A unique Sundance Channel interview with costume designer Casey Storm — a man who has worked on films including Being John Malkovich, Zodiac and The Onion Movie — has revealed some interesting details regarding Where the Wild Things Are’s design and the process of director Spike Jonze.
Storm pretty much glows about Jonze, as would be expected (“He has an amazing ability to find people whom he admires and then ask them to do something they’ve never done before. He knows who gets his creative vision and will execute it perfectly”). The interesting details are in the specifics of Wild Things’ production:
“The biggest challenge was getting the wolf suit right. It’s tough when you have so much scrutiny on just one suit. How do you interpret a two-dimensional sketch? How do we get the details? We spent two months just taking snaps, playing with fabrics, etc. One of our first conclusions was that the ears needed more ‘attitude,’ so we put wire in them so they could change. Another concern was that Maurice’s original drawing had claws, but we still needed Max to have use of his hands. We noticed cinematographer Lance Acord’s son wearing fingerless gloves and thought they were a good solution because they kind of resembled claws. It was also important that there was a cool sense of newness to the suit, so we put him in Converse. Despite how crazy his adventure was, we still wanted that connection to the real world.”
He also revealed the extent to which Maurice Sendak was involved with the production, which actually seems to be quite deep, considering how some authors are simply shut out of productions when their material is adapted:
“Maurice completely trusted Spike’s vision, so it was fairly open. It was a week before we started shooting that Spike and I had a two-hour conversation with him. Maurice had already seen photos and rough samples, so we just talked about a couple options like the hood up versus the hood down. We decided that when Max needed to look more vulnerable, the hood would be down. We talked about the buttons being chipped because we wanted it to feel like an old suit that he’d almost grown out of. Maurice wasn’t caught up in the details. He just cared that it was coming from the right place.”
For the full interview, which has some interesting details about everyone from Robert Downey Jr. to Cameron Diaz to Michael Jackson, click on the link!
