Spike Jonze looks incredibly youthful for a man who recently celebrated 80 years in showbusiness. Last month the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York staged an exhibit devoted to Jonze's work thus far under the title -- that he selected himself -- "Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years".

"It's because I have another 80 years to go," he explains -- if explain is the right word -- and doesn't elaborate any further. Then again, it certainly wouldn't be the weirdest idea that Jonze has pursued throughout his career. Remember, this is the man who made his directorial debut with a movie about discovering a doorway into the head of John Malkovich.

But more of that anon. Leaving aside the alleged eight-decade career, Jonze doesn't look his 40 years either. Sitting in a suite in the Beverley Hilton in Los Angeles, Jonze looks like a preppy college student-cum-surfer dude, dressed in grey pants, blue shirt, and skinny red and grey tie. His skin is sun-kissed, and his wispy sandy-blond hair is combed neatly to one side.

Definitive confirmation of his all-round man-child youthfulness arrives when he opens his mouth to speak: his vocal pitch actually makes him sound more like a teenager. What's more, he speaks slowly and shyly, sometimes hesitantly and awkwardly, during our interview, like a squirmy youngster forced to interact with his adult relatives at a family function when he'd much rather be running around, playing outside.

In lots of ways, this makes Jonze the ideal fit for his third film feature, Where The Wild Things Are, which is based on a much-beloved children's picture book, first published in 1963, by illustrator and writer Maurice Sendak. Although consisting of just 10 lines of text in total, the book has endured (with some 19 million copies sold) as a -- if not the -- definitive story about the power of a child's imagination.

Jonze, together with novelist Dave Eggers, have considerably fleshed out, and in some instances altered, the story of Max (played by Max Records), a rambunctious and lonely runt, living with his divorced mother (Catherine Keener). One night he "flees" to a land populated by fearsome creatures known as the Wild Things (voiced by James Gandolfini, Forest Whitaker, Lauren Ambrose and Catherine O'Hara).

The director admits that the book's narrative brevity, distinctive visual style, and, most importantly, cherished position in the minds of those who grew up with it was always going to make a movie adaptation difficult, if not damn near impossible.

"At the beginning I was definitely ... " he begins to say before trailing off, and picking up again: "I realised how many people connected with the book from when they were kids. People would come up to me and say, 'Oh this is what it's about to me' and everyone took different meanings from it. Everyone remembered different moments, and then remembered moments that weren't even in the book because it had become so much more in their heads. At that point I started to get nervous. It was very personal to so many people

"I talked to Maurice [Sendak] about it, and he said, 'I don't want you to be precious about that, and I don't want you to be precious about the book. You've got to just make what this is to you, and make something personal, something dangerous. He wasn't like this protective artist, he was more like an empowering mentor. So once it came from Maurice, that set me free and I just had to trust my vision of what the book was to me, and I couldn't do more than that."

Jonze first started thinking about making the movie after the release of his last movie, the Oscar winning Adaptation. That was in 2002. Seven years later, the finished product -- idiosyncratic, scary, challenging and touching -- is finally on the big screen.

The movie has attracted rave reviews from American critics, but during production there were reports that the studio was unhappy with Jonze's take on the story. By all accounts, the suits grew even more anxious when stories emerged of kids running screaming and crying from cinemas during test screenings.

"A lot of rumours sprang up as we were editing," he says. "The one that children were running out of the theatre screaming, that didn't happen. But it's a good story. The thing is that the studio was freaked out by it, not kids. It might not be for four-year-olds, and moments in it are intense, but kids can handle it. The studio wasn't really considering what the kids were going to think."

As for any real run-ins with the studio, Jonze firmly denies that he had to compromise on his vision in any way. "We had many conversations, sitting around conference tables, blah blah blah," he explains, with a slight smile. "But we just kept filming, and in the end, they let me finish the movie I wanted to make. There's no way I was going to work on something, and care about something, as much as I have about this, and then compromise it."

That degree of power and control on Jonze's behalf is testament to his strong position within the Hollywood system. Born Adam Spiegel, the director first adopted the name Spike (because of his wayward hair) at age 13 when he became involved with BMX and skating culture, which, in turn, led to his first career as a photographer and writer for skate magazines (he coupled the name with Jonze in tribute to an eccentric bandleader named Spike Jones).

From there, Jonze veered into directing dozens of music videos (see panel), and after a few false starts in movie making, he broke through in 1999 with the dazzlingly original Being John Malkovich, for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Director.

Jonze followed up by helping to create MTV's Jackass, before helming the even more bizarre Adaptation. Along the way, his private life has also played out very much in the public arena: his marriage to and subsequent divorce from fellow director Sofia Coppolla, and his relationship with actress Michelle Williams, which ended just a few months ago.

Like his contemporary Wes Anderson (director of Fantastic Mr Fox), this is Jonze's first attempt to make something akin to a children's movie. He was determined to keep it as real and grounded as possible, eschewing green screens for a complex mix of live action, puppetry and computer animation to render the Wild Thing creatures. Perhaps even more of a challenge was eliciting what Jonze calls a "non-kid performance" from his young, unprofessional lead.

"Max's performance was crucial," Jonze states. "With all the crazy ways we were shooting this movie, we had to carve up space in the midst of the insanity to give Max the room to do what he did.

"The idea was not just to stick him out there and go, 'Be happy, be sad, be scared', but to give him something to react to. So in the spirit of backyard play, we'd set up something behind the camera for him to react to. Sometimes it would be giving light sabres to the guys in Wild Things costumes so they'd have a battle off camera. I remember another time when two extras recited the whole 'I am your father' scene from The Empire Strikes Back, which set Max off laughing. It had to be real."

As our allotted time draws to a close, I ask Spike how much of the Max character is about him, personally? This makes the director even more squirmy and awkward, a nice way to finish any interview. "Erm ... " he hums and haws for a few moments. "Probably as much as all the characters in all my movies are. Even the ones that Charlie [Kaufman] wrote in my first movies, as a director, you have to find the aspects of the characters that you can connect to."

Any more than that, Spike Jonze is unwilling to yield. Perhaps in another 80 years.

Where The Wild Things Are opens in cinemas on December 11

- Declan Cashin

Irish Independent