Plagued by creative and corporate problems and criticised for being too scary for kids, the long-awaited film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are finally sees its UK release this month. Miles Fielder talks to director Spike Jonze about the often tricky process of adapting a beloved children’s book
It has taken a long time to unleash Maurice Sendak’s furry, horned, fanged and big- footed Wild Things on the big screen. A film adaptation of Sendak’s brilliant and beloved children’s picture book, Where the Wild Things Are, which was first published way back in 1963, has been in the Hollywood dream-works for years. Originally envisioned as an animated film, Sendak balked at the idea of his story about a naughty young boy named Max’s dream-like voyage to an island populated with hell-raising monsters being ‘Disney-fied’ – which is to say transformed from a thrillingly scary flight of fantasy into a saccharine kids’ movie – and so over the years he turned down numerous requests for the rights to do so. But now, almost 50 years after their first appearance, Spike Jonze, the director of those Charlie Kaufman-scripted mind-bending fantasies Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, has finally let loose Sendak’s creatures in a live-action film.
‘My mom read the book to me when I must have been about four or five,’ Jonze recalls. ‘I don’t remember exactly where we were, but I vividly remember the pictures and her voice reading me those words. There’s something about Maurice’s work that you just fall into – you are in that world that he creates and you become Max. I always loved that book.’ Where the Wild Things Are the movie arrives with the endorsement of Sendak, who was involved with the film right from the start, but the production has suffered more than its fair share of bumps in the night. For a start, after Sendak asked Jonze to take a shot at adapting his book (the pair met during another and abortive film project in the late-1990s) it took Jonze five years to think of a way to make something out of and do justice to Sendak’s
‘IF THE CHILDREN CAN’T HANDLE THE STORY, THEY SHOULD GO HOME’ beautifully illustrated but slim nine-sentence, twenty-page book. Once Jonze and his co- screenwriter Dave Eggers (author of the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and publisher of ultra-cool literary journal McSweeney’s) had hit upon a workable concept, they encountered terminal creative difference with the suits at Universal Pictures and Jonze had to take the project over the road to Warner Bros. Cameras eventually rolled in 2005 and Jonze duly turned in the finished film in 2007. But Warners were decidedly unhappy: they felt the film was less family-friendly than they had expected and wanted to re-shoot all $75 million worth of it. The studio eventually capitulated and reached
a compromise with Jonze, giving him more time and money to make some changes, and the film, initially scheduled for release in May last year, is finally seeing the light of day this month. However, Warners are not marketing Where the Wild Things Are as a family movie and it arrives with a kiddie-cautionary PG certificate. The studio’s evident view that Jonze’s take on Sendak’s book may still be a bit much for young audiences is being echoed by concerned parents in America, who are worried about their wee ones reading the book let alone seeing the film. News that Where the Wild Things Are is being deemed too scary for kids provoked the plain-speaking octogenarian Sendak to say to Newsweek magazine, ‘I would tell them [the parents] to go to hell. And if children can’t handle the story, they should go home. Or wet your pants.’ Critical reactions to the film have been mixed (Rolling Stone pronounced it ‘defiantly untamed’, while The Village Voice faint praised it with ‘well- behaved’), but there’s no denying the long- awaited arrival of the big screen Wild Things has provoked something of, as Max might shout, a rumpus.
Jonze thinks the book and film are and should be scary. Sendak was inspired by his childhood memories of encounters with overbearing relatives, whom he cast as the book’s monsters, and Jonze found the key to the film was to interpret the tale as a story about children’s emotions, which, he says, should naturally be scary. ‘I’d often asked myself, “Who are the Wild Things?”’ Jonze says. ‘Finally, it just hit me that the Wild Things could be wild emotions. And as a kid, to me, wild emotions were really scary – my own wild emotions, the emotions of the people around me. Just
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