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Where the Wild Things Are
Wherethewildthingsare.jpg
Directed by	Spike Jonze
Written by	Screenplay: Dave Eggers Spike Jonze Book: Maurice Sendak
Produced by	John B. Carls Gary Goetzman Tom Hanks Vincent Landay Maurice Sendak
Cinematography	Lance Acord
Edited by	James Haygood Eric Zumbrunnen
Music by	Carter Burwell Karen O
Production companies	Warner Bros. Legendary Pictures Village Roadshow Pictures Playtone
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release dates	United States: October 16, 2009 United Kingdom: October 23, 2009 Australia: December 3, 2009
Countries	United States Australia
Language	English
Budget	$115 million

Where the Wild Things Are is a 2009 film adaptation of the children's book of the same name written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Directed and co-written by Spike Jonze, Where the Wild Things Are is produced by Tom Hanks and Sendak.

Premise

The film the story of a mischievous boy who is sent to bed without supper. In his room, Max uses his imagination to conjure up a forest populated by the wild things, exotic monsters who embrace Max as their ruler.

Cast

• May 2006: Benicio Del Toro, Forest Whitaker, Michelle Williams, Catherine O'Hara, Tom Noonan and Michael Berry are all cast in unnamed roles. Catherine Keener will appear in the live-action portion of the film, playing the mother of Max, who has yet to be cast. The other actors will voice the creatures, and Jonze will use the video of their work to inform the actual Wild Thing puppets. Those scenes will be shot in Australia. Whitaker's character is Ira.

• Mark Ruffalo is also in the movie. So is James Gandolfini.

Production

Development

Walt Disney Animation Studios concepted with doing Where the Wild Things Are in 1983, commissioning test footage by John Lasseter using a combination of hand-drawn and computer animation. The idea was later abandoned,

• April 2001: Universal Pictures is developing it as a computer animation film with David Reynolds hired to write the script. Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's Playtone Productions is producing, along with Sendak and John B. Carls of Wild Things Productions.

• August 2001: Universal is fast tracking production. 10-year Disney veteran Eric Goldberg has left the Mouse to direct the film for Universal and Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman's Playtone Productions. It is tentatively set for a Thanksgiving 2004 or Summer 2005 release.

• October 2003: Universal Pictures hires Spike Jonze to direct Where the Wild Things Are. Playtone's Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman, Vincent Landay, John Carls and Maurice Sendak (the author) are producing. Originally developed as a CGI film, but the studio and producers sparked to Jonze's live-action vision.

• April 2005: Still in pre-production. Jonze and Dave Eggers were rewriting the script.

• Universal puts the film in turnaround in December 2005. Warner Bros. picks it up in January 2006. Scripts by Jonze and Eggers. Playtone is still involved.

• Slated for a 2008 release date, Legendary Pictures also to co-finance. Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni will exec produce. Dave Eggers wrote the script with Jonze, and Playtone partners Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are producing with Sendak, John Carls and Vince Landay.

• Jonze dropped out of New York in favor of Wild Things.

Filming

• Originally suppose to shot on sound stages at New Zealand, but moved to Australia.

• July 2006: Central City Studios in Melbourne is gearing up for Spike Jonze's $80 million Where the Wild Things Are.

• March 2007: Filming is finished.

Visual effects

The film will have "an innovative mix of live-action, animation and puppetry."

Differences

• May 2006: Slated for a 2008 release.

• Release Date: October 16, 2009.

• February 2008: Rumors of artistic control and creative differences are starting to come between Jonze and Warner Brothers. The film might have to be reshot. The film uses people in huge Jim Henson Creature Shop suits, and the plan was to shoot the suits and animate the Wild Things' faces later. That has been proving to be more technically difficult than anyone had foreseen, even though test footage had been shot (a leaked clip from the movie that hit the internet this weekend was in fact some of that test footage, according to a statement from Spike Jonze). Yet I'm hearing that just such a massive reshoot is what is on the table right now.

• July 2008: Artistic control and creative differences are starting to come between Jonze and Warner Brothers. The $80-million film, with a script by Dave Eggers, was filmed largely in the second half of 2006 in Australia. It was originally slated for release in October 2008 but got pushed back to the fall of 2009. Last week it disappeared entirely from the Warner Bros. release schedule, a sign of continuing troubles. For months the Web has been pulsing with rumors and in-depth accounts that when Jonze had a research screening last December, kids in the audience were crying and fleeing the theater--not exactly the reaction the studio had hoped for. The movie's big problem? The boy, played by newcomer Max Records, is almost entirely unlikable, coming off as more mean-spirited and bratty than mischievous. Jonze has also had tons of issues with the wild things. Originally shot as actors in furry creature suits with animated faces, as well as animatronic puppets, they were a big disappointment. Instead of being scary or funny, they almost seemed blank, with little warmth or emotion. Jonze is now retooling the film, using CGI to create more life-like monsters. Horn denied rumors that the studio has taken Jonze off the movie, saying he remains fully supportive of the filmmaker. "We've given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film. We'd like to find a common ground that represents Spike's vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn't call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we're just trying to get it right."

• July 2008 (about 2 weeks later): Playtone producer Gary Goetzman wishes that Warner Bros. chief Alan Horn hadn't expressed his reservations about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are to the LAT's Patrick Goldstein. Goetzman responded: "Warner Bros.' vision and Spike and my vision of the picture may be a little different. In the end good taste will prevail. The final cut is Spike's. Warner Bros. is not taking over the picture and has no intention of bringing down the hammer on anyone here." The kid starring in the pic as Max (Max Records) isn't going anywhere. He was picked by Spike and approved by Warners, said Goetzman. Goetzman admitted that the live-action animatronic wild things definitely did not work in the context of shooting in the jungles of Australia and that CGI is being added now. "CG can always look right," he says. As for the rumor that kids ran screaming from an early research screening, Goetzman says that's not true: "There was no screaming, no crying, none of that." Clearly, Jonze, who is still working on the troubled movie, needs more tinkering time. The original October release date is long past. But it does seem to make Goetzman a tad nervous that there is no new release date set.

• September 2008: Anne Thompson - Director Spike Jonze has never made a wide-audience commercial studio movie, a family movie or a visual effects movie. Art house filmmaker. Jonze's initial idea was to shoot the wild things in nine-foot suits with animatronic faces in the jungles of Australia and New Zealand. CG-faces would be required. After a disastrous December 2007 preview of Jonze's first cut, the studio shut down the project. Jonze did reshoots a year after he first shot the movie, mostly of the young lead, Max Record. About 10 minutes were added: two scenes at the start and one at the end. "We wanted more emotion for the story on the whole," says Warners president Jeff Robinov, who will screen the new cut this month. Budget will escalate above $80 million.

Release

Marketing

• Trailer was shown with Monsters vs. Aliens.

External links

• Official website
• Where the Wild Things Are at IMDb
• Where the Wild Things Are at AllMovie
• Where the Wild Things Are at Rotten Tomatoes
• Where the Wild Things Are at Box Office Mojo
• October 2007 NY Magazine script review
• Photo gallery
• Screen shot

Cast

• Gandolfini's character is Carol. Chris Cooper voices a Wild Thing. Lauren Ambrose has a part.

• August 2006: "Paul Dano will be shot on digital video to portray a monster, with his movements and voice used as the model for a live-action puppet."

Development

• Maurice Sendak approved of Jonze's script. Jonze first met Sendak when he was producing Harold and the Purple Crayon. Michael Tolkin wrote the script. This was in 1994. Jonze: "They’d been trying to make it a movie for a while, and over the years since then, like over the last ten years probably, he would just talk to me about it, like 'You know, we’re trying to do Where the Wild Things Are.' And I remember a few times I would get an idea and talk to him about it." Jonze worked on it for a couple months before Dave Eggers came along.

Filming

• Weather problems in Australia. Most of it was shot handheld from Lance Acord. Four month long shoot.

Visual effects

• Framestore is doing the majority of the effects. The Jim Henson company.

Music

• Collaboration between Karen O and Carter Burwell; they did it together.

Differences

• It's not like the traditional children's fantasy movie. Jonze: "I think that’s what freaked the studio out about the movie too. It wasn’t a studio film for kids, or it wasn’t a traditional film about kids. We didn’t have like a Movie Kid in our movie, or a Movie Performance in a Movie Kid world. We had a real kid and a real world, and I think that’s sort of where our problem was." Warners stalled the film for a while before Jonze got additional funding for pick-ups. Thanks to a petition, which was signed by Hollywood filmmakers (including Gondry and Bjork), production commenced once more.

• June 2008: If you've been following the upcoming Warner Bros. adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, you'll already know that there's been drama surrounding the fantasy production. Today, we've got a status update on the troubled-yet-anticipated project. Being John Malkovich filmmaker Spike Jonze is making the live-action/CG movie, but word surfaced in February that studio higher-ups weren't too keen on the work that he'd done. Reports claimed it was thought to be "too weird" and "too scary," on top of likability issues with starring child actor Max Records. In fact, there were rumors that the film might be entirely reshot. Now we've heard, via Bloody Disgusting, that a month's worth of reshoots have been scheduled, and that new casting calls have been announced for various stand-in parts. The reshoots will reportedly take place in Los Angeles on June 5-30.

Marketing

• "One of the things we wanted to do is... I don’t know if it’ll be for Nickelodeon or what, but do some TV special with kids where we sit with groups of like 4 or 5 kids at a time and just talk with them about the movie and what it made them feel, and their own feelings. I think do a special in the same way that the movie takes kids’ feelings seriously. Because the other thing with a movie this big is you have the opportunity to do all these ancillary things, and I think instead of doing the generic, cynical fast food tie-in or other merchandising that feels like more fodder or garbage just filling up the..."

• Entertainment Weekly
• ComingSoon.net
• Internet Movie Database
• the actual article
• http://popwatch.ew.com/2009/08/02/anderson-burton-jonze-kids/