In case you were unaware, the classic Maurice Sendak book “Where the Wild Things Are” is currently being made into a feature film by Spike Jonze, the director of “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” and a ton of music videos. With filming wrapped months ago, Spike has been hard at work editing his creation, with an expected release date of October 2008.

Now that you know about the movie, you’ll understand how I'll connect the film with Catherine O’Hara.

It seems that Spike has assembled an all-star cast of voice actors to play the Wild Things and Catherine is one of them... along with James Gandolfini, Catherine Keener, Forest Whitaker and Paul Dano.

Anyway, I recently participated in a roundtable interview with Catherine O’Hara as she was helping to promote her next movie “Penelope.” Of course I worked in some questions about “Where the Wild Things Are” and she explained how she made the movie and how the Jackass guys were always around. It’s a funny story.

So if you’re curious about Spike Jonze next film…you’ll like the interview. As always, you can either read the transcript or download the audio as an MP3 by clicking here. And for more info on “Penelope,” you can click here.

What’s your next project?

Oh, I’m not sure, but I have “Where The Wild Things Are” coming out this year in 2008.

I’m going to have to jump in just real quick. I wanted to know what it’s like working with Spike and have you seen the footage.

Oh, probably everything you’d imagine and then some.  He’s really cool.

I know they did a test screening recently and I wanted to know if you knew how it went and what the process has been like working on it.

I went to one screening with kids and it was great and my kids went too.  They asked the kids a lot of questions.  They started with the guy who does that professionally asking the questions, then Spike got into it because his questions were just great—inside.

What was Spike asking?

Just how different things in the movie affected them and what they thought things meant and I can’t really tell you specific questions without specific stuff about the movie but just by sitting down and talking to them as human beings as if they had thoughts in their heads. And man, he brought out amazing stuff out of the kids.  The other guy was helpful too but Spike is so in touch with his child within, you know.  It was great.  We shot for 2 weeks with about 20 digital cameras.  We work shopped basically the Wild Things characters.  James Gandolfini and Catherine Keener and Forest Whitaker and Paul Dano and I’m forgetting who else… and on camera but looking as ourselves work-shopped the Wild Things in the whole movie so they use it as reference for the people inside these 8-9 foot Wild Things kind of bodies. They’re also going to digitally animate the faces later.  So we’ll end up just being voices but we played all the Wild Things on camera. It was great.  I was going to say he’s got the Jackass crew—all those guys from the Jackass movies were with him on the crew and we had these instead of sets we needed blocking tape on the floor and we used these foam cubes as any kind of set pieces and props and so like these 3 foot foam cubes and the guys on the crew figured out every possible way to try to kill yourself with a foam cube.  And every day they were doing that between takes like you guys are insane.  One guy tried to teach me to jump from cube to cube. I was like no, I’m not going to do it.  And the next day…oh no, after lunch—at lunchtime I don’t see him and I said “where’s what’s his face”.  Oh, he’s in the hospital.  He broke his collarbone and the next day he’s back and trying to do it again with a sling on his arm.

These are the Jackass guys?

I know where Jackass comes from.  Yeah, and Spike says… hey here’s Spike in his suit jumping from cube to cube in between takes.  They’re just nuts and fun and it just made me want to be a little kid again being around them…aside from the actual work which is great.

I was going to say what was it like working with all these people though doing this kind of workshop?  That must have been just…

It’s almost like any other job when it gets down to being a character, you know?  You become that character and you know, you are a Wild Thing, but you know we all had…he wrote the script with Dave Eggers who’s a novelist and you know they all have names and they all have relationships and it’s very much about their relationships.  The Wild Things are very sensitive characters and so we’re just acting with each other in that way and once in a while the Wild Things have a mud slinging fight and we used bread rolls. We did this like 2 days whipping bread rolls at each other trying to kill each other and you know there were moments in there its like ‘Okay that’s enough.  I’m really hurt. Stop it.’  Or trying to kill somebody else. 

Is it very true to the book?

Yeah, it is.  But it’s as true as it can be you know.  My husband directed “Cat in the Hat” and took a lot of heat for it.  You killed the story.  And he’d say to me ‘what do you think the story is?  What do you remember in the story?’ Well, the kids are there and they’re in trouble.  The mother goes out and she says keep the house clean, the Cat shows up and they mess the house and then they clean it up at the end. Yeah, thank you.  Is that an hour and a half?  So he got in trouble for it. I think Spike—I think they’re worried about that, but you can’t worry about what other people think.  I think that’s what this movie is telling us. (she’s talking about her new film Penelope)