (And when a frightened Max listens to an argument between Carol and K W, you hear the echoes of parental discord.) But such analysis is for therapy, not art, and one of the film’s pleasures is its refusal of banal explanation.

On occasion, Mr. Jonze lingers too long on his lovely pictures, particularly on the island, where the film’s energy starts to wane, despite the glorious whoops in Carter Burwell and Karen O’s score. Mr. Jonze loves Max’s wild things, but you don’t need to hang around long to adore them as well. Yet these are minor complaints about a film that often dazzles during its quietest moments, as when Max sets sail, and you intuit his pluck and will from the close-ups of him staring into the unknown. He looms large here, as we do inside our heads. But when the view abruptly shifts to an overhead shot, you see that the boat is simply a speck amid an overwhelming vastness. This is the human condition, in two eloquent images.

“Where the Wild Things Are” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). The wild things in the movie have been designed and directed toward a distinctly older age group than the book’s original audience. If monsters give you the willies, beware!

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Opens on Friday nationwide. Directed by Spike Jonze; written by Mr. Jonze and Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak; director of photography, Lance Acord; edited by Eric Zumbrunnen and James Haygood; music by Karen O and Carter Burwell; production designer, K. K. Barrett; produced by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, John B. Carls, Mr. Sendak and Vincent Landay; released by Warner Brothers Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

WITH: Max Records (Max), Catherine Keener (Mom), Mark Ruffalo (Boyfriend), Lauren Ambrose (KW), Chris Cooper (Douglas), James Gandolfini (Carol), Catherine O’Hara (Judith), Forest Whitaker (Ira), Paul Dano (Alexander) and Pepita Emmerichs (Claire).

"Where the Wild Things Are", de Spike Jonze (Variety review)

A Warner Bros. release presented in association with Legendary Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures and KLG Film Invest of a Playtone/Wild Things production. Produced by Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, John Carls, Maurice Sendak, Vincent Landay. Executive producers, Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, Scott Mednick, Bruce Berman. Directed by Spike Jonze. Screenplay, Jonze, Dave Eggers, based on the book by Maurice Sendak.

Max - Max Records
Mom - Catherine Keener
Boyfriend - Mark Ruffalo
KW - Lauren Ambrose
Douglas - Chris Cooper
Carol - James Gandolfini
Judith - Catherine O'Hara
Ira - Forest Whitaker
Alexander - Paul Dano

By TODD MCCARTHY

Fleet of foot, emotionally attuned to its subject and instinctively faithful to its celebrated source, "Where the Wild Things Are" earns a lot of points for its hand-crafted look and unhomogenized, dare-one-say organic rendering of unrestrained youthful imagination. But director Spike Jonze's sharp instincts and vibrant visual style can't quite compensate for the lack of narrative eventfulness that increasingly bogs down this bright-minded picture. Widespread curiosity about the cinematic fate of Maurice Sendak's childhood perennial looks to spur sizable if not stellar commercial results in all markets, including on Imax screens.

Thematically, comparisons to everything from "The Wizard of Oz" to "Coraline" are not out of order for this flight of fancy on the part of an emotionally neglected 9-year-old boy; the driving impulse to escape an oppressive real life through creative fantasy is the same in all these books-to-films, as is their success in speaking simultaneously to children and adults. At the same time, contrasting "Wild Things" to two such superlative works in the same vein sharply shows up the new film's lack of density and complexity.

Granted, Jonze had a lot less to work with going in, as Sendak's 1963 volume, consisting of just 18 picture panels and 338 words of text, can be digested in less than five minutes. It's a simple but powerfully evocative tale of a mischievous boy who, sent to bed without supper, finds his room transformed into a dense forest and, after a long sea voyage, lands on an island populated by several fearsome-looking beasts, whom he tricks into believing he's "the most wild thing of all."

The most bracing section of the film is the first 15 minutes. Using a spot-on handheld camera and deft edits ruthlessly timed to when you need an air intake, Jonze pins the action on the aggressive energy of Max (Max Records) as he terrorizes his dog, bombards neighbor kids with snowballs and disrupts cozy time his mother (Catherine Keener) tries to have with a boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo, barely present). A great-looking kid, Records behaves with credible abandon and, without any child-actor mannerisms, provides the film with a solid center throughout.

Perhaps the greatest liberty Jonze and screenwriting cohort Dave Eggers take with Sendak's little yarn is their dispensing with the flowering of Max's bedroom, instead having him run off into some woods in his white wolf costume and find a sailboat that takes him through turbulent seas to a distant shore.

Upon arrival, Max finds six large and potentially dangerous creatures variously outfitted with scary horns, sharp claws, pointy teeth and large stomachs that need filling. Taking advantage of the beasts' general forlornness and evident need of an authority figure, Max introduces himself and is quickly accepted as their king. As in the book, Max's immediate command is, "Let the wild rumpus start!," whereupon one and all engage in mad behavior worthy of kids of all ages. By the time everyone calms down, however, it dawns that these big wild things are just like people -- in fact, rather too much so.

Free to have the wild things speak however they wanted, Jonze and Eggers surprisingly give them the voices and attitudes of middle-aged urban kibitzers; vaguely complainy and neurotic, the creatures are dominated by their sense of isolation and sadness. On the face of it, this is a choice with some wit behind it. But it also defangs the beasts from the outset -- one never fears that any of them would dream of making a meal out of Max -- and in the long run makes them far too ordinary.

Absent any sense of jeopardy or dramatic complications, the 70-odd minutes of screen time Max spends on the island (beautifully represented by rugged locations on the southern Australian coast near Melbourne) becomes a blur of rambunctious shenanigans, fort building, pretend warfare and confided feelings, particularly on the part of the imposing Carol (James Gandolfini), the most developed wild thing and the one to whom Max becomes closest.

There are fine creative inventions along the way, notably the large birds' nest-style structures the island inhabitants build and two funny squawking owls that aren't in the book. But nothing much is ever at stake, causing a story that begins in dynamic fashion to slowly devolve to the level of fleeting whimsy.

Most of the attention the film received during its prolonged production centered on the difficulty of seamlessly combining the large creature costumes with CGI facial expressions. The wild things move around pretty well and interact with Max in a credible way that fully justifies the no doubt difficult decision not to use CGI all the way. All the more ironic, then, that the film's biggest problem is not the look of the creatures but the manner in which they speak.

That said, the thesps provide low-key, nuanced readings, with Gandolfini and Lauren Ambrose particularly distinguishing themselves with dialogue that often seems odd coming from the toothsome mouths seen onscreen.

Excellent production values stress the relative realness of what's on view compared to the digital worlds of most kidpics these days. The alt-rock tenor of the music scoring is refreshing at first, but the predictability of the music cues proves increasingly wearisome.

Camera (Technicolor, Panavision widescreen), Lance Acord; editors, Eric Zumbrunnen, James Haygood; music, Karen O, Carter Burwell; music supervisor, Ren Klyce; production designer, K.K. Barrett; supervising art director, Jeff Thorp; art director, Lucinda Thomson; set designers, Michael Bell, Tel Stolfo; set decorator, Lisa Thompson; costume designer, Casey Storm; creature costumes, Jim Henson's Creature Shop; sound (Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS), Gary Wilkins (Australia); sound designer, Klyce; re-recording mixers, Michael Semanick, Juan Peralta, Klyce; animation and visual effects supervisor, Daniel Jeannette; animation and visual effects, Framestore; animation supervisor, Michael Eames; visual effects supervisors, Marc Klobe, Ben Gibbs; associate producers, Natalie Farrey, Catherine Keener, Emma Wilcockson; assistant director, Thomas Patrick Smith; second unit director, John Mahaffie; second unit camera, Brad Shield; casting, Justine Baddeley, Kimberly Davis-Wagner. Reviewed at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank, Oct. 8, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG. Running time: 100 MIN.

"Where the Wild Things Are" - Let the wild rumpus start! (Newsweek)

By Ramin Setoodeh and Andrew Romano

For more than 40 years, kids have wondered about Where the Wild Things Are. Are they real or imaginary? Friends or foes? Now that we're grown-ups, we still can't help you, but we may have figured out where they really are: living with author Maurice Sendak in his Connecticut home. The front door is flanked by Wild Thing statuettes; vintage stuffed monsters and framed posters fill the living room. There's even a bronze sculpture of Max and his sailboat in the center of the kitchen table. The always acerbic Sendak, 81, inhabits the world of the Wild Things as fully as any child—he actually placed an order for a Wild Things parka during our interview—so we couldn't wait to ask him about Spike Jonze's big-budget, live-action movie based on the book. To discuss the dark, unorthodox adaptation, Sendak invited us over, along with Jonze and novelist-screenwriter Dave Eggers (who participated via speakerphone from San Francisco) for an exclusive group interview:

What makes a good kids' story?
Sendak: How would I know? I just write the books. But I do know that my parents were immigrants and they didn't know that they should clean the stories up for us. So we heard horrible, horrible stories, and we loved them, we absolutely loved them. But the three of us—my sister, my brother, and myself—grew up very depressed people.

Dave, do you remember Where the Wild Things Are from your childhood?
Eggers: I do. I remember when I was really little, I was scared of everything—Willy Wonka scared me to death, and the Oompa-Loompa people scared me to death. When I was 3 and 4, I would leave the room and hide under the couch when those movies came on. My first experience with Where the Wild Things Are—I couldn't read it. And my mother thought I would love it, because I was that barbaric kid that Maurice was talking about—really hyper and wild. But it scared me, mainly because of the nuances of the monsters. It just wasn't clear if they were good or bad, if they were going to eat Max or not.

The monsters were based on adults, right?
Sendak: The monsters were based on relatives. They came from Europe, and they came on weekends to eat, and my mom had to cook. Three aunts and three uncles who spoke no English, practically. They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do. And I knew that my mother's cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn't taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that's who the Wild Things are. They're foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don't understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate. So there you go.

Maurice, what did you think when you first saw the movie?
Sendak: I thought it was never going to end. [Laughter] I say that to be funny. The truth of the matter is, I saw immediately a combination of things that I wanted and I loved. The courage of the child, the danger of the situation—it could turn on a dime. They could have eaten him. All of that was apparent right from the start. The artistry was something they would have to take care of. I was happy right from the beginning. I didn't have to suffer like they did—schlepping from this place to that place, dealing with the studio.

One disagreement you had is that in the book, Max stays in his room. In the film, he runs away from home.
Sendak: It was one of my favorite scenes in the book. It was so much about the ability of children to imagine themselves in another place. He was a prisoner, locked in his room by his mother. And by his imagination he was able to get through those few hours where he was isolated and trapped. That's how I saw it. But there was something so totally valid in what Spike was doing. I remember I was having fights with my editor about this book.

What were the fights about?
Sendak: Well, I'll just give you a silly example. The entire staff at the publishing house were keen on my changing the word "hot" to "warm" on the last page. Because "hot" meant "burn."

Jonze: The soup was "still hot."

Sendak: It was going to burn the kid. I couldn't believe it. But it turned into a real world war, just that word, and I won.

How did you win?
Sendak: Just going at it. Just trying to convey how dopey "warm" sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is "hot."

Spike, did you have fights like that when you were making this film? With the studio, not with Maurice.
Jonze: Oh, yeah, definitely.

Eggers: No, there were no fights! [Laughter] No! Sorry, go ahead.

Jonze: Yeah. The big disagreement is that they thought I was making a children's film and I thought I was making a film about childhood, and so, along the way ...

Eggers: Keep dancing, Spike!

Jonze: I mean, I think it's a film—I want children to see it, and it's not like I made it not for children, and it'll be on the video shelf under CHILDREN'S, but I didn't come at it that way. I came at it from the inside out as opposed to the outside in. In the end, though, the studio let us make the movie we wanted to make.

Sendak: It's really an American problem.

What do you mean?
Sendak: Europeans have done films about children, like The 400 Blows or My Life as a Dog, which is one of the most wonderful movies ever. It's tough to watch his suffering when his mother is dying and he scoots under the bed. That's the kind of way they have of dealing with children and they always have. We are squeamish. We are Disneyfied. We don't want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that's never our intention.

Do you think Disney is bad for children?
Sendak: I think it's terrible.

But you have all the Disney characters on your mantel behind you.
Sendak: I adored Mickey Mouse when I was a child. He was the emblem of happiness and funniness. You went to the movies then, you saw two movies and a short. When Mickey Mouse came on the screen and there was his big head, my sister said she had to hold onto me. I went berserk. I stood on the chair screaming, "My hero! My hero!" He had a lot of guts when he was young. We're both about the same age; we're about a month apart. He was the little brother I always wanted.

Jonze: What was he like when he was young?

Sendak: He had teeth.

Jonze: Literally?

Sendak: He had literally teeth. I have toys in the other room.

Jonze: Was he more dangerous?

Sendak: Yes. He was more dangerous. He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened, was that he became so popular—this is my own theory—they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck. And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He's too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point.

What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?
Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate.

Because kids can handle it?
Sendak: If they can't handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it's not a question that can be answered.

Jonze: Dave, you want to field that one?

Eggers: The part about kids wetting their pants? Should kids wear diapers when they go to the movies? I think adults should wear diapers going to it, too. I think everyone should be prepared for any eventuality.

Sendak: I think you're right. This concentration on kids being scared, as though we as adults can't be scared. Of course we're scared. I'm scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can't fall asleep. It never stops. We're grown-ups; we know better, but we're afraid.

Why is that important in art?
Sendak: Because it's truth. You don't want to do something that's all terrifying. I saw the most horrendous movies that were unfit for child's eyes. So what? I managed to survive.

Jonze: It's interesting because at this point it's being talked about. I met some guy on the subway the other day—I was waiting on the subway platform for the F train the other day, and this guy comes up to me who's roughly my age, and he said, "Is the F train running today? God, I've been waiting here forever, and I've got to get down to this record store. It's the only used-CD store in town." And he was very friendly, nice guy, so I was talking to him about used-CD stores, then the guy was like, "You know what movie I can't wait to see is Where the Wild Things Are." And I was looking at him, trying to see—is he just messing with me now? Does he know that I made this? Or is this sincere? And so I just listened to him talk for a minute, and I said, "What made you say that?" And he said, "Oh, because I used to skate a lot, and it made me think, the director's a skateboarder, and I like his stuff," and I was like, "Uh-huh." And so I'm still waiting to see, is he messing with me? And he keeps talking about the movie, and how he's heard about it, and he's like, "The movie's amazing." And I asked if he'd seen it, and he was like, "No, but I saw the trailer. I know it's controversial—they said it's controversial. I think something really crazy happens at the end." [Laughter] And at this point, I'm still trying to figure out if he's messing with me, so I'm like, "Are you f--king with me?" "No, no, they said it's controversial," and then he's going on, and he's telling me how the director made all these music videos, he made skate videos, and I finally realize that he is just genuinely being sincere, and this conversation's gone on for 10 minutes, and I finally say, "I'm Spike, I'm the director," and he just looked at me for a minute and he got really sincere and he's like, "Oh, so why is it controversial?" [Laughter]

Eggers: I think there's plenty of kids who have grown up with a different type of children's movie, but my daughter, since she's been a year, her favorite movie's been The Wizard of Oz, and her favorite part's been the sepia-toned part at the beginning. Once it gets bright she loses interest a little bit.

Sendak: That is so fascinating that she likes the beginning more than the rest of it, because the beginning is so scary. One, the sepia tone itself tells you to expect something stormy. The fact that they all unwittingly abandon her. Her aunt doesn't have time for her. Bert Lahr [the Cowardly Lion] doesn't have time for her. No one has time for her. And her being alone, even for that brief time—how terrifying that must be for her. It surely was for me.

Eggers: And that lady takes her dog, goes off with it, but I think that my daughter's favorite part is when Toto jumps out of the basket, runs home, and jumps through the window, and I think that's what she's always waiting for is that there's something at stake there and the dog might be gone forever but ultimately good triumphs, even though the next thing that happens is the house being picked up in a vortex. But there is something at stake, and ultimately kids do want something at stake.

Sendak: I've always had a private theory that when she gets home and she's in bed, and Frank Morgan [the Wizard], at the window, says something like, "Is she all right?" And her uncle makes it clear that they might lose her. It goes by very quickly, but then she tries to tell them her adventure, she tries to tell them what it was like when she was in Oz, and her aunt says, "It's all right, Dorothy, just lie down." In truth, the grown-ups just don't want to hear her death fantasy. They don't want to think that Dorothy could be in so much trouble that she might not survive. And she lays back in bed and says, "There's no place like home." And there were people who were very critical of that—sentimental—but for me it was pure irony. There is no place like home. Where the hell else is she gonna go? It's the opposite of sentimental—it's the hard truth. Grown-ups are afraid for children. It's not children who are afraid. That movie is unbelievably great.

Do you think it could hurt a child's imagination to read a book and then see the movie, like there's only one way to see the world they imagined?
Eggers: Every kid I've ever talked to says the same thing, which is that the book was better—no offense, Spike.

Jonze: Oh, s--t. [Laughter] Kids are so fiercely opinionated, that if they love the Harry Potter books and they go see the movie, they'll be the first to say, "That was wrong! They didn't get that right!" They're storytellers themselves. They're critics. They're going to have the critical opinion.

Dave, what's the difference between writing a movie and a novel?
Eggers: Writing this script couldn't be more different than sitting alone and writing a novel. With Spike and I, we were really in the room together for eight hours a day, and writing for at least 20 minutes of that. We really examined and fought over every word as we went along. Before we put any dialogue down, we had talked for weeks about who each character was and what they were motivated by, and what did Douglas want, what was his relationship with Carol, what would they do in this situation together. Spike had to make sure these characters were as deep and real as possible. We had whole backstories for each one of them.

How did you name them?
Jonze: Dave and I named them. We took the book and went to Kinko's and blew up big poster-size images of each spread. Our dining-room walls were covered with every spread of the book. As we'd write, we'd look at the images, just sort of soaking it in. It was a process of going back to the book and sitting and listening to the character. You realized how certain characters came and went in the book. The characters appearing and disappearing, it makes it more wild.

Maurice, you never had names for the characters?
Sendak: I never wanted them to have names. When it was an opera and the director and I were working on it during rehearsal, we had to have names to tell them when they were screwing up. They had Jewish names: Moishe, Schmuel. You have to remember this is an English opera house. We were all speaking Yiddish. It was very funny. But the names were dropped after the opera. They never had names until they became movie stars.