Let’s go Wild (From The Northern Echo)

Let’s go Wild

11:23am Thursday 10th December 2009

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Steve Pratt discovers that getting a straight answer from 12-year-old Where The Wild Things Are star Max Records is a lot easer than from the director Spike Jonze.

DIRECTOR Spike Jonze has sketched a drawing of the creatures for his film version of Where The Wild Things Are.

His young star, 12-year-old Max Records, is standing on a chair taking a photograph of the drawing. Jonze is in the corner of the room taking a picture of a round table of international journalists watching Max taking a photograph of the drawing.

It’s a bizarre interlude in an interview that defies the regulations of usual question and answer sessions with filmmakers and stars. Only to be expected, perhaps, when Jonze is involved.

He’s the director (of music videos, commercials, short films and documentaries) of Being John Malkovich, one of the most original if baffling films of recent years in which an unemployed puppeteer finds himself inside the head of Malkovich.

So when the interview takes a surreal turn, no one should be surprised. Some of the halfdozen journalists present had been given in advance a list of questions that he didn’t want to be asked. So the obvious first question is: why don’t you want to be asked these questions? “You can ask me if you like,” says Jonze. “I just figured I’d said these answers so much I got to the point where I don’t mean it any more. I was repeating some words that stopped meaning anything. I thought it would be easier if I gave you those and we kicked off from there.”

He’s accompanied by young Records, from Portland, Oregon, who stars in Jonze’s new film Where The Wild Things Are, taken from Maurice Sendak’s muchadmired book.

Max (played by Max) is a lively lad with a single mother and a feeling he’s misunderstood. He escapes in his wolf suit to a kingdom populated by very large creatures called Wild Things.

Writing (with Dave Eggers) more than directing the film took Jonze back to his own childhood. “Dave and I were sitting talking about scenes and moments, then going back and telling stories that had happened to us. It’s a book I read when I was four so it’s a bit of a portal back to that time,” he explains.

Jonze needed to satisfy Sendak, who has steadfastly turned down offers to film his book in the 46 years since publication. There have been reports that he and the director fell out.

“I don’t know about fall out, that might be a little extreme,”

says Jonze. “Overall he really wanted me to make my movie of this. He didn’t want to stand in the way of that. He knew that I had to own it and couldn’t just do something because he wanted it or it was in the book. So even in those times we would argue, he would present his argument and then say ‘but it’s your movie’.

The film was shot in Australia so Sendak, who can’t travel, was unable to visit the set. So every week they would send him “a little video letter”, a half-hour DVD of what had been happening on set and footage of scenes shot.

His reaction showed Jonze he was on the right track.

“When we sent him the dailies of the sequence where Max runs out of the house and gets in the boat, he called me up and said I wanted it to be in the bedroom, but now I’ve seen this I think it’s beautiful.

You’ve made it cinematic. I couldn’t see it on paper, but now that I’ve seen it, I see what you’re doing.”

The young star also had a big influence on the movie, not in terms of the story but in bringing it to life. “He’s in every scene and carries the whole movie. He had a lot of input because sometimes it is him literally making up dialogue,” says Jonze.

❛One of the things Max always makes fun of me for is I know exactly what I want but I also try a million things. I always know what I want in terms of what I want it to feel like, but I’m open to letting things happen and people bring ideas if they can get any closer to that feeling.

“So Max would improvise and make up dialogue or we’d make up dialogue on the spot.

So there’s a lot of that in the spirit of bringing it to life and making it feel alive and not scripted.”

There weren’t, he adds, a lot of easy days for Max. His young star concurs. “There were some times that were rough but that was mostly just whenever like we had too much to do and not enough time to do it,” he says.

“You know the shouting and screaming on set, it was all just like trying to get things done without us murdering each other or some other catastrophe happening.”

When one of our number asks how the tall creatures were created, Jonze insists on painstakingly drawing a diagram. Max contents himself with words: “It was just a lot of really tall, basketball player size people inside suits. The heads added an extra 2ft and the suits were up to 100lbs each. They were having to walk around with all this extra weight.”

The photographic interlude follows before talk turns to the budget. A figure of $100m dollars is quoted. “No, it wasn’t that much, but was a lot more than my other movies,” says Jonze.

He shot a lot of the action using handheld cameras.

“Every decision was to make it feel like what it means to be nine years old. When Max shows up on the island, the camera was shot from a low angle trying to capture it all using the wild things to stand in for the way kids see the adult world.

“They may not understand the specifics of what we’re talking about but understand the feeling. There’s something uncertain and unsettling about that and I wanted to capture that feeling.

“The emails I’ve got that have been the most rewarding and most touching are ones from parents talking about what kids have been talking about. The conversations parents have had with kids after the movie that they haven’t had before about feelings and relationships.”

Where The Wild Things Are (PG)

★★★★

Stars: Max Records, Catherine Keener, Mark Ruffalo, Lauren Ambrose, Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker

101 mins

PHASES like much loved and children’s classic are bandied around by those who know Maurice Sendak’s book. The rest of us, blissfully ignorant of the novel, have to rely on director Spike Jonze’s interpretation in a film that to outward appearances – a boy and some big furry creatures – is a children’s film but has more to say about love, life and growing up than most so-called movies for adults. Being John Malkovich director Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers have taken the original story – just ten sentences and 338 words – and made it into a 101-minute, visually startling adventure.

It begins in the real world where nine-year-old Max (Max Records) is a stroppy little boy, who doesn’t mix with other children at school and is antagonistic towards his mother (Catherine Keener) and teenage sister (Pepita Emmerichs) at home.

Following a row with his mother while she’s entertaining her new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), Max runs off in his wolf costume and sails away to an island that’s home to a bunch of large furry creatures called the Wild Things. Think mutant Muppets and you’re in the right area.

Their behaviour is as unpredictable as their looks but Max’s wild behaviour stands him in good stead and they elect him their king.

That Where The Wild Things Are works is thanks in no small measure to a completely natural, totally unsympathetic performance by Max Records.

The voice talent give the Wild Things (named here but not in the book) personalities for Max to act against.

The film may not be to everyone’s taste but Jonze is to be commended for making a film capable of captivating young and old alike without talking down to either.

ALSO OPENING Carriers (15, 84 mins) Thriller set in the aftermath of a global pandemic which has devastated the human race.

Four young survivors face a variety of moral dilemmas. Lou Taylor Pucci, Chris Pine (Kirk in the latest Star Trek movie), Piper Perabo, Emily VanCamp and Christopher Meloni star.

The Stepfather (15, 101 mins) Remake of the 1987 move about a wayward teenager who suspects the new man in his mother’s life is a psychopath. Dylan Walsh, from TV’s Nip/Tuck, plays the title role.

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