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SPIKE JONZEINTERVIEW BY SHANE SMITH PORTRAITS BY TERRY RICHARDSON  In the five years since we’ve become friends with Spike Jonze, he has never not been working on his movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. It’s been a life-consuming, soul-questioning, long-day’s-journey-into-night, half-decade quest for Spike to make this film according to his very specific vision for it, and it’s been hugely inspiring to watch it grow and evolve. And now, like a beautiful little baby crowning the rim of the birth canal or a ripe, juicy tomato plumply twisting on the vine, Where the Wild Things Are is about to burst forth into the world. It’s like no film we’ve seen before, and we can’t wait to witness how the general moviegoing public reacts to it. Vice founder Shane Smith went to London this summer to visit Spike as he completed effects work on WTWTA there. Shane was en route to Africa to film for VBS.TV, and he was reeling from the gargantuan doses of malaria medication he’d been taking. Before he met up with Spike, he attended a private viewing of Where the Wild Things Are. Then he rushed straight into Spike’s arms and, overcome with emotion, sobbed awhile. And then the two of them sat in Shane’s hotel room and talked all about Spike’s new movie, life, and love. Vice: I just saw your new film. It’s called Where the Wild Things Are— Spike Jonze: Yeah… [laughs] I obviously read the book when I was a kid, and I remembered all of the characters, especially Max. But I couldn’t remember a lot of the specifics. Like, does he use a boat in the book too? He does. The basic elements are all taken from the book. But most important to me was to capture the spirit and tone of the book. At least what that was to me… You read it when you were a kid too? Oh yeah, definitely. And it was one of your favorites? For sure. Was it in your brain for a long time that you wanted to make it into a film? No, because it was one of those things that I loved but I wouldn’t have wanted to touch. I didn’t know what I could add to it that wouldn’t ruin it. But I’ve gotten to know Maurice Sendak over the last 14 years and talked to him about it occasionally. He would ask me if I would want to do it and I would contemplate it and try to think of— Hold on, hold on. So he asked you if you wanted to do it? It was something he was developing into a movie for the last 20 years. Do you know who else was ever going to do it? I’m not sure who had gotten really close to it, but he talked to a lot of different people. It must have felt amazing to be personally asked by him. Oh yeah. I mean, I love him, and I love his books. And since I’ve loved them from when I was so young—In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are and Pierre and The Nutshell Library—those images are all so… Ingrained in your head? Right. When you love something from that age, you end up loving it really deeply because the images are there way down inside you. As you’ve grown, you’ve grown around them and they’ve just gotten deeper into you. Sometimes I get mad when someone takes one of my favorite movies and then remakes it, or takes a great book and films it. There’s a huge risk of misinterpreting the original thing. Were you worried about that? Like, “Wow, it’s a huge responsibility to make the most beloved children’s book of all time into a movie”? Definitely. Not only did I not want to ruin it for other people, I didn’t want to ruin it for myself. So, initially, I didn’t want to do it because I didn’t have an idea of how to do it. And then one day it clicked? Well, I think it was probably the third time Maurice talked to me about it. He sent me a script, a draft of a script— So he had been writing it? No, not Maurice himself. He had worked with different writers or directors over the years and tried different versions. I read this one draft and it wasn’t bad. But I realized what it could be and I got really excited. It was a really simple idea—to take the feeling of the book and expand who Max is and who the Wild Things are. And my idea was the Wild Things are wild emotions. It was that simple, but it was enough for me to know I could explore that idea and still be true to the book. I think that as a kid, for me at least, wild emotions were probably the things that were the scariest. Like freaking out but you didn’t know why you were freaked out, getting hysterical. Exactly. Maybe at the time I wouldn’t have analyzed it like this, but I think that wild emotions, both your own and those of the people around you, can be really confusing and disorienting as a kid. And the most accepted interpretation of Where the Wild Things Are is that it’s about emotions and control—or lack of control—over them as a kid. Reading that script, suddenly I felt like with that idea, if you were going to be writing about our wild emotions, then it’s sort of infinite in terms of where you can go with it. It just felt wide-open. Did there end up being any of your own childhood in there? Is there a little bit of you in Max? Yes, sure. I mean, even in things that I’ve made that I haven’t written there is some of me. Even the movies I’ve done with Charlie [Kaufman]—I feel like I’m in those as well. But yeah, I am probably in this one to a higher degree. See all articles by this contributor
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