Think back – back to the days between ninth and twelfth grades. Sitting in your high school cafeteria, the jocks had their table, the nerds had theirs. High school was so easy when everyone was labeled and you knew who to hang out with and who to avoid. I’m sure every high school class had a group of skater punks – the un-showered few, voted least likely to succeed. You never thought they’d amount to anything, least of all a thriving career in filmmaking. You’d eat your hat before something that unlikely would happen. Well, pass the salt …
Perhaps this characterization is unwarranted. After all, I haven’t actually met Spike Jonze. I’m not quite sure where he fell within the high school spectrum, but I can cast an educated guess. As you mature, you come to realize that the stereotypes embodied by certain high school students aren’t always fair. At that stage in their lives, their full potential has not yet been realized. You have no idea how far they will go or how greatly they will impress.
Adam Spiegel, who celebrates his 40th birthday today, was raised in Bethesda, Maryland. Unfamiliar with the area, I wonder what there is to do there but get involved in the local skateboarding and dirt biking scenes. Interested in anything extreme, Spiegel worked at the Rockville BMX store during junior high and high school. It was his co-workers who knighted him with a nickname because the sometimes-un-showered teen would show up to work with his hair sticking up. Spike Jonze. The nickname stuck. This was a long ways away from his future as an in-demand director and four-and-a-half-years marriage to Oscar-winning filmmaker Sofia Coppola.
Photo by Brigitte Lacombe
After high school, Jonze moved to California to write for Freestylin’ magazine, a now defunct BMX publication. His publication roots flourished as he co-founded and edited Dirt magazine (the brother publication to Sassy) with Mark Lewman and Andy Jenkins. Jonze would also work as an editor for Grand Royal magazine (also with Lewman and Jenkins) and senior photographer for Transworld Skateboarding. In 1993, he co-founded Girl Skateboard Company, which continues its operations today.
Jonze’s life took a sharp turn after Sonic Youth saw a 20-minute video of a skateboarding team doing tricks. Jonze shot “Video Days” in one of his first forays behind a camera. Impressed, the band hired him to shoot footage of skateboarders for their “100%” video, thus beginning a successful career as a music video director. Jonze went on to direct such notable and iconic videos as Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” (1994), Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” (1994), and the rock remix of Puff Daddy’s “It’s All About the Benjamins” (1997). He also worked on videos for R.E.M., Björk, The Chemical Brothers, The Notorious B.I.G., Tenacious D, Beck, Ludacris, Kanye West, and several others. In 1999, Jonze won the Best Direction MTV Video Music Award for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You”. In his normal, quirky self, the director accepted the award on stage as his alter-ego Richard Koufey, a character that appears in the video. Fifteen years after directing “Sabotage,” Jonze won the 2009 VMA for Best Video (That Should Have Won a Moonman).
The director’s signature style of guerrilla/independent filmmaking was evident in MTV’s Jackass, a popular series that Jonze both co-created and produced. He also produced the show’s big screen incarnation, Jackass: The Movie (2002). Understanding Jonze’s interest in both stunt work and filmmaking, it’s not hard to fathom he’d be behind exposing the sub-culture that is guys performing ludicrous stunts (thus inflicting themselves with enormous amounts of pain) to a mass audience.
Jonze went beyond quenching the MTV generation’s thirst for music videos and “jackass stunts.” His short-form film work seemed a perfect launch into advertising, where he was able to appeal to a wider audience. The director worked on such acclaimed TV spots as “Hello Tomorrow” for Adidas, “Penguin” for Miller Beer, and “Pardon Our Dust” for Gap. For his collective work on these spots, Jonze earned a 2006 Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Commercials.
While continuing his success as a music video and commercial director, Jonze was also projecting his imagination onto the big screen. According to a 1999 article in New York magazine, his first feature film was to be an adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s beloved children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. He planned to use a combination of animation and live action to bring this story to life (hold onto this thought). Unfortunately, David O. Russell was already working on his own version of the adaptation, so Jonze’s project was scrapped. (Russell cast Jonze in his 1999 feature, Three Kings, in which the director-turned-actor played redneck Private Conrad Vig, acting opposite George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube.) The filmmaker wound up making an impressive feature debut, nonetheless, with 1999′s Being John Malkovich, which earned him both an Oscar and DGA Award nomination for Best Director. Once again teaming with Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, Jonze’s second film, Adaptation. (2002), earned him a Golden Globe nomination. (With this film, the filmmaker directed Chris Cooper to an Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor, as well as nominations for Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep – not too shabby for a sophomore effort.)
Following his critical triumph with Adaptation., the director continued his partnership with Kaufman on what was to be another Jonze-helmed film, Synecdoche, New York (2008). However, Jonze was eager to pursue his long-time pet project, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, so he passed the reigns of Synecdoche onto Kaufman. Jonze still produced what turned out to be the Oscar-winning screenwriter’s directorial debut, but his heart was with his next project.
Perhaps he sought to redeem himself after his disappointment with Harold and the Purple Crayon, or perhaps he saw a piece of himself in the heroes of the two classic children’s tales about kids with imagination. Whatever sparked his interest in the big screen adaptation of Wild Things really doesn’t matter to the casual moviegoer. Jonze both directed and co-wrote the feature, all the while developing it with the cooperation of Sendak, himself. The film is no disappointment to a fan of Jonze’s work (or of the book). In his usual imaginative – and sometimes dark – ways, Jonze mixes live action with computer animation to realize the award-winning book on screen. After years of planning and production work, Where the Wild Things Are was unleashed in theatres on October 16th and is currently king of the box office with an impressive $32.7 million opening weekend.
Click here for an August 2008 Limité-exclusive preview of Wild Things.
