On the day before a charity screening of Where the Wild Things Are, writer/director Spike Jonze, star Max Records, and star (and so much more) Catherine Keener sat down with us (and Adam Fendelman of HollywoodChicago.com) to discuss their highly anticipated and already controversial adaptation of the beloved Maurice Sendak classic. The lively conversation shot around the room with Jonze starting off by asking his interviewers questions and everyone becoming involved in what felt more like a discussion than a typical Q&A session. Jonze and Records sat on the couch together and worked off each other in what resembled a father-son dynamic and Keener is simply one of the most likable interview subjects you’ll ever meet. The whole thing wrapped up in a way-too-brief twenty minutes but covered why the book is still beloved today, the struggle in getting this unusual film to the big screen, and the unusual process it took to get it there.

SPIKE JONZE: (Pretending to be the interviewer.) What were you guys thinking making this movie? What made you want to adapt this book into a screenplay?

CATHERINE KEENER: What makes you want to write about this movie?

HollywoodChicago.com: Well, we write about all movies.

KEENER: This one in particular. Is there something about this movie specifically that you want to write about?

MovieRetriever: I think it's unbelievably ambitious and I think part of my job is to support movies this ambitious.

KEENER: That's great. I agree with that.

MovieRetriever: I think it's one of the best films, maybe THE best film, about how imagination can be used for more than escape. It can be used for coping – dealing with reality as much as fantasy. People make fantasy films all the time about kids bouncing through the woods and having fun but there's a lot more to this than that.

KEENER: I never viewed this as a fantasy movie. I really do agree with that.

MovieRetriever: Now I can switch it over to you ... but don't you think that a lot of people adapting this book would have seen this as fantasy? She did not. Did you? (To Spike.)

JONZE: I don't know if I ever used that word. I'm sure I didn't. It was something that someone mentioned to me a couple months ago – that it was “a different sort of fantasy film.” I was like, "Whoa. I guess it is, kind of." I don't know. I never ... I guess I never put any sort of ... like the movies I did with Charlie [Kaufman], we never talked about what kind of movies they were. We never said "This is a comedy. This is whatever kind of movie." It's more about what we're trying to express; what we're trying to make; the feeling we're trying to get at. So, I think with this movie, yeah, it was more just trying to make a movie trying to get at what it feels like to be a person at that age. Even at the beginning, I don't know if I could have said it that clearly. It was more intuitive.

HollywoodChicago.com: Who do you view [lead creatures] Carol and KW to be metaphors for?

JONZE: We never did a one-on-one like "This is this. That is that." There are elements of ... it's more feelings and emotions than specific "This is that person." It's a little more like a dream in that the emotion is what you connect with. I don't know if that's an okay enough answer.

KEENER: I agree with you. I think I had my own feelings about Carol and KW but we all sort of projected our own experience.

MAX RECORDS: I always viewed all of the wild things as sort of like individual emotions that are sort of isolated into these big, furry creatures. It can be taken so many different ways.

HollywoodChicago.com: They were like a collective?

RECORDS: I sort of looked at the wild things as individual emotions and one of the weird things about doing that is that you're not sure which is which. All in all, probably if you were going to map it out and stuff, Carol is sort of love, you know? He's shaky and unstable and about to lash out and eat your head off. But he's so sweet and stuff. They're all sort of parts of Max.

MovieRetriever: I think it's interesting that just in this room there are so many different interpretations. That's a great thing, but how difficult is that to make? Is it just because you never sit down and map it out or do you set about to make a film that's so open to interpretation? Was that a goal of yours?

JONZE: I think that I don't find life to be that simple and to make something that oversimplifies ... I'm more interested in trying to capture what life is like and life isn't simple. Life has a lot of grays. And things can be contradictory. And relationships have a lot of different sides to them. You're just trying to put in everything that you can and, if you're exploring a theme, you're going to try and approach it from all sides of that theme, as opposed to just "it's like this." I don't think ... I think there's....

MovieRetriever: Don't you think that's rare in the genre of the family film, a genre that generally talks down to its audience? Do you think that's why there were problems getting it done the way you wanted to get it done?

JONZE: Yeah, definitely. The first thing ... It starts with Maurice [Sendak] and his work and his work doesn't talk down to kids. And I think that's why I loved it as a kid. When I see something that felt like ... I recognize that feeling. Those were the things I was attracted to. It wasn't a book that was like "If you behave this way then...." The ones that were the "easy lesson" books? Those ones didn't stick in my head at all. The ones that had some strange feeling that I recognized ... those are the ones that stuck in my head. Like the first Willy Wonka movie with Gene Wilder – he's compelling and I want him to like me but I'm also scared of him. I want to be Charlie and I want him to give me the factory but I'm also really scared of him and charmed by him and he's mysterious.

KEENER: It's sort of a mystery. It's kind of scary and you feel like I kind of have to keep going through this to figure out what it is. There is no end to it. It never ends.

HollywoodChicago.com: It's a journey.

KEENER: Exactly. It's a journey where it's mysterious too.

HollywoodChicago.com: As the film was pushed back, was it your goal to make it less dark?

JONZE: Well, what happened was that it was my goal just to make it better and use the time. We pushed it back one year and it was really frustrating and difficult because I had been working on it so long already but I just tried to stay productive. "Well, I'm going to use this time and this money to make the movie better." And, in the end, I feel like we did use that time to discover things. We never made the movie less dark. We never changed our intention. The movie was always ... I feel like the movie is the same movie that we started making. It's the same movie that we screened that the studio was anxious about. But, in the end, the studio realized ... they came to accept the movie. They realized that I wasn't going to work on something for five years and then, because they were anxious, change it and go against what I set out to do. I would never do that. Why would I? Why would I spend that much time on something I cared so deeply about and then, out of their anxiety, question that?

MovieRetriever: Clearly, you were affected by the book to begin with. Were the two of you [to Max and Catherine] as well?

BOTH: Yes.

MovieRetriever: Speak about what you liked about the book Max. What did you like about it?

JONZE: Do you remember it being read to you when you were young?

RECORDS: My parents read it to me and it was probably read to me first when I was a year-and-a-half old or something, possibly younger. And it's just different. As Spike says, it's not a moralistic, easy-to-follow thing where you do something and there are consequences and that's that.

JONZE: Do you remember being three or four?

RECORDS: Not at all. I'm guessing at what I felt.

JONZE: What is the earliest age you remember?

RECORDS: Mostly, I just remember brief memories and a couple of images from when I was like three or something and then I start remembering stuff in detail when I was probably six.

JONZE: When you were six, do you remember reading the book still?

RECORDS: I probably still did. Yeah.

HollywoodChicago.com: How much could you relate in real life to your character in the film?

RECORDS: I think that I relate to Max just as much as any kid does. We all get pissed off and stand on the counter and yell at our mother, "Feed me woman!" It's just different instances of stuff like that. I think that the character of Max does a very good job of ... one of the things that makes the film so great is that Max the character embodies a child between the ages of six and ten or even beyond that.

MovieRetriever: One of the things that struck me about the film was the sense of spontaneity – the idea that Carol threatens to eat his feet off, the dirt clod fight, all that stuff feels almost improvised but, of course, it can't be. How do you maintain that sense of spontaneity?

JONZE: I think in the writing we were very spontaneous. It's the way we wrote it. We didn't over-analyze it. Looking back now people talk about it in sort of a more intellectual way, but I think when we wrote it, it was more of a gut feeling of "This feels right. This is what I would say if I was Max. This is what I would want." It's just going to that place and free-forming from there. And I think that process, as laborious as the process was ... it was the most laborious thing I've ever made in terms of the actual shoot in terms of building the creatures and getting the performances ... despite all that, moment to moment ... and this is why we had Keener there ... to make it NOT a visual effects movie – to make it a movie about character and performance. I've been lucky enough to have these incredible casts that can do anything and they bring it to life. And, so, the idea with this is that we're going through this process that could easily become a visual effects movie and it could be easily un-spontaneous and we did everything we could to fight against it. Keener was our secret weapon. She ended up helping with casting. She helped me get the performances of the voice actors. And then she came to Australia to play the mom, which was the smallest of her duties but the most visible and significant and hugely important. And she stayed on after just to be a second set of eyes. She would also give Max stuff to react to or play off camera for him.

KEENER: Everyone sort of ... the group that Spike works with – all of the friends and I'm part of it too – everyone would kind of burn out and take their day and hit the wall and there was always somebody there....

JONZE: We don't work that departmentally. So, if I was faded one day then Lance [Acord, the cinematographer] would jump in and take over. Or Keener. It was everybody.

KEENER: It was such a long time that everybody got very real. So, if you were just sort of DONE, people would understand it and pick up for you.

RECORDS: They wouldn't just stop.

KEENER: No. They wouldn't stop. You couldn't stop. We could not afford to stop.

JONZE: What was it like seeing the wildness of this production? The way we shot? Did you think anything of it at the time?

RECORDS: I guess I just thought, "This is how they do it."

(Everyone laughs.)

HollywoodChicago.com: How was this set different than The Brothers Bloom?

RECORDS: Rian Johnson, the director, knew EXACTLY what he wanted. Whereas, here, Spike knew EXACTLY what he wanted ... and fifty other things he wanted too.

KEENER: But that's what it was like with what you were describing – the range of emotions in those characters. It was a range of everything on this movie within each person. There was so much scope. And it's funny that the story ... you were saying with the studio ... there was so much happening. Spike went out to make this movie and Max went out to do his journey. And they come back and there's acceptance at the end.

RECORDS: The way I view it is that my job is to go to Australia and help make a movie and then come back and come here to make sure these two don't make up lies about me.