Actress Catherine O'Hara, shown Oct. 2, says director Spike Jonze encouraged all his voice actors to bring out the inner wild thing. (Matt Sayles/Associated Press)In making Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze encouraged everyone in the cast and crew to get in touch with the wild thing inside.
His voice actors weren't posed in front of standing mikes to voice their characters — but thrown together in a physical enactment of the movie. He even asked his musicians to pretend they were playing their instruments for the first time.
"I really had to learn to let go with him," actress Catherine O'Hara said in an interview aired Friday on CBC's Q cultural affairs show.
"Spike seems to believe, why make an actor fake something, when you can just give them that experience? And that's what he did for us."
O'Hara, a Canadian-American actress who honed her skills with Second City and ensemble acting with Christopher Guest films such as Best in Show, said she is always fueled as an actress by the people around her. In Jonze's movie adaptation of Maurice Sendak's 1963 book, she plays the cranky monster Judith.
But it was nonetheless a fresh experience to do a voice performance while having a bun fight with the other characters.
"We shot with the Jackass crew from the movie," she said, recalling the voice performances, laid down three years ago before the shooting and animation that created Where the Wild Things Are.
"We acted the movie out with Catherine Keener and Spike Jonze taking turns playing Max."
Jonze in particular was a crazy person as Max, pushing everyone into performance by pretending to be the child rather than the director. At one point, he jumped on O'Hara's back, as Max does with Judith. At another, he got everyone to pile in a heap as if they were the monsters sleeping together.
Seeing the film now, O'Hara is convinced what he did was inspired.
"The thing that really strikes me now, and with the beautiful subtle, digital animation that they've done with the faces matching these quiet voices, is … what a smart thing he did having us together," she said.
"When you're sharing the air as another human in a close space, that is a different sound and much more real."
O'Hara said she read Sendak's book, a true children's classic, to her own children. She's not worried about the film being too scary for kids, because they won't be analyzing it the way adults do.
"I don't think they'll get the darker parts that adults will get — kids will watch it in a different way, and kids will have their own experiences and laugh and feel sad for Max and for the wild things. And adults will go into a place of 'that's what it was like when I was 9' and analyzing things," she said.
Children will recognize the raw emotion that Max experiences, one of the hallmarks of the original book.
"It's sparsely, beautifully, eloquently written, and it leaves a world of imagination up to you," O'Hara said. "But I think the movie actually leaves places for your imagination.
Where the Wild Things Are opens in theatres on Friday.
