Bringing "Where the Wild Things Are" to the Screen

New York Times Magazine has an extensive article about bringing Maurice Sendak's brilliant children's book to the silver screen.

From the piece...

“Where the Wild Things Are” is arguably of a piece with Jonze’s earlier works; it features moments of transcendent beauty and moments of profound silliness. Just as in “Jackass,” characters smash things and throw things at one another. But it is clearly Jonze’s most personal film to date, and it is also his most ambitious. To bring Sendak’s characters to the screen, Jonze used a complicated mix of computer animation and giant monster suits. He shot in the forests of southern Australia, which required convening a crew of more than 150. The costume department alone was larger than the entire crew of “Being John Malkovich.” Variety put the film’s budget at $80 million, and other estimates go as high as $100 million. Jonze’s next most expensive film, “Adaptation,” cost only $19 million.

“Where the Wild Things Are,” in other words, cost about as much to make as did “Shrek” and “Madagascar,” and yet in almost every other way it represents a sharp departure from those family-friendly blockbusters. Most kids’ movies are brightly, mouthwateringly colorful; Jonze favored a mushy-vegetable palate of greens and browns. Most kids’ movies have a clearly defined plot and an unambiguous moral lesson; Jonze’s film has about as much plot as an episode of “Jackass.” Most kids’ movies crackle with one-liners; in “Where the Wild Things Are,” the characters talk over one another and spend a lot of time stumbling over their own words as they try to articulate their feelings. Jonze told me that one of his models for the dialogue was the work of John Cassavetes, which may be exciting news if you’re a fan of avant-garde cinema, but might not sound quite as good if you’re the president of Warner Brothers. Cassavetes, who once said that he found scenes with crisp dialogue “corny and boring,” is arguably one of the most brilliant American filmmakers of all time, but his movies never made much money, and he was effectively banished from Hollywood by the time he was 40.

Last winter, I spent an afternoon with Jonze at a postproduction studio in West Hollywood, where he had sequestered himself with members of his trusted creative team, a group he referred to as his “pack.”