A monster project

Where the Wild Things Are. Photo / Supplied

Usually the problem with book-to-film adaptations is fitting it all in or knowing what to leave out. Not this time. Maurice Sendak's 1963 classic beloved children's picture book Where the Wild Things Are runs to just 338 words.

At the helm of the story is an adventurous 9-year-old boy, Max, whose imagination takes him to a faraway land where he can unleash his wild side and become king of the creatures inhabiting his somewhat scary world. The book, which has sold 19 million copies worldwide, resonates with children, and the child within us.

In the wrong hands, this sparse and sensitive story of a child's feelings of abandonment and displacement in the world could have resulted in another formulaic Disneyesque cliche. However, Spike Jonze, one of Hollywood's most original directors, who brought us Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation, has succeeded in making a thoughtful, darkly emotional fairytale-with-an-edge.

Playing with a classic was an anxious experience.

Says Jonze: "I was excited but really nervous about it because I didn't want to add something on to it, like a storyline or plot. I felt that anything I would add would just sound cheesy and I didn't want to ruin it. But finally I felt comfortable doing it when I started thinking about what the wild things are and what they would talk like and sound like. Suddenly, out of that, everything tumbled and it felt like I could build from inside the book. It was imperative that I stayed true to it."

The creatures were voiced by actors including James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O'Hara, and Forest Whitaker, and the movie's live action stars include Catherine Keener and Mark Ruffalo. Max is played by namesake newcomer Max Records whose previous screen experienced extended to a Death Cab for Cutie video.

The director and his young star have similar recollections of the book.

Records: "I was a really big fan of the book. My parents started reading it to me when I was probably like one year old or something. It was probably my favourite book for a good portion of two, three, four years. It's not like the classic moralistic story. You do this, you realise what you did was wrong, you go home, and then you learn your lesson. It's different."

Jonze: "My mom read it to me when I was growing up. Even as I got older, at ages 8, 10, or 12, I'd go back to the bookshelf and I'd always look for it. I loved all of it - the drawings, the characters and the story. Part of it was the imagination and part of it was just Max being the king. The feelings he was going through were something that I related to and that's what I think was special about Maurice's work. He writes so honestly about childhood in this very poetic way and the drawings create these evocative visual poems in a language that kids understand. It's not pandering to a kid. It's being truthful about childhood." Jonze's efforts to turn the book into a film proved a journey almost as perilous as Max's.

A seven-minute animated Wild Things was made in 1973. Pixar founder John Lasseter had worked on a computer-animated feature version for Disney before he made Toy Story.

Sendak later spent years trying to launch a feature-length film and eventually approached Jonze, whom he'd befriended before his 1999 breakthrough film Being John Malkovich. The project switched studios from Universal to Warner Bros after disagreements, while filming, which began in 2006, and an extended post-production mean Jonze has spent nearly six years on the film.

"The first couple of years I spent writing the script with [novelist] Dave Eggers so I moved to San Francisco. Then it took another six months of getting the financing, then a year of making the costumes and then moving to South Australia to shoot. Then came a year and a half of editing followed by a year of visual effects," he says of this exhaustive process. "It took twice as long as we thought it was going to."

Part of that was fusing the life-sized creature costumes with CGI. The creatures are endowed with sensitive, human-like eyes and have facial expressions which exude intricate emotions of despair, hope, and at times, joyful abandon.

The banter between the creatures will appeal to adults. "It was a giant collaboration," says Jonze. "The idea was that the creatures had this weird family dynamic. Like, when you're invited over to a friend's house for Christmas and you're just thrown into the middle of this crazy family, trying to figure out who's mad at whom. So you have all this stuff going on under the surface that you're trying to navigate."

There are departures from the text. They've added a few years to Max for one thing

"If you're going to really put a kid on a boat in an ocean, five isn't going to cut it," Eggers said. "It's just too young."

Sendak was OK with that change but took more convincing on another one: instead of having Max's room turn into the forest where he encounters the Wild Things, the movie sends Max in his wolf costume storming out the front door and on to his adventure.

"That was the one thing that he really couldn't believe we wanted to do, and he really fought it," Eggers says." He kept coming back to it."

"[He'd say] 'This is your movie - you've got to make it however you feel it needs to be - but why can't the bedroom turn into a forest?"' Jonze recalls.

But the director gives all credit to the book's creator. "Maurice was the beacon who created the book that drew us all together and led us in the spirit of him as an artist. He inspired us in making this movie.

"Of course, I value lots of opinions about it, but it was Maurice who had to be okay with it. He had to love it."

Lowdown

What: Where the Wild Things Are, the Spike Jonze-directed film of Maurice Sendak's kids' classic

Where & when: Opens at cinemas on December 3

- Additional reporting Associated Press