Spike Jonze feires

Snart kommer Where the Wild Things Are på kino og i den anledning har MoMa en midtlivsutstilling om Spike Jonze og i disse anledningene har New York Times en 7-siders sak om alt.


Fin filmbit med Maurice Sendak, Dave Eggers og Spike Jonze

Artikkelen handler om bloggeren som satte i gang kampanjen som fikk Warner til å snu og tåle Spike Jonzes versjon av Where the Wild Things Are, skatefilmer, reklamefilmer for IKEA, Nike og GAP, musikkvideoer, John Malkovitch som dro til Paris for å treffe Spike Jonze på Sophia Coppolas oppfordring. Med mere som det heter.

Dette er de bitene jeg likte best

Growing up, Jonze told me, he completely identified with Max.
In 2001 and 2002, while filming “Adaptation,” Jonze would read the book at night in his Los Feliz bedroom. “I’d read it and put it down next to my bed and think about it,” he said. Every once in a while, Sendak would call and they’d talk about work, art, Mickey Mouse, their lives. But whenever the subject of a “Wild Things” movie came up, Jonze told me, his answer was the same: “I love it in this form, and I don’t want to add something on that seems extraneous.”


Then one night in 2003, Jonze opened the book again.
He had been going through a difficult time. After more than a decade together, he and Sofia Coppola were splitting up.

He found himself contemplating the wild things anew. “What would they look like?” he wondered. “What would they talk like?”
He decided they should talk like people, not like monsters.
They were “complex emotional beings,” he told me, with wild emotions roiling inside them. Then he began to think of the wild things as actually being wild emotions, embodying all the intense things children — and grown-ups — sometimes feel.

“I felt that I could write infinitely about that, because that’s so much of what we are,” he told me. Excited, Jonze scribbled down some notes and called Sendak. At some point during what he described to me as “10 minutes of rambling,” he managed to get across the essential piece of information: he wanted to do the movie.


Jonze asked Dave Eggers, the novelist and nonfiction writer, to write the screenplay with him; they had met a few years earlier after Eggers wrote Jonze a fan letter. In 2004, his divorce from Coppola finalized, Jonze moved to San Francisco, where Eggers lived.

The two of them wrote in Jonze’s house. For inspiration, they’d watch “The Wizard of Oz.” To unwind, they’d ride around the house on skateboards and shoot each other with BB guns. Sendak had instructed Jonze to make the movie personal, so Jonze gave Max a single mom. He and Eggers spent hours talking about their childhoods and their families. Though they were creating a strange, allegorical fantasy, they wanted it to feel as true-to-life as possible.


Jonze’s team, meanwhile, has been pursuing its own marketing strategy, one not particularly oriented toward children.

Jonze directed a short documentary about Maurice Sendak that will be shown on HBO.

Eggers wrote a novelization of the movie and is publishing it
(with a fur cover) through his own publishing company, McSweeney’s.

There’s a line of “Wild Things” skateboards,
a soundtrack album by Karen O of the art-rock group Yeah Yeah Yeahs
and branded “Wild Things” jewelry for sale at a boutique near Jonze’s Lower East Side apartment.

På bildet er Dave Eggers, Tophy Eggers og Spike Jonze.

Jeg finner ikke noe på MoMas sider om alt Spike Jonzez som foregår der i oktober, men New York-bloggeren Brooklyn Vegan har en lang gjennomgang. Det er filmer fra den hittile karrieren, snakkinger, konsert.

Where the Wild Things Are kommer 16. oktober i USA.
11. desember i Oslo
Her har jeg skrevet om Maurice Sendaks 80-årsdag,
da han gjerne ville tilføye at han er homofil.