Spike: We’ve been lucky for sure. Wild Things was the only one that I’ve ever gotten in those kinds of fights with because the budget was so much higher. I was on a different playing field because what I wanted to do required a lot more money. And so when you’re taking that much money from somebody, there’s going to be a danger.
Judd: They do the math: Okay, it cost us a hundred, it needs to gross three hundred.
Spike: And it’s a weird movie. Some people find it very sad and strange or dark and that doesn’t feel like a “family film.”
Judd: It’s a remarkable movie, but it’s so daring. When I watch it, I think, This feels like it was made in another land.
Spike: There are people who like it and people who don’t like it. I don’t even know how to judge that kind of thing. I just know it’s true to what I set out to make, and it feels dangerous in the way I promised Maurice Sendak it would feel. When I first started talking to him about the movie, it always scared me because I loved the book and I didn’t want to fuck it up and I didn’t know what I could possibly add to it. And then I finally had the idea of what I’d add to it, which is: Who are the wild things? And, you know, who are they to Max—they are emotional volatility and emotional wildness in his life—in him and the people he is close to. If I could make a movie that captured what it felt like to be a person at nine years old trying to understand a confusing and sometimes scary world—that was my goal. I remember talking to Maurice about it and saying, “Maurice, I’m a little nervous about what I want to do because this is what it is to me but I know this book is a lot of things to a lot of other people.” And he said, “I don’t care.” He said, “Just promise me that you’re not going to pander to children, that you’re going to make something dangerous and personal and true to you. If you do that, then you’ve done the same thing I did when I wrote the book when I was your age. The book was mine and now this movie has to be yours.” With his blessing…and not only blessing but his artistic integrity challenging me and pushing me and inspiring me, I felt like as long as I’m true to the assignments that he gave me, I will have done right by him.
Judd: With a movie like Where the Wild Things Are, you get incredible praise and vicious attacks. How do you keep your center when you have both?
Spike: The thing I’m realizing is that I just don’t start to make another movie until I feel clean again from the last one.
Judd: That can mean years in between.
Spike: I took a while after Where the Wild Things Are before I was ready to start again—it was almost a year after we released it before I sat down to write. I had all the notes for it. I had two years of notes for what became Her. But I let myself take time before I sat down to write, until I felt excited to write—excited in that feeling of curiosity and wanting to get into this for myself.
Judd: Because you do get a kind of post-traumatic stress from making these movies.
Spike: It maybe seems obnoxious to say that, but it’s true.
Judd: I think it’s because you’re so vulnerable. You put so much of your heart into it and some people are deeply moved and touched, and other people could give a fuck. Twitter is a funny expression of that. You can get so much praise and then just someone’s just like, “This was forty minutes too long.” You know.
Spike: It’s like, “Meh.” (Laughs) I love that, that you can work on something for three years and somebody will give you just three letters: M-E-H. It makes me think of two things. One of which is, I feel like my job really isn’t to know how many people are going to like something. My job is to know what a movie’s about to me, and to know that I need to make it. It’s somebody else’s job to say, “Okay, that budget makes sense or doesn’t make sense.” Once they gamble on it, that’s their gamble and I’m gonna be their partner in it, but we have to support each other. That’s how I feel with Megan Ellison. I feel like we are partners. And then the other thing made me think about what you were talking about before, the anxiety of not being able to get another movie made. I don’t want to come off as flippant about that. Because it is an anxiety I had, of course. But it’s my job to not let that anxiety affect the creative decisions. That’s not fair to the movie.
Judd: So you decided to make a movie about a guy who wants to fuck a computer. Am I going to get to work again? (Laughs) Seriously, though. What do you take from the success of Her? You know, what I notice from a lot of people is that…I feel like, as creative people, we’re all on this journey to get comfortable with who we are, to understand who we are, to find a way for our art to express that. And as the years go by, you can see the journey that people take to be themselves and find themselves, whether it’s Garry Shandling as a comedian who then does The Garry Shandling Show, which then turns into The Larry Sanders Show. Or Louis C.K. being a comedy writer who works for Conan and does stand-up until he suddenly reveals himself and does Louie.
Spike: I love the story of Louis C.K. I love the story of him finding his voice when he’s thirty-five and, like, and a lot of it having to do with his kids, having kids, and—
Judd: Just realizing that’s interesting. See, I never thought I was interesting. I stopped doing stand-up because I thought, Jim Carrey’s interesting. I could write jokes for him. I could work on a movie with him. But my feelings? Not interesting.
Spike: And when did that change?
Judd: My Maurice Sendak moment happened with Warren Zevon. I wrote a movie with Owen Wilson in the late nineties and I went to meet with Warren Zevon about scoring it. I was talking about handing it in to the studio and being anxious about getting their notes. And he looked at me like I was crazy for even getting notes, or wanting notes, or caring about what the notes would say. He’s like, “What do you care what they say? That’s not what this is about.” And then I just clicked in, like: Oh, that’s what it is. And then even as something as silly as The 40-Year-Old Virgin perfectly captured my neurosis, how insecure I felt and how much like a freak I felt. You’re just hiding in your cubby, afraid to interact with the world. And as soon as I let go, everything went better. The second I made that adjustment, my career took off. But it took me forever to believe, to get my self-esteem out of the gutter enough to think that my story, my thoughts, were interesting. And I felt that when I watched Her, which is such a personal expression of a worldview and how you feel about other people and relationships. And then the world rewards you because you went all the way. And it leads to success and an Oscar. Do you look at it that way? Like, Wow, I finally did it all alone, I fully committed?
Spike: It’s so complicated. There’s so many thoughts and feelings I have about all that. One of which is maybe slightly defensive. Which is: I feel like Her is not a radical departure. Maybe it was, I don’t know. But to me, it was just the next step like any next step that came before—following what I had to do. But I have to say, I don’t think I could’ve written Her in my twenties. I don’t think I could’ve written screenplays like that in my twenties because I didn’t understand everything you’re talking about, in terms of exploring yourself through writing. I couldn’t even have written the story you wrote to get into college about all the teachers having sex with you. I don’t think I knew how to go that raw. I knew how to explore things I was curious about. My daydreams, my fantasies—as I said, I’m a late bloomer. When I think about certain writers, like the Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson, they came out writing those things so young. That’s incredible to me. But I also want to say that most everything I’ve done feels personal to me. Even the two movies that I did with Charlie [Kaufman] or the music videos—a music video that would start with a song that Björk would send me, and I would try to make it my thing. It’s all an extension. They are all personal to me, because that’s who I was and what I was interested in and trying to explore at that time. Maybe that’s a little defensive. But it’s a bit of a defensive answer because, you know, I just finished doing a lot of interviews about the movie and that point was made a lot: This is the first thing that wholly came from me. Which is, you know, true in some ways. But Wild Things feels like it came from the same place, to me.