Spike Jonze's Wild World

Warner Bros. Where the Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze talks to The Daily Beast’s Caryn James about his new MoMA retrospective, childhood fears, and getting James Gandolfini to play a monster.

The Museum of Modern Art’s splashy new film retrospective, Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years, was named by Jonze himself. “You know, I've only been working 80 years, and so I wanted a title that represented the fact that I still have more work in front of me,” he told The Daily Beast, offering a rare example of a pithy Spike Jonze sound bite. He is wry and low-key in a brief phone interview, but ask about his work and his side of the conversation becomes loaded with pauses, “ums” and detours. He’s better at directing films than explaining how he made them, but he is a whiz of a filmmaker.

There is thunderous buzz about Jonze’s latest movie, Where the Wild Things Are, (opening October 16) which captures all the dark, raucous energy, and psychological layers of Maurice Sendak’s minimalist children’s classic. The film should cement Jonze’s reputation as one of our most inventive directors. At 39, he is no longer young enough to be an enfant terrible, but people still peg him as a kid too cool to grow up.

Click the Image to Watch Clips from Spize Jonze’s Movies and Videos

He is forever ahead of the curve, though. In Jonze’s brand-new short "We Were Once a Fairy Tale" (part of the MoMA series, which begins October 8), Kanye West plays a fictional version of himself, a high-rolling celebrity who tosses money around a club, picks up a gorgeous woman, and ends up in the men’s room where a puppet rat pops out of his stomach and commits suicide under a shower of blood-red confetti. The credits call this character “Drunk Kanye” which accidentally plays into the recent headlines about West’s outburst at the MTV Video Music Awards. The name was “just a joke,” Jonze said, and the film “wasn't about being drunk, it was more about being sad.”

True enough. The short is a surreal and moody piece about fame and self-destruction, just the kind of layered little gem Jonze became famous for and that the MoMA series recognizes. There are skateboarding videos, and classic music videos, such as 2001’s “Weapon of Choice” for Fatboy Slim, with Christopher Walken dancing solo through a hotel lobby as gracefully as Fred Astaire then floating through the air. The droll commercials include a current one for a Japanese bank in which Brad Pitt dines with a Sumo wrestler.

“I wanted somebody who had a huge presence—charismatic, able to dominate a room,” Jonze said about casting Tony Soprano, yet “who was very sensitive, whose emotions were right under the surface.”

Jonze’s two features, Being John Malkovich (in which a man finds a doorway to Malkovich’s brain) and Adaptation, (Nicolas Cage as a screenwriter tortured by self-doubt), owe their mind-bending oddness to Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays, and the shorts may be the truer expression of Jonze’s quirky, sardonic style. His video for “Y Control” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was done in 2004, when he was thinking through the Wild Things concept, and visions of childhood don’t get funnier or more sinister. In the video, a pack of children become so out-of-control violent—in a funny, horror-movie way—that one little boy asks a girl to chop his hand off. The kids going haywire are a lot like the monsters’ playful attack in the movie.

The video, he said, came from “brainstorming and coming up with ideas” with Yeah Yeah Yeahs' lead singer Karen O. “I'm not one to intellectualize why I did something,” he adds, which counts as a gigantic understatement. Karen O. also did the soundtrack for Wild Things, which is haunting, brash and nothing like the usual icky-sweet kiddie music.