Experimentation, in Life and on Screen

Spike Jonze, director of the upcoming Where the Wild Things Are. (Astounding image by Dan Winters for The New York Times.)

It’s true.  Seeing the first mention of the movie on the Internet with pictures gave me a chill.  The first teaser trailer enthralled me.  And, when I saw the extended trailer, I knew.

I already am in love with Spike Jonze’s movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, set to open October 16.

And, now, The New York Times Magazine gets its take on the movie, but more, of Jonze and the path that led him to the Wild Things.

Saki Knafo writes:

“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.

Later, when discussing a Jonze never-made movie — an adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon — we learn who Jonze is:

The project’s demise, Jonze told me, actually brought him an “odd sense of relief.” TriStar had been pressuring him to make the script jokier, he said, and he’d given in to the point where he barely recognized his own work. “I realized only then that it happens millimeter by millimeter,” he told me. “If you compromise what you’re trying to do just a little bit, you’ll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you’re suddenly really far away from where you’re trying to go.”

And, then we get to the Wild Things:

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 [author Maurice] 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.

So exciting. I was struck by this profile, not just because of the movie — but also by the remarkable follow-up that this profile provides to my post on Tuesday about experimentation.  I wrote, of First Lady Michelle Obama’s description of the value of experimenting in the legal field: “[T]he message . . ., truly, [] applies to any career path.  There’s always going to be an ‘expected’ route and and a more experimental one.”

I’m not sure of anything that I’ve read recently that shows the wonderful power of experimentation more than this profile — in words, in pictures and in spirit.  Read the whole, lengthy piece, and check out the impressive photos by Dan Winters.

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