8/13/2023 0 Comments Allusions in her spike jonze![]() ![]() That was how Jonze got to know Sendak, and Sendak Jonze. 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. “I can still totally hear the inflection of all the lines through her-I hear her delivery of them,” he says. Where the Wild Things Are was a story his mother had read to him as a child. ![]() ![]() 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. The 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. 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. “Just making sure everything has an intention, comes with a thought,” Jonze explains. 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. It is this footage-of real-life expressions with all their unpredictable nuances-that the special-effects experts here are using as a reference. 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. Worried that digitally created facial movements tend toward cliché, resorting to a constrained repertoire of simplistic emotions, Jonze devised a complicated work process. Jonze shows me how the wild things’ expressions are determined. “And I just had this huge sense of relief.” “We threw it off and watched it fall and then shatter into a million pieces,” he remembers. They carried an eight-foot plastic crayon they had been given to the roof of the twelve-story building they were working in. 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. “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. 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. Many 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. ![]()
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