'Where The Wild Things Are' - Creating A Mythical World To Match The Book

Source: Warner Bros

When it came to design, what mattered most about the Wild Things' big-screen debut was that they had the depth of feeling, humor, ferocity and tenderness the story required. They had to be alive.

Author, and producer on the film, Maurice Sendak was offered "the last word on what they looked like and how they moved. Yet, at the same time, I didn't want to lock them into place so that they were stuck rather than creatively excited by the prospect of what the monsters looked like," the author said. "When I was doing the book, nobody bugged me. Nobody said the monsters should look like this or that, because nobody knew what they should look like."

Directer Spike Jonze and producer Vincent Landay first delved into the world of creature movies, the history of suit performances and animatronics, to see what they liked or didn't like, and why. It was hard to find a direct parallel. Research with designers and effects companies turned up options that Jonze deemed "too troll-like or monster-like," or sometimes the opposite, "too cute." Repeatedly, they were advised toward full CGI and cautioned that recreating the book's proportions in real space would be a nearly insurmountable challenge. But they never gave up.

A friend referred them to artist Sonny Gerasimowicz, whose early sketches conveyed the blend of humor, whimsy and pathos they were looking for. Together, they experimented with color, textures and fur and from there moved into the model stage.

The Jim Henson Company and its legendary Creature Shop in Los Angeles built and refined the enormous costumes over a six-month period before shipping them to Australia, at which point Sydney-based Dave Elsey and an Australian team of costumers continued with on-site adjustments and reconfigurations to meet the unique demands of location shooting, such as one Wild Thing hurling another into the air, an effort involving wire work, pulleys and special rigs.

Peter Brooke, Creative Supervisor for the Creature Shop, begins, "We scanned the maquette, then enlarged the head to actual size and modeled that in foam, covered with clay. We re-sculpted the body of the maquette without fur, and were left with the understructure. Then we enlarged the pattern off the maquette and cut it out of foam. Within a week, we managed to get the basic shape and size of the character."

Thinking from the inside out, he continues, "We tried to transfer most of the weight of the costume to the hips of the performer. Basically, we approached the project as if these were huge puppets that were going to be puppeteered from inside, as opposed to thinking of them as huge costumes."

Elsey then adds, "Over the skeleton is the muscle suit, which gives the creature shape. When the actors flex their arms the muscles actually flex; when they lift, the rib cage will expand. That's what we call 'soft mechanics.' Fabricating these things is a real art form. The actor inside has to be capable of moving around and doing everything in the costume seemingly effortlessly. 'Soft mechanics' has been done before but this is on a whole different scale. The costumes are an amazing combination of engineering and art."

The final touch was enabling the Wild Things' features to match their emotions. Rather than using animatronic models, which would have caused lip-sync problems due to the creatures' enormous mouths, Jonze opted to enhance their expressions in post-production with computer animation, led by animation and visual effects supervisor Daniel Jeannette.

Says Jeannette, "Even with the static images, you could already see a lot of the impact they would have. We looked at the film and it was so beautiful we tried to animate the faces without creating a completely CG version of them. Instead, we did only the movement of the face in CGI."

Jonze clarifies, "Basically, they are creating 3D models of each creature's face in the computer. They used wire frame models to animate; then, the animation of those wire frames dictated the faces that were shot on camera. It's as if they were able to slide that wire animation under the faces of the puppets. Then that animation moved the fur on the faces that we shot on set."

"It looks real," Jeannette sums up, "because it's based on a real image."

One special costume that fell outside the purview of the Henson designers and Dave Elsey was Max's second skin and alter ego: the wolf suit he wears while making mischief at home and that later helps assert his animal nature over the Wild Things. That suit--plus 56 individual versions of it, was provided by costume designer Casey Storm, based on a drawing by Gerasimowicz that aged up the footed pajamas of the book into something a boy of eight or nine might wear. Storm's design included flocked whiskers, bendable ears, broken buttons, snaps under the chin to keep Max's "head" on tight through the wildest of rumpuses, and fingerless gloves.

Since Max is always in the wolf outfit, Records needed an entire wardrobe of them in various stages of wear: some dirty and some pristine, some warmer and others cooler in hue to match the tone of certain scenes and the camera's different light filters.

"When you think of the setting for the characters in the book, they're in some type of woods, on an island, a beach," says production designer K.K. Barrett, marking his third collaboration with Jonze on "Where the Wild Things Are." "We wanted the environment we put them in to be gritty and realistic, with natural elements. We wanted it to feel like somewhere no one has visited before."

After considering places as diverse as Argentina, Hawaii, New Zealand, California and the Southern U.S., the filmmakers found a home for the Wild Things in the hills, quarries and shoreline areas of outer Melbourne, at the southern tip of Australia. Here, says Jonze, "It felt like the edge of the world, on this rocky cliff." The area's barren forest proved a perfect graphic background for the action and suited the film's overall palette.

In keeping with the idea that they were discovering, along with Max, the creatures' natural habitat, Jonze and director of photography Lance Acord gave the island scenes a lived-in quality. Says Acord, "We needed a certain amount of texture and lack of resolution, so we were under-exposing a fair amount and letting the shadows go quite dark. The colors are less saturated than if you have a sharp, high-contrast negative."

The downside of working in a place where your nearest neighbor is Antarctica is that the production had to contend with bracing and often unpredictable winds and a rough ocean, which Acord vividly recalls, describing a scene in which the voyager Max pilots his boat alone toward the unknown shore. "I was shooting with a hand-held in the back of the boat. Suddenly we heard people in the other Zodiac yelling. A set of rogue waves was coming through, breaking at around 10 to 12 feet. They crashed over our boat and knocked the camera into the water. It started dragging along the ocean floor and, unfortunately, it was tied around the weight belt I had on, so was dragging me down with it. I struggled to get the belt off before being drowned by my own camera."

Acord made maximum use of hand-held cameras throughout the shoot because, notes Jonze, "We wanted it to feel as if this movie is being told through Max's eyes."

That point of view was a constant theme and extended to elements of production design. Upon his arrival at the island, Max finds the Wild Things happily demolishing their own homes, their immediate joy at wanton destruction prevailing over their less-immediate need for a place to sleep. Later, as their King, Max launches construction on the Ultimate Fort, in which they will all live together. This meant Barrett had to design huts and a fort that that could withstand some action but also look like something sprung from a child's drawings and built by a crew of unskilled and impatient monsters.

After abandoning early attempts as too sophisticated, they finally hit upon the perfect formula: a circle. "It took a long path to get to an idea that was actually very simple," Jonze admits. "The round hut, the round door with the round floor; there's no shape simpler than a circle." Adds Barrett, "The circle-based bird's nest kept showing up in our sketches. We figured if a bird could build it, they could build it. When you look at all the twigs and lines in nests, and then look at Maurice's drawings, it just made sense."

At more than 40-feet high, the fort was a formidable undertaking. Twice. Says Jonze, "We built two forts in Australia. The first one we built on the desert location in order to shoot exterior shots and the second one was built on a stage to shoot the interiors." Much of the physical fort was made of gravity-defying molded foam, to offset the structure's outsized scale, and painted to look like a weave of sticks, with actual sticks substituted in close-up.

The production included upwards of 400 people working on three separate stages and one location, with a shooting schedule divided between first unit, second unit, reduced unit and puppet unit--all of which evolved on a daily basis.

New challenges arose regularly as might be expected while working in rough terrain with actors navigating nine-foot costumes with giant heads. It took 45 minutes of prep time prior to each shot to clear a path the actor would then tread on faith. "But," Jonze specifies, "you'd have to make a path that wouldn't look like a path on camera, that looked just like the forest floor. We had to fill in potholes, and all the roots and rocks would be taken out so there wouldn't be anything to trip on."

On-set art director Tim Disney remembers some of the shoot's other inherent challenges: "250 people's footprints in the sand dunes that had to be gone by morning. Could we bring in choppers to 'buzz' them out? A hundred tons of kelp was getting in the way of Max's island departure. Do we get boats to drag it back into the ocean or pull it out? If Spike needed a forest down the side of a mountain, he got it."

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