11/18/08
Text: Nik Mercer
New York Magazine's Vulture blog pointed us in the direction of a very special, very exclusive interview that director Spike Jonze recently had with Ain't It Cool News, which finally confirms that his much-anticipated adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are is, indeed, still being made―and he's not kidding.
The movie's still a year or so out, but the good news is that a lot of the hard work's done. "We just locked picture about three weeks ago," Jonze said. "We’ll probably finish all the effects by, like, May or so. Then we mix in May and we have our dates in October... "
The problems Jonze ran in to, it seems, were all rooted in the sheer ambition of the project: "[F]rom the beginning, I wanted it to feel a certain way. I wanted it to feel 'real,' or not-real because it's not 'real,'" he noted. "I wanted it to feel like... like when I was a kid, and I would play with my Star Wars action figures, or read Maurice’s books and imagine me being Mickey in In the Night Kitchen, or whatever it was... it felt like it was everything, you know?"
As for the poor screen test receptions, well, that all came down to an issue of gender in Jonze's mind. "I told the studio, 'I don’t think this is gonna be a movie for four-year-olds.' And I think they said, 'Oh, okay,' but I think that when they saw it, that’s... something else... it’s sort of like they were expecting a boy and I gave birth to a girl."
So don't lose faith quite yet, and rest assured; this is not, as Vulture so aptly puts it, a Chinese Democracy farce.
Spike Jonze Interview with Ain't It Cool News
