Spike Jonze finds the right look for ‘Where the Wild Things Are’

By Chris Lee – LATimes.com

When Spike Jonze set out to create live-action versions of the classic creatures from “Where the Wild Things Are” for his movie adaptation of the beloved children’s book, the writer-director had a very clear image in mind — of what he didn’t want.

In 2004, around the time he also started co-writing its script with novelist Dave Eggers, Jonze rejected a number of submissions from a Hollywood special-effects company for being, well, “too creature-y.” Jonze thought they simply failed to capture a bestial je ne sais quoi found in Maurice Sendak’s 1963 picture book about Max, a little boy in a wolf costume who misbehaves and imagines himself transported to a faraway land where he becomes the king of all Wild Things.

“I wanted the monsters to retain the strange design that Maurice had created,” he said. “Weird, cuddly, charming. Looking at each other out of the corner of their eye. They’d be almost, like, conspiring. You don’t know if Max has total control over them.”

To ensure his monsters would have the proper “soul,” though, Jonze decided he needed an illustrator from outside the movie biz to draw mock-ups first. Over dinner, Jonze’s friend Karen O, lead singer of the alt-rock trio the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Julian Gross of the noise rock band Liars steered the director toward their pal Sonny Gerasimowicz.

He wasn’t a professional creature creator or artist. A former graffiti writer turned ad agency creative, Gerasimowicz was a kind of closet artiste with only one illustration for a magazine article to suggest his skill. Offered the chance to work with the zeitgeist-riding auteur, Gerasimowicz didn’t present him a polished portfolio. He showed Jonze rough pencil drawings of the Wild Things. And the lo-fi renderings struck just the right nerve. “I sent him sketches that were, like, things I drew while I was on the telephone. Like on scraps of paper,” Gerasimowicz recalled.

“When it comes down to something as delicate as tone, it became clear we had to find someone who had the right aesthetic,” Jonze said. “It’s finding people that have the right judgment, even if they’ve never done the specifics.”

Gerasimowicz landed the job in early 2005, the mandate being not to slavishly imitate Sendak’s singular style, more to articulate the creatures’ distinct personalities as per the script (it helped that Jonze physically acted out each character for him). In turn, Gerasimowicz drafted scores of monster drawings: previsualizations for Photoshop-version Wild Things, the stage during which such crucial details as their fur, feathers, musculature and eyes would be decided.

Then the two traveled to Connecticut to show Sendak the renderings and get his blessing. The then-76-year-old writer-illustrator made some tweaks — suggestions about the muzzle on a bull-like Wild Thing and the feathers on the rooster Thing not being “flamboyant” enough — but remained markedly nonproprietary. “His attitude is so contrary to protecting anything,” Jonze said. “His assignment to us was, ‘Take this, make it your own. Make it something personal.’ “

In 2006, the project landed at Warner Bros. and monster production began at Jim Henson Co.’s Creature Shop. Gerasimowicz was kept on as head creature designer, overseeing work by some of the foremost practitioners in the business. Nevermind that he had absolutely no experience. Or that the expense of making the monsters accounted for the largest part of the movie’s production costs. Or that his staff wasn’t exactly certain where he fit in.

“I would give them aesthetic direction, ‘What if we kind of did this a little bit?’ And they’d be, like, ‘That’s a cool thought.’ But they would keep moving with what they were doing,” Gerasimowicz said.

With principle photography in Australia approaching in the spring of 2006, anxiety set in. Jonze had precise ideas about the way the Wild Things should look, i.e., “not like they were guys in suits.” But Jonze and Gerasimowicz’s lack of familiarity with how special effects are created resulted in sleepless nights during the characters’ fabrication.

“It was so hard!” Gerasimowicz exclaimed. “They show us a bare-bones suit and it would be the scariest thing in the world because it’s just a big foam thing. Not doing this ever before, it was hard to visualize.”

“We freaked out every step of the way,” Jonze added. “By the time we got to Australia, we were nervous wrecks.”

Compounding matters, the actors who were to perform in the Wild Thing suits had to be in costume up to 12 hours a day. Suits weighed up to 150 pounds and temperatures reached triple digits. When one of the actors dropped out at the last minute, Gerasimowicz’s job description changed again: He stepped into the role of Alexander, a small, snarky goat in the film. “Sonny has a demeanor similar to that character,” Jonze said. “I always describe him as a disgruntled Muppet.”

For anyone familiar with Sendak’s book, Jonze’s “Wild Things,” which opens Oct. 16, will be a marvel. The characters — voiced by such actors as James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker and Lauren Ambrose — seem comfortingly familiar and yet occupy a totally unique movie universe, a vivid live-action extrapolation of Sendak’s classic work. Especially the creatures’ emotive faces. Asked if CGI was responsible for their expressiveness, however, Jonze grew cagey.

“The faces were static when we shot them and we put the faces on in post-production,” he said. “I didn’t want to have CGI faces where it’s synthetic fur. So it’s more manipulating what we’d shot in-camera.

“It’s not like it’s a big secret. But I want to let that come out later. I don’t want the attention to focus on that.”

50 Cent Reveals Role In ‘Intense’ Remake Of ‘Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde’

Larry Carroll – MTV.com

‘Working beside him is a great honor,’ the MC says of starring alongside Forest Whitaker.

It’s one of the most bizarre — and secretive — projects in the worlds of hip-hop and Hollywood. Ever since it was first announced, it has raised more questions than answers. But now, 50 Cent is finally ready to talk about his monstrous turn in a modern-day “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” film.

“That one’s coming up soon,” Fif told us this week, excited about the first horror film of his young acting career, which he starts shooting at this end of the summer opposite a recent Oscar winner. “It’s me and Forest Whitaker. I actually just spoke to his agent yesterday.”

Since the project made headlines in May, 50 has remained tight-lipped about the remake of Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless tale of an affable doctor battling the evil within himself. In the classic setup, the doctor invents a potion that fully unveils his inner beast — only to create a battle between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for their common body.

“Ah, so you assuming?” the chart-topper laughed when I told him that Internet buzz suspects that he’ll be portraying the monster. “I don’t know, you know?”

After a bit of coaxing, however, he admitted his role for the first time. “Yeah, I’m supposed to play Hyde.”

“It’s gonna be intense,” he said excitedly. And although his appearance will be transformed with makeup and hair so he can play a deadlier version of Whitaker’s mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll, 50 Cent said that they’re just now getting around to discussing his look with accomplished filmmaker Abel Ferrara. “He’s an excellent director, so his creative ideas will definitely be an injective into what it’s actually gonna turn out to be.”

“Are you familiar with Abel Ferrara? ‘Bad Lieutenant’?” 50 Cent said of one of his favorite movies, a controversial 1992 flick starring Harvey Keitel and currently being remade with Nicolas Cage. “It was amazing. So, then you understand that the director we chose for this ['Jekyll'] project is the kind of guy that has an eye for real cutting-edge, really in-your-face material.”

50 Cent also confirmed that his “Jekyll” will update Stevenson’s tale to take place in modern times. “When you say ‘Jekyll and Hyde,’ it’s been made a couple of times,” explained the actor, who can be seen with Val Kilmer in the New Orleans cop drama “Streets of Blood” when it hits DVD later this month. “And [it's been told] from different perspectives, with different directors trying to capture it. But this is gonna feel great. It’s modern, with new talent in it. Forest Whitaker is amazing, and working beside him is a great honor.” 

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Hollywood’s most wanted look familiar as films revisit old ‘Enemies’

By Maria Puente, USA TODAY

They’re back —Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger and Baby Face, Jekyll and Hyde, Holmes and Watson. Say hello again to Robin Hood, the Wolf Man, the Lone Ranger, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man and Conan the Barbarian. Hamlet, dear boy, long time, no see! They have all been here before, and soon they’ll all be here again, dashing across big screens around the world, drawing in a new generation of moviegoers perhaps unfamiliar with earlier versions of these characters.Or so Hollywood hopes.

Exhibit A: Public Enemies, out Wednesday and starring Johnny Depp as the charming and public-relations-savvy bank robber John Dillinger in a retelling of how the early FBI got its man in 1934. (It was messy and bloody, and innocent people were caught in the crossfire.)

Real-life “public enemies” such as Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Bonnie and Clyde were celebrities to Depression-era Americans who cheered them for stealing from despised banks. By the 1940s and through the 1970s, Hollywood made scores of movies and TV shows about Dillinger and his gang. Now, in the midst of an economic calamity and multiple bank bailouts, Universal hopes a sexy outlaw targeting bankers and outwitting brutal G-men will resonate with audiences.

“It’s hard to predict, but (banks) are not going to garner an undue amount of sympathy — let’s put it that way,” jokes Enemies director Michael Mann. He’s not concerned about past Dillinger movies; he knows most moviegoers will be more familiar with Depp than with Dillinger, but he believes they’ll be drawn to a story about a “fascinating life.”

But you have to wonder about all this effort being lavished on movies that have been made before, even if the characters and stories are being presented in fresh ways. Surely today’s filmmakers haven’t run out of new characters or creative juice. Maybe it’s the result of the crashed economy, as risk-averse studios fall back to familiar (and proven) moneymakers.

Call them insurance policies

Or maybe it’s a matter of tradition and history: As in any art form, entirely new stories are relatively rare; what came before is recycled and reimagined to make new art.

“The idea of re-using characters and remaking films goes back to the earliest days of Hollywood, but the flood today does seem rather stunning,” says UCLA film historian Jonathan Kuntz. “But with so much riding on major pictures costing hundreds of millions, they want some kind of insurance. Taking a story or character already well known makes it easier to market, to get that opening weekend box office at a reasonable level.”

It will not have escaped Hollywood’s notice, Kuntz says, that characters such as Batman and the Mummy, each dating back decades, have been enormously successful in recent revivals. No wonder, then, that Universal, long known as the studio of monster movies, would return to its archive: The Wolfman (original 1941) is due in November with Benicio Del Toro; The Invisible Man (original in 1933) is scheduled for 2011; and planning has begun for Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954).

So it’s back to the past — only with better (and more expensive) special effects. “There’s always talk in the Hollywood press about this— ‘Do we have to recycle everything all the time, why can’t we come up with new characters?,’ ” says David Gross, editor of MovieReviewIntelligence.com, which analyzes movie reviews from newspapers around the USA. “There’s not a whole lot new under the sun, so if you have to go back to the well every 20 years, there’s a new generation of moviegoers (to attract).”

Most of nearly two dozen coming movies are based on classics of English literature or Western folklore, with American comics, pulp fiction and TV series thrown in. Thus: Frankenstein; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Also: Conan the Barbarian (based on 1932 stories by Robert E. Howard, remake of the 1982 film due in 2010); John Carter of Mars (based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, coming in 2012 with Taylor Kitsch);The Three Stooges (coming in 2010, with Jim Carrey, Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro); and The Lone Ranger (2012, with part-Cherokee Depp as faithful companion Tonto).

Most have been made multiple times, such as Gulliver’s Travels (2010, Jack Black), A Christmas Carol (November 2009, Jim Carrey) and Disney’s Alice in Wonderland(2010, directed by Tim Burton with Depp as the Mad Hatter), which even Disney has done before, in a 1951 animated feature.

“The other versions haven’t been very good,” says Richard Zanuck, an Alice producer, “and we’ve never seen the story through the eyes of a visionary like (Burton).”

As in literature, certain cinematic characters and themes are returned to repeatedly because they resonate across all boundaries of time, space and cultural milieu. So, every generation needs its own on-screen Hamlet — and now we’re about to get another one: After Lawrence Olivier (1948), Richard Burton (1964), Mel Gibson (1990), Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Ethan Hawke (2000), now comes young heartthrob Emile Hirsch, 24, who is set to play Hamlet next year and is the first actor in his 20s to play the prince of Denmark on-screen at roughly the same age as the character.

Director Catherine Hardwicke and screenwriter Ron Nyswanger say they will present the story as a “contemporary supernatural thriller.”

“Hamlet is the ultimate, alienated young hero, who exposes the hypocrisy of society,” Hardwicke says. “His struggle to find the truth and act on it is universal and particularly relevant to young people today, living in a world that’s in crisis mode on so many fronts.”

Call them universal themes

But does every generation need its own Robin Hood? Even if it’s Russell Crowe and he’s wearing macho armor instead of tights? Maybe so. After all, rob-from-the-rich-give-to-the-poor is an evergreen concept.

Robin Hood, of course, is much older; the character is based on late 12th-century English folklore. Errol Flynn nailed the role in 1938, then Sean Connery in 1976, Kevin Costner in 1991, and Mel Brooks in a comic version in 1993.

Now Oscar-winning Crowe will be the prince of thieves, starring in Robin Hood, due out later this year and directed by Ridley Scott. Producer Brian Grazer says the story was ripe for revisiting, again, because it’s a “universal theme.” (There’s that phrase again.)

Robin Hood “is trying to create equality in a world where there are a lot of injustices,” Grazer told USA TODAY earlier this year. “He’s a crusader for the people, trying to reclaim some of the ill-gotten gains of the wealthy.”

Filmmakers are not only bringing back characters we have seen before. In some cases, there are two sets of filmmakers making films about the same characters at more or less the same time.

Two Holmes and Watson films are in the works. Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, directed by Guy Ritchie, is out later this year; the second, still untitled with no release date, is a comedy with Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell. And two Jekyll & Hydes: Jekyll and Hyde, with Forest Whitaker and 50 Cent, out later this year, and Jekyll, with Keanu Reeves, no release date yet.

Also, two William Tells. Errol Flynn played him in a 1953 picture. Now comes William Tell: The Legend, due in 2010, with Jim Caviezel. The second film has a name, Ironbow: The Legend of William Tell, due in 2011, but as of yet no named star.

Who are the audiences for two William Tell movies? He may be a Swiss hero, but to everybody else he’s … well, he’s the opera overture adapted as the theme for The Lone Ranger. But the Tell movies may be the offbeat exception.

“This is not business as usual — this is Hollywood’s attempt to deal with risk in a troubled marketplace,” says Brett Walsh, a producer on the Whitaker/50 Cent Jekyll and Hyde, which he says will follow director Abel Ferrara’s darker, more suspenseful vision of the story.

“Going back to known brands or characters is perceived as a way of protecting your downside risk, because they have an existing value,” Walsh says.

Maybe, but it might also be true that oldies are goodies. And each new generation of moviegoers gets to discover the gems in Hollywood’s archive anew — as is happening already with The Story of Bonnie and Clyde, expected to begin shooting later this year with Hilary Duff as Bonnie.

Tonya Holly, who is writing, directing and producing the movie, says she’s not intimidated by the Oscar-winning 1967 Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway. Not only has film technology improved in 40 years, but her target audience is filled with moviegoers who are not familiar with the real-life bank robbers and who haven’t seen the earlier film.

“But they know Hilary and Kevin (Zegers as Clyde), and their fan base is going to boost interest,” Holly says. Besides, she says, when it comes to movies, “There are a million ways to tell a story, and the story changes with each storyteller.”