Highlights from Script Magazine piece by/on Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers on the writing of the Where the Wild Things Are script, and the challenges of adapting a very, very short book.
(Most of this isn't available online otherwise. And you should buy the darned magazine on newsstands anyway.)
Spike Jonze: The early draft primarily focused on the characters. I wanted to be really specific about who Max is and who the Wild Things are and let the story become their relationships to each other. Dave and I would sit together in the same room, mostly just talking through scenes, One of us would make notes or riff and the other would try and write it down.
Dave Eggers: We had fun every day writing it. There were a lot of days we'd just take two or three hours of warming up before we put a word down. And we have 80 pages of dialogue that's not being used for every one of those characters because we just went on and on. We'd have a whole inner-life and backstory and everything, and then, of course, we couldn't fit it all in there. The book was only 70 something words, so we had to do a lot of filling in.
Jonze: First and foremost I was concerned with who Max is, and what's going on in his life that he's trying to figure out. I wanted to make a movie that takes kids seriously. Maurice [Sendak] said: "Make sure you don't just take the heavy side of the kid seriously. You take the imagination seriously, his sense of joy seriously."
Eggers: We never thought "are kids going to like this?" Not once. This is the way it has to be written. We never dumbed anything down or said no, that's too much of an adult theme. We were determined not to do anything that would cheapen the material.
...
Eggers: Spike wanted to explore to deeply as possible the psyches of the Wild Things--that they are these giant, manic-depressive creatures that came from Maurice because they're all based on his aunts and uncles, and their giant faces and their bad breath and their giant teeth coming down. So we started with the Wild Things. They're all meant to represent different things and be tangential relationships with Max's world a little without being direct representations.
[What's interesting too is the revelation in this piece that Jonze came up to San Francisco to live here for awhile while he worked directly with Eggers. Eggers saw himself "as more of a facilitator" helping Jonze put his ideas onto paper and so on. But while the ideas may be Spike's, it's clear from reading this that the beauty of the script (which I'm admittedly just presuming from little I've read of it, and from the clips and trailers) was assisted greatly by their collaborative process.]
Eggers: Spike's method of working is the definition of organic. It had to be very real. I always would prefer to write alone, and send stuff online, and write marks on a piece of paper, and send it back. That's how I do things. But he really wanted it to be like, "Let's talk this through. Let's act this through, figure it out. What would he say here?"
Jonze: I think sometimes that was really frustrating for Dave because he just wanted to be productive. I definitely work a lot slower than Dave. He's very experienced as a writer, very disciplined, always moving forward. If he gets stuck, he just puts something in a placeholder and keeps moving. But, if it doesn't feel right I'll stay in that place until I find what feels real or right or true. I don't want to let go, I don't want to leave it.
Eggers: It was a real learning process for me, in terms of you do get at some incredibly real stuff if you actually put yourself in the shoes of the character.
This was great to read :) I'm so excited about a special screening in Ann Arbor on Oct 6th for this movie! And Spike Jonze is going to be there for a Q&A.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=649498383 | September 22, 2009 at 08:47 AM