The trailer for Where The Wild Things Are hit the internets today, causing us to wonder about the task of adapting Maurice Sendak’s classic for the screen.
We pecked around and found a giant interview with director Spike Jonze on Ain’t it Cool News from last November that contained a few gems:
One of the things I was worried about is that the book is just so beloved to so many people. And as I started to have ideas for it I was worried that I was just making what it means to me, and what the book triggers in me from when I was a kid. And I’d be worried that other people were gonna be disappointed, because it’s like adapting a poem. It can mean so much to so many different people.
And Maurice was very insistent that that’s all I had to do… just make what it was to me, just to make something personal and make something that takes kids seriously and doesn’t pander to them. He told me that when his book came out, it was considered dangerous. It was panned by critics and child psychologists and librarians, because it wasn’t how kids were talked to. And it took like only two years after the book was out that kids started finding it in the libraries, and basically kids discovered it and made it what it is. And now it’s 40 years later and it’s a classic. So he said you just have to make something according to your own instinct.
This part is lovely:
Kids are complicated, and they’re in touch with all those feelings. I didn’t want to make a movie that was just sad, or just heavy, or just anxious. I think I tried to make a movie that had a lot of the other sides of kids too; there are also soft feelings and sweet feelings and I think I tried to make the movie have Max’s imagination, Max’s sense of play, of love and hope and caring, but just let him be complicated, and the world that he goes to in order to figure out what’s going on be as complicated as he needs it to be.
And on the five years it’s taken:
It’s so long and it’s so complicated. I think by the time we got to Australia and were shooting it, the realities of what we were trying to do set in. It was exhausting and insane to be out on these cliffs in southern Australia where there’s 60 mph winds, and you’ve got all these guys in suits, and you’ve got this little boy who’s freezing. When I was writing it, I kind of knew it was complicated, but I kind of just had to be willfully naïve about that to not get bogged down.
If you loved the trailer as much as we did (Lance Acord’s photography is stunning), you may have noticed a slightly different cut of The Arcade Fire’s Wake Up which, according to the savvy folks at The Playlist, may have been prepped just for the trailer.
