Judd: There’s something about being alone in the woods.
Spike: Yeah, so now that I’ve been defensive, I’ll answer your question. I think Wild Things was the beginning of that. And after Wild Things I went and made a few short films that was like, I wanted to sort of exercise that muscle of having an idea that came purely from my own imagination and my confusion and my excitement and wasn’t inspired by something else, that was inspired purely by my gut and heart. I was excited by that. I’m excited by giving myself permission to write what’s in my daydreams.
Judd: What do you think people took from Her? Like what do people talk to you about when they say they’ve connected with the movie?
Spike: Um, what…I’m not sure….I think to answer that question honestly makes me anxious because I’m still recovering from six months of talking about that movie. Maybe I’m a bit fried right now since it’s still fresh. It took a lot out of me. But to be clear, I’m so grateful for the response it got, the reception it got. And grateful that I get to make movies and that anyone is interested in talking to me about it in the first place. But it’s also complicated just because of how much I’ve had to talk about the movie and—
Judd: The experience of making movies is—if you do work that’s personal, you’re putting yourself out there in a way that people don’t understand. They really don’t. I made a movie with my family and it was made up, but it did cut to the core of everything we’re debating and worried about and thinking about. And it takes years to recover.
Spike: Yeah. I feel ridiculous to complain about it but I’m just giving myself time to recuperate. Making a movie takes so much out of you, but it also gives you so much. When I lock picture—it’s like a relationship ending, and there’s something bittersweet about it, too. It’s a love relationship in one way, in terms of negotiating what you need from it, and what it needs from you. It’s also a parent relationship, in that you can’t need too much from it. You have to give to it unconditionally and you have to allow it to be who it is—not to put your needs on it. And then you let it go—it graduates high school and you send it off into the world; you’ve done everything you can do. When I finished Her, I thought, Okay, I’ve done everything I can do to give this as much love as I could give it and now it’s gonna go off and be what it’s gonna be. If it gets loved I’ll be proud and if it gets hated it’ll hurt, but I also know that what I have done with my friends and collaborators will never change. That is what the movie is to me, that’s my relationship with my movie…the experience and life I lived with it.
Judd: It’s deeply sad that it ends. If I think about anything I’ve done—when we made Freaks and Geeks and it ended, I thought: How do I keep these people around? How do I keep these ideas around? I never recovered in a lot of ways. I miss making Funny People. I miss going to see Sandler every day and talking about it. It’s devastating. I mean, I come from a divorced family. It’s devastating that each experience comes to this…instant violent conclusion, and then you’re alone again in your room. So many of those ideas went into Her. I’m such a—I’m fascinated by relationships, self-help, the struggle we all have, and I thought—in the last thirty-five minutes of that movie, you brought so many ideas together in such an elegant way, that are really hard to capture. The idea of loving your ex, even though it doesn’t work. And getting to that place where you feel like you understand why it melted down, and it can’t work but…It’s like an impossible thing to express. I don’t think I’ve ever seen people talk about it in that way. About letting go and what it means.
Spike: I don’t know what to say.
Judd: Am I in the ballpark of what you were exploring?
Spike: For sure, for sure. You know, relationships are so infinitely complicated. And I think that intimacy is equally so….I was trying to write about all of that, trying to write about it in as complicated a way as I knew how at this time in my life. As you said earlier, every day we’re in a different mood and see things differently. And our emotions are so completely convincing to us, so I tried to write about all the confusion of that…but also the way we believe things so truly—the way, there’s the moment, you know, where Joaquin is talking about how he is never going to feel anything new again. And he believes it so convincingly and then, the next day, he’s believing something totally new. And feeling that with complete conviction that that is true, too. Luckily, we have these irrational emotions, emotions that make life large and—it’s just not like this series of rational decisions and logic. It’s the magic of it and the poetry of life. I don’t know. You saying that definitely moves me. When you’re talking about the idea of loving your ex, and being able to hold on to that amidst all the other feelings of being heartbroken or sad or missing something that’s gone—something dies when a relationship ends. It is a death because that thing that was the two of you together was alive and now it won’t be and the only two people who really knew that thing that was alive are the two of you. No one else knows.
Judd: I think about my girlfriend from high school and all of our dreams at the time and I almost…You know, a lot of times I’m tempted to reach out to her but I don’t because it’s almost, it’s so present. It doesn’t feel old. It feels brand-new. I’m always afraid to see exes in front of my wife because I feel like she’ll know in my face that I’m as devastated today as I was the day that girl broke up with me. Do you think it sometimes takes making a movie—do you feel like you evolve in your personal issues as a result of making a movie like Her?
Spike: Yes, every movie, I’m working stuff out.
Judd: Joaquin Phoenix is so amazing in Her. It’s just so tight on him, and he does so many amazing, funny things. And it’s so intimate.
Spike: So many times I felt, I just don’t want to cut away from this performance. I just want to sit here on this take and be close and feel him.