‘Where the Wild Things Are’

For more than 40 years, kids have wondered about Where the Wild Things Are. Are they real or imaginary? Friends or foes? Now that we're grown-ups, we still can't help you, but we may have figured out where they really are: living with author Maurice Sendak in his Connecticut home. The front door is flanked by Wild Thing statuettes; vintage stuffed monsters and framed posters fill the living room. There's even a bronze sculpture of Max and his sailboat in the center of the kitchen table. The always acerbic Sendak, 81, inhabits the world of the Wild Things as fully as any child—he actually placed an order for a Wild Things parka during our interview—so we couldn't wait to ask him about Spike Jonze's big-budget, live-action movie based on the book. To discuss the dark, unorthodox adaptation, Sendak invited us over, along with Jonze and novelist-screenwriter Dave Eggers (who participated via speakerphone from San Francisco) for an exclusive group interview:  (Article continued below...)

What makes a good kids' story?
Sendak: How would I know? I just write the books. But I do know that my parents were immigrants and they didn't know that they should clean the stories up for us. So we heard horrible, horrible stories, and we loved them, we absolutely loved them. But the three of us—my sister, my brother, and myself—grew up very depressed people.

Dave, do you remember Where the Wild Things Are from your childhood?
Eggers: I do. I remember when I was really little, I was scared of everything—Willy Wonkascared me to death, and the Oompa-Loompa people scared me to death. When I was 3 and 4, I would leave the room and hide under the couch when those movies came on. My first experience with Where the Wild Things Are—I couldn't read it. And my mother thought I would love it, because I was that barbaric kid that Maurice was talking about—really hyper and wild. But it scared me, mainly because of the nuances of the monsters. It just wasn't clear if they were good or bad, if they were going to eat Max or not.

The monsters were based on adults, right?
Sendak: The monsters were based on relatives. They came from Europe, and they came on weekends to eat, and my mom had to cook. Three aunts and three uncles who spoke no English, practically. They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do. And I knew that my mother's cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn't taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that's who the Wild Things are. They're foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don't understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate. So there you go.

Maurice, what did you think when you first saw the movie?
Sendak: I thought it was never going to end. [Laughter] I say that to be funny. The truth of the matter is, I saw immediately a combination of things that I wanted and I loved. The courage of the child, the danger of the situation—it could turn on a dime. They could have eaten him. All of that was apparent right from the start. The artistry was something they would have to take care of. I was happy right from the beginning. I didn't have to suffer like they did—schlepping from this place to that place, dealing with the studio.

One disagreement you had is that in the book, Max stays in his room. In the film, he runs away from home.
Sendak: It was one of my favorite scenes in the book. It was so much about the ability of children to imagine themselves in another place. He was a prisoner, locked in his room by his mother. And by his imagination he was able to get through those few hours where he was isolated and trapped. That's how I saw it. But there was something so totally valid in what Spike was doing. I remember I was having fights with my editor about this book.

What were the fights about?
Sendak: Well, I'll just give you a silly example. The entire staff at the publishing house were keen on my changing the word "hot" to "warm" on the last page. Because "hot" meant "burn."