LOS ANGELES -- Like the song says, they wanted to do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.
Namely, shoot Where the Wild Things Are as if it were a wildlife documentary -- not a big-budget fantasy adventure.
"The first thing (director Spike Jonze) said to us was this is not an effects film," remembers production designer KK Barrett. "Even though there are effects in the film, it is not an effects film. So it kind of pre-determined our sensibility."
Says director of photography Lance Acord, "The camerawork in a wildlife documentary is very, very simple. So we tried to stay away as much as possible from big crane shots or steadicam shots." (Jonze had some previous experience filming wildlife: He directed Weezer's Island in the Sun music video, in which band members frolicked with lions on a hillside.)
Explains Barrett, "In a typical fantasy film, you would have your humanistic character and your creature characters, however they were made. And the creature character is always a little lacking in the full range of emotion. Spike really wanted to get it to where they were equals. So Max and the wild things had the same weight and emotional connectivity."
Tasked with rendering Maurice Sendak's wild things into three-dimensional beings was creature designer Sonny Gerasimowicz. Immediately he discovered that, "When you make them anything but flat they look crazy. Maurice's artwork is so specific to that look and so as you bring it into 3D, they just look all insane. So immediately Spike knew he had to change the eyes to something more emotive and they've got to start neutral so they can get angry or sad."
The final creatures seen on-screen are a combination of animatronics -- performed live during filming -- and computer imagery, which augmented their expressions.
Gerasimowicz, who had never worked on a film before, eventually wound up playing a much larger role than he expected when he replaced one of the wild thing performers.
"I ran into two trees full-speed ahead," he says, explaining how he only had a tiny video monitor to see where he was going. "I'd hear Spike: 'Sonny? Sonny, where are you going? Can you see anything?' And I'd be like, 'No, no, I can't.' "
