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"FacebookPinterest\n\nmany years ago, when he was a twentysomething skate kid turned video director, Spike Jonze was asked to direct a film adapted from the children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon. For a year and a half he worked away, planning out an unusual mixture of animation and live action, but this first encounter with the movie industry would not be a happy one.\n\n\"I realize now I didn't really know what I was up against,\" he says a little ruefully, \"trying to work in a machine like that.\" There were so many dispiriting moments along the way: \"It had slowly, day by day, moved away from what I was trying to do. I didn't realize how things get corrupted not all in one fell swoop, they get corrupted millimeter by millimeter by millimeter, and only when you look back and you see where you were trying to go and where you came from, only then do you really realize how far adrift you've gone.\" On the day the plug was finally pulled, Jonze and his collaborators held a ceremony at sunset to mark their liberation. They carried an eight-foot plastic crayon they had been given to the roof of the twelve-story building they were working in. \"We threw it off and watched it fall and then shatter into a million pieces,\" he remembers. \"And I just had this huge sense of relief.\"\n\nDetermined that this would never happen to him again, Jonze would soon go on to make two remarkable, and remarkably unusual, movies, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, each a different kind of proof that when people did trust him to follow his own peculiar instincts and seek his own idiosyncratic truths, the results could be wonderful. What reason, then, to flinch from making a film of another classic children's tale? He had now shown what he could do when left to his own devices. Besides, the book was just ten sentences and forty pages. What could there be to worry about?\n\n\u2018Adaptation,' Spike Jonze's last movie, was released in 2002. Where the Wild Things Are, which he began work on not long afterward, finally comes out this month. When I first meet with Jonze, in May, he is on the top floor of a building in central London at a company called Framestore, in a room that is filled with row upon row of computer screens, the faces of various wild things frozen upon many of them. \"I'm just deep in the throes of this thing,\" he says.\n\nFor the benefit of anyone who was never a child, or who has somehow forgotten, the slender text of Maurice Sendak's book describes how a misbehaving boy called Max finds himself on an island inhabited by a motley collection of toothy monsters known as wild things who make Max their king and romp with him while also letting slip that he might make good eating. For Jonze's movie, the wild things have been filmed in real life, played by human \"suit performers\" in wild-thing costumes with static, impassive wild-thing faces. At Framestore these faces are being brought alive with the painstaking digital additions that will animate every single wild-thing expression. It's quite a job.\n\nJonze shows me how the wild things' expressions are determined. Worried that digitally created facial movements tend toward clich\u00E9, resorting to a constrained repertoire of simplistic emotions, Jonze devised a complicated work process. When the actors who provide the wild things' voices recorded their parts, they did so together, acting out each scene as well as voicing them, and as they did this each actor had a separate camera focused on his or her face. It is this footage\u2014of real-life expressions with all their unpredictable nuances\u2014that the special-effects experts here are using as a reference. I watch as a technician clicks from the face of the wild thing called Ira to the raw footage of Forest Whitaker saying the same line. \"Just making sure everything has an intention, comes with a thought,\" Jonze explains. This seems a typical Spike Jonze decision: to embark upon an unmapped, inconvenient, cumbersome, labor-intensive process that others might consider unnecessary with faith that the end result will be imbued with a kind of realness that might, perhaps undetectably, make all the difference.\n\nThe history of Where the Wild Things Are is strangely tied up with the children's-book adaptation Jonze didn't make, Harold and the Purple Crayon. When Jonze was first taking studio meetings in the mid-'90s about possible films (early on, he turned down the second Ace Ventura movie), at one such meeting he spotted a copy of Maurice Sendak's book lying on a table. Where the Wild Things Are was a story his mother had read to him as a child. \"I can still totally hear the inflection of all the lines through her\u2014I hear her delivery of them,\" he says. \"I do remember it being hypnotic. Just totally engrossing. Not even wanting to be Max, but just in being Max.\" The book was there because Sendak had a production deal with that studio; Harold and the Purple Crayon was one of the projects he was producing. That was how Jonze got to know Sendak, and Sendak Jonze. The author, who is known for being prickly and protective when it comes to his work, liked what he found. As Sendak would later describe: \"He was the strangest little bird I'd ever seen. He had fluttered into the world of the studios, and could he not be swatted dead, I knew he would manage. I had total faith in him.\" It was then that Sendak first suggested Jonze might be the man to film his most famous book. Jonze wasn't sure. \"I'd percolate on it for a month and put the book next to my bed and read it before I went to bed and think about it,\" Jonze remembers. Eventually he said no: \"I turned it down because I had no idea what I could add to it.\"\n\nSendak asked Jonze again after Being John Malkovich came out, and then once more after Adaptation. That was when it clicked. \"It just hit me that wild things could be wild emotions,\" says Jonze. \"It was that simple of an idea. And all of a sudden, it seemed infinite where I could go from there.\"\n\nJonze can be almost phobically reserved about the specifics of his early life (\"Um, I just grew up in\u2026 I don't know\u2026in America?\" he responds to my first direct question on the subject), but sometimes, as when he's talking about childhood emotions, he'll open up in a way that illuminates both movie and maker. \"As a kid, that was really scary and confusing\u2014both the wild emotions in me and the wild emotions in the people around me,\" he says. \"Unpredictable emotions, positive or negative\u2014you don't know where they're coming from, you don't know what they mean. Especially negative emotions. Your own behavior\u2014you don't know why you're acting a certain way and it scares you, or you don't know why somebody else is acting a certain way and it scares you. Big emotions that are unexplained are really scary. At least to me. I guess it's anger, or sadness, guilt\u2014or guilt for being angry, you know. Just the whole big mess that we're sort of thrown into. Emotions are messy and hard to figure out. Hard to know where you start and the next person stops. Even as an adult, that's a hard thing to know. As a kid it can be really confusing, because it's all new and you're trying to sort of make your map.\"\n\nThat was what Where the Wild Things Are would be about.\n\n\n\nit seems that there is a secret fact many people believe they know about Spike Jonze and can't wait to share with me: that he is actually the heir to the Spiegel-catalog fortune. Grateful as I am for such pointers, they are making two mistakes. One is in believing that this information is truly secret. In fact it has been mentioned in print many times, often by reputable sources. For instance: \"Jonze is a pseudonym used by Adam Spiegel, a 29-year-old Bethesda, Maryland\u2013bred heir to the $3-billion-a-year Spiegel catalog business, who in June married Hollywood hipster princess Sofia Coppola at Francis Ford Coppola's Napa Valley vineyard\" (New York magazine, 1999). \"Spike Jonze, the hip film director, didn't let the fact that he was born Adam Spiegel, heir to the clothing-catalog fortune, sink him into a slough of pampered despond\" (The New York Times, 2003).\n\nThe second, more fundamental mistake when it comes to this secret fact is that it is not a fact at all. Jonze is heir to nothing of the sort\u2014the slur that he's a spoiled brat slumming with the cool kids is a false one. Jonze insists he often used to set the record straight. \"I think I gave up,\" he says. When he did say anything, he would explain that his real name is Adam Spiegel but that he is only distantly related to the catalog family. That, too, is slightly misleading. The catalog was started at the beginning of the past century by the German \u00E9migr\u00E9 Joseph Spiegel and his son Arthur. Given that Spike's father is called Arthur Spiegel III, this suggests that the genetic link is a pretty direct one; Jonze confirms this. \"Yeah. I guess, my great-great-grandfather. But my family hasn't\u2026They sold it. So it's by name only.\" (His mother has been variously described as a writer, a communications consultant, and having worked in public relations; his father used to run a medical-consulting business.)\n\nNor is the name he now uses an alias he adopted to distance himself from his privilege. It came when he was about 13, when he would hang out at the BMX shop in Rockville, Maryland\u2014the nexus of the teenage obsession that would eventually plug him into BMX and skate culture and lead him, the moment he left school, to head west to California as a writer and photographer for skate magazines. \"Spike\" was inspired both by the haircuts Jonze used to give others and by his own youthful skyward hair; \"Jonze\" completes a homophone of the old-time eccentric bandleader Spike Jones. Nothing at all to do with escaping the stigma that might accompany what I refer to as \"a multimillion-dollar catalog fortune.\"\n\nThis is a description Jonze takes real exception to.\n\n\"I thought it was multibillion-dollar,\" he insists. \"That's the one I heard.\"\n\n\n\narmed with his \"wild things = wild emotions\" insight, Jonze worked on his own for about six months, writing pages and pages of notes and filling out the story of Max's adventure with the wild things. He was excited by what he was coming up with, and Sendak was mostly supportive. \"At a certain point,\" says Jonze, \"he was like, \u2018I don't care what's in it. As long as you make something that is personal and that is dangerous and that takes it seriously and that doesn't pander to kids and is honest, you can do whatever you want.' \u2018Take kids seriously,' that's what Maurice said, and that weaves right into my natural aesthetic and what I want it to feel like and what excites me.\"\n\nJonze had never written a movie script before, but to him this seemed no impediment. \"I never knew how to do anything before I did it, really,\" he reasons. \"Those are the situations that I find the most exciting. It's most fun just to decide, \u2018Okay, I'm going to choreograph this. I've never choreographed before, I've never really danced before, but I know what kind of dancing I like, so I'll do that.'\u00A0\" It seems to him that such resolutions are less leaps of grandiose self-confidence than a way to reprise the unworried and unfettered creativity of childhood. \"Like, if you were going to make a fort in your backyard,\" he says, \"you're not going to go, like, hire someone to make your fort or go buy plans. You're just going to have an idea for it and go make your fort.\"\n\nAfter a while, however, he decided it would be more fun to build this new fort with someone else. He asked Charlie Kaufman, who'd written both of his previous movies, but Kaufman was otherwise engaged. So he called Dave Eggers. They'd been friends since Eggers approached Jonze about filming his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. To write the Wild Things script, Jonze moved up to San Francisco, where Eggers lives, for several months, and they worked together in a rented room near the Castro. Eggers remembers how Jonze mapped out what he intended: \"That it was going to be live-action, that there was going to be real danger, that it was going to be\u2014like Maurice's work\u2014not necessarily written for kids even though it's about a kid. I was always the guy, at least in this first year and a half when no one else got involved, that just kept on wondering how the hell he was going to pull it off. When we would write something, I would say, \u2018Well, how are you going to do this?' And he didn't want to think about it then. It was really just about what's best for the story. There was kind of a stunning, relentless commitment to that.\"\n\nMax was someone with whom they both strongly identified. \"Spike is still half Max, probably, to this day,\" Eggers says. \"He's still got a lot of boy in him.\" (To this Jonze takes mock umbrage. \"I'm 39!\" he protests. \"I'm a 39-year-old man!\") Though Eg-gers did the typing, this doesn't mean he was in control. \"Spike's vision drove it all,\" he says. \"For every word on the page, there was an hour of talking, maybe. The recurring impulse was: Every word that went down had to be true, and it had to be right. It had to be something that was so true it hurt, I think. Efficiency, or deadline, didn't factor into it.\" He mentions one other facet of their nontraditional process: \"I've never known a grown man to take as many naps as Spike does. \u2018Yeah, it's one o'clock\u2014let's take a nap.' \" Eggers would get on with his own work until Jonze woke again.\n\n\"I like naps,\" Jonze says. \"I don't drink coffee.\n\n\n\nthere seems no easy explanation for Spike Jonze's speedy rise, as it is usually told, from BMX kid to skateboard photographer to innovative music videographer (the Beastie Boys' \"Sabotage,\" Weezer's \"Buddy Holly,\" Fatboy Slim's \"Praise You\") to filmmaker. Jonze gives me the impression that he was a somewhat aimless high school student with no clear ambitions. Whether through modesty or his aversion to sharing, Jonze may be underplaying how early he blossomed. When I call his old photography teacher, Frank Stallings\u2014the one school inspiration Spike mentions\u2014Stallings paints a vivid picture of a small Mohawked boy who struggled academically but was inventive and popular and highly motivated, often away riding on BMX tours but already obsessed with filmmaking. \"He ate and slept video,\" says Stallings. \"He was just so talented. I didn't need to teach him.\" In fact, Stallings says, a short film Jonze made and acted in back then won both county and state film competitions.\n\nCharlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich script was apparently considered brilliant but unfilmable. The expectation could have been, from a very superficial knowledge of Jonze's videos, that he would make the weird weirder, the wacky wackier, the gimmicky more gimmicky. But his smartness, and the source of the movie's power, was to never lose track of the very human desires and foibles that lay at the center of all this strangeness. His videos thrived on what Eggers identifies as their \"commitment to concept,\" but the concept he committed to in his first two movies was an old-fashioned one\u2014that, amid all the strangeness, at their center lie real, subtle emotions and the complicated, unpredictable ways these shift as an odd world changes around them.\n\nAfter Being John Malkovich, Jonze agreed to film an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, \"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,\" but then backed away. \"It was at a studio [Paramount] that I just didn't hit it off with,\" he says. Instead he turned back to Charlie Kaufman and Adaptation, which he calls \"probably the best script I've ever read.\"\n\nThey had planned a third movie together. After Adaptation, Amy Pascal, head of Sony, had suggested that Jonze and Kaufman make a horror movie. What they came up with, says Jonze, was not the regular horror pulp but \"illness and mortality and heartbreak and loss\u2014things that were actually horrifying.\" That turned into Synecdoche, New York, a movie Kaufman would end up directing himself. By then, Jonze was too busy with creatures of his own.\n\n\n\noriginally, Jonze was to have made Where the Wild Things Are for Universal, but the studio eventually decided not to proceed. Its reaction to Jonze and Eggers's script was the first presage of the rough times ahead. When I ask Jonze about Universal's decision, it is before I have seen the finished movie.\n\n\"I could show you the movie, and then you can try and guess why they didn't want to make it,\" he says. \"I'm sure it's probably the same issues we had last year when we were editing and Warner Bros. was really anxious about the movie we were making. Because it's just not what they pictured. It's not what they think of when they make a children's movie. The tone of it\u2026it's not like \u2018a movie kid.' It doesn't have that movie reality. I tried to make it true to my memory, my experience, of being a human being at that age of life\u2014what it's like to be 9 and be alive. That was my goal. This movie is going to be in the children's-movie section at the video store, and that's fine, and our other movies were in the comedy section.\" His expression seems to suggest that there is no point in being anything other than stoic in the face of a world that scrunches up and classifies everything in this manner. \"I mean, they've got to put it somewhere. It doesn't matter where it is.\"\n\nAnd when they put this in the children's section?\n\n\"That's fine, but I didn't set out to make a movie they could put in the children's section. I set out to make a movie that was about being 9 years old.\"\n\nFor?\n\n\"Whoever connects to it.\"\n\nDoes it matter if they're 7 or 42?\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\nDoes it matter to the studio?\n\n\"More, probably.\"\n\n\n\nwhenever I sit down with Jonze, he'll pepper me with questions, as he does today at Musso &amp;amp; Frank in Hollywood. I don't think it's a ploy, but I'm also mindful of our time together being used up, so in the middle of my fifth or sixth answer, I pause for a moment and tell him that I will be shutting up in a second and making him talk.\n\n\"Okay,\" he says. \"Good luck.\"\n\nFor almost as long as Spike Jonze has been doing interesting things, he has also been finding inventive ways to sidestep all but the most straightforward, practical queries about himself and what he does. Consider just a few representative examples:\n\nThe director's interview on the Being John Malkovich DVD shows Jonze being questioned while driving a car. After about two minutes, he pulls over and throws up before the screen goes black.Appearing on Craig Kilborn's show to promote his first movie, Jonze clearly managed to convince them it would be funny if he and Kilborn sat there without talking. The audience hears prerecorded voice-overs, supposedly their respective thoughts, as Jonze and Kilborn sit facing each other in silence.For an interview with Spin magazine, he took the writer to the home of a musician whom Jonze said he was hoping to make a music video with. The meeting was not a success. Jonze and the musician argued, the musician smashed Jonze's chair, then threw him against a wall. Jonze retaliated by leaping onto the musician and raining punches on his head. It was, of course, a setup. (\"He had some guy come to my house,\" remembers Johnny Knoxville, who, pre-Jackass, played the angry-musician role. \"I chased them both out of the house with a baseball bat\u2014it worked out pretty good.\")\n\nThere have been many more. I'm not sure there's a simple or obvious reason why Jonze acts and reacts, hides and disguises, in this way. Some of it is clearly just for fun and for the joy of the prank, whether or not that fun always spreads outward, but I'm sure it's more than that.\n\nAs we eat today, I try to ask him about all these past strategies. His immediate reaction is to pretend not to know what I mean. \"That's not true!\" he says accusingly. \"I'm calling my lawyer! You just crossed the line!\" But from what happens next, I think he may also be affronted at the implication that he would no longer act in such a way. Almost immediately, he springs to his feet. \"Hold on a second,\" he says.\n\nA few yards away, in a nearby booth, a middle-aged man and woman are eating lunch. Jonze goes over to speak with them, and when he returns, the man comes with him.\n\n\"Chris,\" says Jonze, \"this is John Jackson, my attorney.\"\n\n\"Hi, how are you doing?\" the man says, offering his hand.\n\n\"He wanted to speak to you,\" says Jonze, \"about some of the defamation situations you're drawing against my character right now.\"\n\nPlaying along, I ask the man to spell out his exact objections.\n\n\"What?\" he says, and looks at Jonze pleadingly. He's doing his best. \"I need more context,\" he says.\n\n\"I'll fill you in later, John,\" Jonze says. \"I just wanted him to know the threat was looming.\"\n\n\"Good luck to you,\" the would-be lawyer says to me before returning to his own booth. \"You're going to need it.\"\n\n\"My attorney,\" says Jonze. \"The best attorney there is. The best attorney in town.\"\n\nHe didn't do so well just then, I say.\n\n\"No,\" says Jonze, \"he's an idiot savant. People underestimate him, and then he goes in for the kill right at the end.\"\n\nUndeterred, I return to my original question\u2014of why Jonze would engage with interviews in this manner.\n\n\"Can I just say: Why not?\" he asks.\n\nI have one more useless try at finding even half an answer to my original question: whether all this betrays a huge reluctance to share anything about himself.\n\nHe waits a moment before answering, as though considering his options.\n\n\"I feel like we're entering therapy now,\" he says. \"Can I come over and get in the booth with you? I might need to be held.\"\n\nThe things you'll do, I say, to avoid answering a question.\n\nHe smiles broadly.\n\n\"I'll cuddle with you,\" he replies, \"to avoid answering a question.\"\n\nI decline, but he has another idea.\n\n\"I could draw a tattoo on your arm for the rest of the interview.\"\n\nWhy would you do that?\n\n\"Just to help answer some of your questions.\"\n\nHe gets a green Sharpie from his bag, takes my left hand, and carefully draws a word on my knuckles. The word is \"D-R-U-G-S.\" He looks as happy as I see him. \"Shall we go and get it inked in?\" he suggest.\u00A0 \u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\u00A0\n\n\n\none of the great hurdles you face if you intend to make a realistic, powerful movie about a young boy is that of finding a boy who can carry your expectations. Max Records, the son of a Portland, Oregon, photographer, had appeared in a couple of music videos (for Cake and Death Cab for Cutie) but other than that had done no acting at all. His first audition with Jonze was not how he'd expected a movie audition might be. \"Instead of making me read lines,\" says Records, \"he just made me do all this crazy stuff, like he took a Nerf gun that shoots little foam bullets, and I took an umbrella and deflected them like a light saber. Then he had some inflatable boxing gloves, and we were beating on each other.\" Whatever Jonze was looking for within this, he found. \"We were so lucky,\" he says, \"that we found this really special, soulful, sweet kid\u2014sensitive and thoughtful. Just a freak of nature, a 9-year-old who already knows who he is so well. Max is the movie.\"]\n\nMax wasn't involved in the first stage of filmmaking\u2014what Jonze calls the \"voice shoot,\" recording the wild-thing actors' voices\u2014because Jonze wanted his reactions to remain fresh. Instead, Jonze would often play Max's part. (There have been other substitute Mas along the way: At the script's first table reading, Max was played by Brad Pitt. \"He was so good,\" Jonze remembers.) For the sound recording, the wild-thing voice actors\u2014among them Whitaker and James Gandolfini\u2014gathered for three weeks in Los Angeles on \"a giant soundstage with shag carpeting.\" There was lots of foam, to represent the scenery and for the actors to use when setting upon each other. \"Once Gandolfini came into the room, he set the tone,\" says Jonze, \"just reckless abandon, throwing the actors around\u2014he didn't hold back at all. Just all out.\"\n\n\"It's very odd,\" remembers Gandolfini. \"You're growling and you're snarling and you're howling, and sometimes you'd walk out of there like, \u2018This is a fucking ridiculous way for a grown man to make a living.' However, I think the end result, it's a beautiful thing.\" When I ask Gandolfini what Jonze was like, he says, \"He's incredibly smart, but he also did Jackass\u2014that's the kind of guy he is. He's got a lot of things going on in there. He started tossing shit at your head, and there was one guy on the crew, he grabbed his underpants and tried to give him a wedgie. And he's a strong little fucker, he really is. He's very strong for a wiry little bastard. But he seems like he's a kind, good person. Got a good temperament. Like, under pressure I'm a fucking raving lunatic, but under pressure he's on a very even keel, and I admire that.\" I also ask Gandolfini if he got a sense of what captivated and inspired Jonze to tell this story. \"Um, I don't know,\" he says. \"I don't know if it's something in his past or not. Actually, I do know, but I don't want to say.\"\n\nOnce the real-life filming concluded, Jonze cut together a version of the film that was still rough and unfinished (the wild things' faces, for instance, were still inert), and in late 2007 there was a screening organized by the studio. That's when the problems began.\n\n\"Really,\" says Jonze, \"the nitty-gritty of it all was that the studio was sort of nervous about it before, and they wanted to have an audience give them reason to be more nervous.\" The movie was pushed back a year, and a difficult debate began. Rumors appeared in the press and online: that children fled the theater in tears; that the monsters were too frightening; that the whole movie was too adult, subversive, and scary and unsuitable for children; that the actor playing Max was a disaster; that his character was unlikable; that Warner Bros. was considering firing Jonze and reshooting the entire movie.\n\nJonze talks about this period uneasily. \"To me it's a small part of the movie\u2014five months in the course of five years,\" he says. \"And it was kind of irrelevant. It was just a bummer. It was not easy or fun.\"\n\nIs it possible to summarize what kind of changes they were looking for?\n\n\"They wanted it to be a different movie. I think they really expected it to be more like a kind of pixie-dust movie. That was a word they used at one point: \u2018Pixie dust.' Magic. \u2018Where's the\u2026?' The specifics of the conversations are kind of pointless, because they're behind us. The end result is I got to make the movie that I wanted to make.\"\n\nIt was reported that kids were running out of the screening in hysterics.\n\n\"No, that wasn't happening. I don't know how that got reported.\"\n\nThe implication was that you'd made a movie that scares the hell out of kids.\n\n\"It goes back to the whole testing-numbers thing, like, \u2018We've got to get this many people to like this character' and \u2018this many people to think this' and \u2018this many people to feel this.' I've never made a movie like that. I want anyone to feel anything that they want to feel. You can like a character, you can not like a character. Think something's funny, think something's sad, think something's creepy. That's not interesting, to make a movie where you try and make everyone feel the same thing, everyone think the same thing. You make a movie that is about what you want it to be about and let people have their reaction to it.\"\n\nI ask Jonze how much, when making an expensive movie like this, it becomes his problem to worry about the size or kind of audience it can reach.\n\n\"I think it's my problem up to a certain point,\" he says, \"up until it takes me away from the movie I'm trying to make. I of course want to be responsible to somebody who's giving me money, but I can't let it take me off my path at the same time.\"\n\n\"We didn't see that coming,\" says Eggers, \"that anyone would think, \u2018Oh, I don't really like this boy' because he howls, or that he doesn't behave perfectly at home.\" Back when they were writing, they never debated whether this was to be a movie for children or a movie about a child, or whether there was any need to consider any difference. \"Pointedly, no,\" says Eggers. \"We just went back to Maurice. Maurice never thinks about what a kid's going to want, or like necessarily, and he thinks of any of that as pandering. So the idea was, it's a boy, let's be true, and then let the chips fall where they might.\" It was never meant to be a cozy experience. \"It drives Maurice crazy that people think of it as this harmless canonical classic when he still considers it a provocative book\u2014we were just hoping to sort of carry that over onto the screen.\"\n\nWhen the troubles started, they couldn't help but be reminded of the resistance Sendak's book had faced when it was first published\u2014many reviewers and librarians found it scary and confusing\u2014and to take succor from its eventual triumph. Perhaps the most perspicacious review it received, in the Cleveland Press, is one that Jonze and his collaborators would likely take to heart: \"Boys and girls may have to shield their parents from this book. Parents are very easily scared.\"\n\nJonze declines to discuss the specifics of what happened to resolve the situation, but by June 2008 he was free to shoot further footage. \"The nature of the resolution\u2014and it could be different from their point\u2014is that they let me finish my movie,\" he says. Jonze suggests that in the end it was less the movie that changed than maybe the studio began to embrace what it was, rather than what it wasn't. \"I think they really expected it to be a boy and I gave birth to a girl, and then they had to sort of learn: \u2018What does that mean? How are we going to be a parent to a girl?' Maybe they had anxieties about having a daughter or something. I think the movie that we made is the exact same version we screened\u2014it's just a better version of it.\"\n\n\n\ni was apprehensive about seeing Where the Wild Things Are. Perhaps Jonze really had overreached or had allowed the search for a certain kind of sensibility and truth to lead him astray. I was wrong to worry, though that's not to say that Warner Bros. is completely insane in its concerns, for it is a very strange, magical, intense film. The first twenty or so minutes, where we see Max at home with his mother and sister, playing, being sweet, hurt, reckless, cruel, gentle, manipulative, elated, devastated, is an incredible evocation of what it is like to be a child\u2014as I remember it, at least. What it is really like\u2014not the familiar coded version of good kids and bad kids, innocence and venality, that we usually see on-screen.\n\nOne tumultuous night, Max flees the house (anyone, by the way, who doesn't find Max Records's performance fairly staggering would enjoy a very different kind of movie) and eventually ends up on an island where the wild things live. What happens here, the bulk of the movie, isn't simple\u2014either narratively, or emotionally, or in its tone. The adjective I use to describe it that Jonze seems most perturbed by is disturbing, but at times it is disturbing, both in terms of specific things that happen and in the way easy resolutions are declined. But I mean that as a compliment, and the movie is also savagely beautiful in unexpected, original ways, and funny, and sweet. The other thing I say about the movie that makes Jonze uncomfortable is\u2014thinking about the issue of its audience and suitability for different age groups\u2014that I wasn't sure I was old enough to have seen it.\n\n\"Wow,\" he says. \"Shit.\"\n\nBut by that I mean that none of us are ever quite ready for something that hits home in ways we aren't expecting. It may be as the Cleveland newspaper reviewer said about Sendak's book. If Jonze has judged it right, it may be that where adults are unsettled by certain kinds of truth, children will simply recognize them.\n\n\n\nsome questions just seem to paralyze Jonze. After I have seen the movie\u2014among other things, a devastatingly brilliant depiction of divorce's aftermath from a child's viewpoint, a narrative theme that Jonze has added to Sendak's story\u2014I ask him when his own parents split up. This is his reply.\n\n\"I don't know. I'm not sure. But, you know, I guess maybe I'm not sure because I don't really want to talk about it.\"\n\nFair enough, in its own way, but he won't even be drawn out as to whether his own experience has any relevance at all to the movie he has made. We go back and forth. \"The movie is the movie,\" he finally says. \"Why isn't that enough?\"\n\nGiven this, some of the other subjects that seem to horrify him are hardly surprising. I point out to him that, reading about him, half the articles are about how he is\u2014\n\n\"A mathematical genius,\" he interrupts. \"I know.\"\n\nActually, no\u2014how he is one of the remarkable filmmakers of his generation, and the other half are about his relationships with famous people (for instance, ex-wife Sofia Coppola, Karen O, Drew Barrymore, and more recently, Michelle Williams).\n\n\"I guess they're good articles to write,\" he says. \"If you even talk about it, it seems like participating in the nonsense. So fuck it.\"\n\nI wonder aloud whether it might not be completely absurd to ask about his marriage, at least in terms of the union of two of the emerging director talents of a generation.\n\n\"Well,\" he says, \"when we got together, we weren't directors. But we sort of grew up together, in a way, from our early twenties to our early thirties.\"\n\nAnd was that a big influence on you?\n\n\"Definitely. Yeah. She was a big part of my life and a big part of forming who I was.\"\n\nI mention the common belief that Lost in Translation\u2014in which Scarlett Johansson's character's husband is a photographer waylaid by work and other distractions\u2014is a coded version of their marriage, and say that he must be aware of that perception.\n\n\"Yeah, I am,\" he says. \"But, you know, all I will say is that's somebody who I was with for ten years. That's not really how one would represent somebody.\u2026\" This sentence also trails off, and it feels like he's caught between refuting what he considers an obvious absurdity and his distaste at having found himself, momentarily, even caring. If so, the latter wins out. \"That's all,\" he says. \"You can write whatever you want, but I won't participate in that one, either.\"\n\n\n\njonze may make other movies like Where the Wild Things Are, but he is clearly determined never to make another movie in the way he made Where the Wild Things Are. However proud he feels of the final result, and however much he succeeded in digging in his heels well and long enough to preserve his creation, it has surely taken a toll. \"You know, I'll certainly never be in a situation\u2026\" he begins. \"I'll still make movies for studios, but my editing process will be much further removed from the studio system. Because I don't understand it. I don't understand the whole testing-numbers thing. It is not how I want to make movies. So if that's how they do it, then I don't think I want to do it.\"\n\nI ask three members of the cast what they think Jonze's new movie is about.\n\n\"It's about real life,\" says Max Records. \"It's about childhood. It's about not talking down to kids.\"\n\n\"It's about all these different points of view,\" says Catherine Keener, \"and maybe how a family can be together and still be so distant, but want to be close and keep trying to be close. This real sense of yearning for love and closeness.\"\n\n\"Trying to find a safe place,\" says James Gandolfini, \"in this fucking chaos we have created for ourselves. I think the movie shows that it's not really anywhere. You've kind of got to maybe do the best you can, I guess.\"\n\n\n\nat musso &amp;amp; frank, Jonze tells me that he is late for an appointment, but I carry on asking and asking for as long as I can.\n\nWhy, I ask him, do you make movies\n\n\"I gotta go,\" he repeats. \"Why do I make movies? What a crazy question.\"\n\nSeriously, I say.\n\n\"I don't know. I love making things. I just love making things.\"\n\nHe appears relieved; it seemed an impossible question, but he found an answer.\n\nWhy, I ask, do you like making things?\n\nFor a second or two, I'm wondering whether, maybe, we're stumbling toward a deep pool of the most intrinsic, majestic truths.\n\nSpike Jonze looks at me, disbelieving. Answer a question, all you get is a worse one.\n\n\"Fuck!\" he says.\n\nchris heath is a gq correspondent. He wrote about Larry King in the June issue."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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