Film: Where the Wild Things Are
Director Spike Jonze and child actor Max Records create a classic family adventure
By Nina Riley
Max takes a ride on the wild side
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 10/20/09 – “In a way, it’s an action movie starring a nine-year-old,” says Where the Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze. “There’s a lot of physical mayhem like dirt clod fights and rampaging in the forest. The island offers up every youngster’s fantasy: the freedom to run and jump and howl, to build and destroy and wrestle and throw things as far as he can. Most of all, to do only the things he wants to do, with no one saying he can’t.”
“They hired a bunch of guys from a sideshow to do tricks,” says Wild Things star Max Records. “Spike learned fire-swallowing. He was doing all these crazy stunts. He had these big flamethrowers going off behind the camera to make me scared. The fire-swallowing thing really worked because he wasn’t very good at it. Spike’s tricks really did make me feel scared at times.”
“I wanted a real kid…someone who was going to give a real, emotional performance,” says Jonze. “As we progressed, it became clear that it was going to be hard to get the two sides of Max in one kid. He would have to be a really deep, internal kid, who had a lot going on in his head. A close-up of him should reveal his thinking and feeling. Simultaneously, we needed him at times to be totally out-of-his-head gleeful and wild. We could find one or the other, but finding both was hard. Max was my partner in making the heart of the movie come through. He is the heart of the movie.”
Where the Wild Things Are is a family adventure starring Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker and James Gandolfini. Producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are longtime fans of author Maurice Sendak’s work. “We started developing Where the Wild Things Are twelve years ago with Maurice and John Carls,” says Says Goetzman.
Screenwriter-director Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers developed Sendak’s motley band of horned, clawed and hairy giants into a group of individual personalities. Drawing from the book’s illustrations, each character has his or her own impulses and motives. The beasts were given heart and soul by voice performances from a stellar cast, played on location by costumed actors, then their faces were digitally enhanced to increase the range of movement and subtlety their thoughts.
James Gandolfini portrays the powerful and sensitive de facto leader of the pack. Carol. Lauren Ambrose is the free-spirited but melancholy KW. Chris Cooper is the rooster-feathered Douglas, energetic and industrious. Catherine O’Hara is the sarcastic, gloriously negative and domineering Judith. Forest Whitaker is Judith’s modest and patient companion. Ira is very good at punching holes into things. Paul Dano is the diminutive goat-horned Alexander, a mere eight feet tall, who often feels he’s not taken seriously enough. Catherine Keener, an associate producer on the film, stars as Max’s loving but stretched-to-the-limit single mother.
The film is an extraordinary merger of live action, state-of-the-art puppetry and computer animation, putting Max directly into the company of nine-foot-tall monsters. Fanged, tufted, striped and wide-eyed, the monsters are simultaneously ferocious and endearing.
Where the Wild Things Are
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures Distribution
Running Time: 1 hr. 34 min.
Release Date: October 16th, 2009 (USA)
MPAA Rating: PG for mild thematic elements, some adventure action and brief language