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kottke.org posts about Where the Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze is not wearing the wolf suit

Spike Jonze gets the NYT Magazine treatment this weekend with a piece on his career and Where the Wild Things Are.

“It’s in the visual language of, like, some sort of fantasy film, and it is a fantasy film to some degree,” he acknowledged, “but the tone of it is its own tone. We wanted it all to feel true to a 9-year-old and not have some big movie speech where a 9-year-old is suddenly reciting the wisdom of the sage.” He hadn’t set out to make a children’s movie, he said, so much as to accurately depict childhood. “Everything we did, all the decisions that we made, were to try to capture the feeling of what it is to be 9.”

It’s difficult to draw a conclusion from this article other than Wild Things is going to bomb but be really good.


The Wild Things

Dave Eggers has written a young adult novel called The Wild Things that is based loosely on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and the screenplay he co-wrote with Spike Jonze for the movie version. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the book this week.

Max left the room and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.

Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.

“Uh, hey, Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Z’s. How goes it?”

Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.

“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”

Eggers explains how the idea for the book came about in an associated interview.

But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version.

Here’s the latest trailer for the movie.

To sum up: children’s book, movie, young adult book. Oh, and a movie soundtrack.


Where the Wild Things Are trailer

First trailer for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.


Books coming out in 2009

The Millions has a rundown of some of the most anticipated books of the coming year, stating that “2009 may be a great year for books”. News to me: along with the film that he and Spike Jonze co-wrote, Dave Eggers is doing a novel based on Where the Wild Things Are.

The Wild Things novelization, Sendak says, was all Eggers’s idea. A plan had always been in place to have some kind of book come out to “add to the noise of the movie,” he says, but at first it wasn’t clear what the book would actually be. Once tie-in talk began in earnest, Sendak, who had grown close to Eggers during work on the screenplay, began a campaign to have Eggers do it, and Eggers stepped up and agreed, broaching the idea of the novel.


Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are in trouble?

Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are might be in trouble. It was originally due out in October, got pushed back to fall 2009, and has now been taken off of the Warner Bros. release schedule. But not all is lost…here’s what Warner had to say about it:

We’ve given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film,” Horn said. “We’d like to find a common ground that represents Spike’s vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn’t call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we’re just trying to get it right.


A review of the script for Where

A review of the script for Where the Wild Things Are, written by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze (the script, not the review):

Where the Wild Things Are is filled with richly imagined psychological detail, and the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a longer and more moving version of what Maurice Sendak’s book has always been at heart: a book about a lonely boy leaving the emotional terrain of boyhood behind.


Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Where the

Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are had been shelved, but Warner Bros has revived it. Jonze wrote the screenplay with Dave Eggers. (via rw)