Last week, a clip from (or, maybe more accurately, “from”, since its derivation is totally up for debate) Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are “leaked” onto the internet. I didn’t write about it at the time, because I watched it and thought it was kind of stupid, and I couldn’t think of anything better to say about it than “This looks kind of stupid.” Then AJ Schnack wrote this blog post shaming bloggers who posted the clip without bothering to consider whether or not it was real.”[I]t’s clear to this Angleno that the things is a badly conceived fake.” he wrote. “That rounded thing in the upper right corner? LA’s Griffith Observatory! And where is the movie being shot? Australia.” Whoops!
But the plot thickens: today, in response to wide-spread internet mocking and speculation, Jonze issued a statement confirming that the clip IS for real…sort of:
that was a very early test with the sole purpose of just getting some footage to Ben our vfx (visual effects) supervisor to see if our vfx plan for the faces would work. The clip doesn’t look or feel anything like the movie, the Wild Thing suit is a very early cringy prototype, and the boy is a friend of ours Griffin who we had used in a Yeah Yeah Yeahs video we shot a few weeks before. We love him, but he is not in the actually film…Oh and that is not a wolf suit, its a lamb suit we bought on the internet. Talk to you later…
David Poland posted the statement on his blog without comment, but his readers quickly filled the speculative gap. “Okay, now that we got that cleared, maybe we can find out why the movie got pushed back to next year and why Drew on AICN is hinting at Spike being replaced as director,” wrote commenter Noah. “I never said Spike was being replaced, and don’t put words in my mouth,” Drew then fired back. “There are several schools of thought on WTWTA right now behind-the-scenes, and we’ll see which of those schools of thought prevails in the next year or so of post-production. All I’ve ever said is that Warner may want more reshoots than Spike feels like doing. Again…we’ll see.”
All of that gossip is pretty interesting in light of this report from Defamer, which contends that early test screenings of the film for its intended demographic have gone pretty terribly. Apparently, “kids are crying and begging their parents to go home mid-film” because the movie’s creatures “are not cute” and the film’s human protagonist is “a bit weird and off-putting” and even “slaps his mom.” I think that might offer a pretty strong answer to Noah’s question, no?
No matter how effects-heavy this film is, it’s still been in production for an awfully long time. If Wild Things has actually been bumped to 2009 as has been rumored, that’ll mark seven years in between Spike Jonze features. And if I know my Yeah Yeah Yeahs history correctly, the kid from the vfx test was probably in the video for “Y Control” (above), which was released in 2004. That would mean that this film will have been in more-or-less active production for five of those seven years, which would indicate that there were serious problems long before finished footage made babies cry.
