Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze
Spike Jonzeis an American director, producer, screenwriter and actor, whose work includes music videos, commercials, film and television. He started his feature film directing career with Being John Malkovichand Adaptation, both written by Charlie Kaufman, and then started movies with screenplays of his own with Where the Wild Things Areand Her...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth22 October 1969
CityRockville, MD
CountryUnited States of America
Movies, they take years of my life, so I'm fortunate that I get to work in a lot of different mediums.
Maurice Sendak never - I remember he said something that was very striking because it's something I never thought about. I always loved his work, and he said, 'I don't really view myself as a children's book author. I just try and write about childhood as honestly as I can.'
Nicolas Cage, I would love to work with him again. He's just a fearless madman. He'll go anywhere you want to go. He would not say 'no' to anything.
I worked at this bike shop called Rockville BMX, and I started going on this summer tour with this one company. One summer, we ended up in California, and I got to hang out with the guys who made 'Freestylin' - Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman.
As a director, you never get to watch other directors work, and you also don't get to collaborate with other directors that much.
I'm very nervous about taking jobs. I always make sure that, if I'm going to work with somebody, that they really understand what it is that I want to do. I'd rather not take the job than be vague about how I'm going to do something and run into trouble later on. It's a hard thing to negotiate.
Every actor I've worked with I want to work with again.
There were times in 'Adaptation' during the editing where I really thought, 'Okay, well, this was a noble failure. I tried to do something good, but this is not going to work.'
If I heard somebody else say, 'I worked on a movie for five years', I'd be like, 'What? How could it take that long? What were you doing?'
Whenever I start writing, I try to put together songs that feed the feeling of the movie.
You get a buzz when getting texts: 'Oh, someone's thinking about me.'
Everything in L.A. is - it's just an easy place to live in. The houses are nice, the backyards are nice, you got the ocean right there and the mountains behind you; there's an idealised easiness to the way you live and the whole environment.
There are a lot of kids in the world. People seem to keep having them.
I don't know what life was like 1,000 years ago, but I imagine there was the same struggle: people trying to connect with each other.