“..Where the Wild Things Are comes to the cinema..”
“..Director Spike Jonze tells how he turned his favourite childhood book by Maurice Sendak into a film with James Gandolfini
Just before interviewing Spike Jonze in Soho, I dart into a bookshop and reread Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
It’s been years, and there are so many things I’d forgotten — such as in the time the furious Max disappears to the island in high dudgeon, becomes king of a race of savage creatures, rules wisely for years and finally returns home, his supper is still hot.
I didn’t spot that one when I was five.
I also didn’t spot that the whole book is 10 sentences long.
Ten sentences.
So how did Spike Jonze make that into a 100-minute movie?
“It was a complicated process,” Jonze says in his halting voice — a curious blend of laid-back slacker and hyped-up kid.
“It seemed that every choice we made turned out to be the hardest possible way to do it.”
He’s bent over a huge computer screen in a postproduction house, editing and re-editing a sequence where the Wild Things mount an enormous mud-slinging battle, egged on by Max, only to find that — as your mum used to warn you —
– someone gets hurt and it ends in tears.
As I peer over his shoulder, the first surprise is that the Wild Things aren’t animated.
Or at least, they don’t appear to be.
They are great big shaggy 9ft-tall Sesame Street characters, with the faces of James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper and Lauren Ambrose.
Jonze had the cast act the movie in normal clothes, filmed unknown actors performing the script in the costumes all over again, then melded the two together.
It seems like the long way round — but then, the whole movie went the long way round..”
go to source/story>>Where the Wild Things Are comes to the cinema - Times Online