Celebrity Biographies
Spike Jonze
In 1999 a video clip director dared to take a crazy script signed by Charlie Kauffman to the movies, which few thought would have a place on the big screen. “How to be John Malkovich” was a success and for it Spike Jonze was nominated, in his debut, for the Oscar for best director. Great, different and daring: that’s how one of the most particular creators of today’s cinema is.
From a very young age he was attracted to street culture: skateboarding, BMX, graffiti. With some friends he founded the magazine “Dirt”, which he turned into one of the benchmarks in the world. Little is known about how he got from here to the world of video clips and later to the cinema, because Jonze hates talking to the press about himself and his past: “I don’t like talking about myself, I get bored (…) I’m not a a public figure and I have no interest in being one.”
What we do know is that during the 90s he made a name for himself in the video clip industry and worked with big names in the recording industry such as Weezer, Björk , Kanye West and the Beastie Boys. But this medium was too small for the talented de Jonze, so in 1998 he began to think about going to the big screen. The opportunity presented itself with Charlie Kaufman’s script for Being John Malkovich . Thanks to the rich audiovisual language that he had acquired with music videos, Jonze managed to transfer the complex script to images, an effort that was recognized with an Oscar nomination for best director.
In the years that followed his debut, the director produced the crazy series Jackass and continued shooting video clips and shorts until in 2002 the good old Kaufman knocked on his door again with another tremendously original script. Adaptation (The Orchid Thief) confirmed the genius of the tandem formed by Spike and Charlie. Once again, the director had managed to bring the literary delusions of his screenwriter to the big screen. The tremendous range of audiovisual resources that he deployed in his second film earned Jonze a Golden Globe nomination for best director.
Despite the success, Jonze did not direct a film again until 2009. He focused on his other projects: the Jackass phenomenon and its many sequels, video clips, documentaries for television, and so on. He returned to the movies with Where the Wild Things Are , a film that adapted a children’s book by Maurice Sendak .. This time Jonze signed the script for his own film and, right there, the tape did not reach the stature of his previous works. This film told the story of a restless and rebellious child who plunged into his own imagination and began to confuse fiction and reality. The most striking thing about this film was its soundtrack and its visual aspect: Jonze had created an imaginary world that was gloomy and tender at the same time, like the stuffed monsters that inhabited it.
From childhood Jonze moved on to the theme of love. In 2010 he released I’m Here , a short directed and written by him that recounted a romance between two robots. The filmmaker wanted, by setting the story in the distant future, the viewer to connect with what is closest: love. This same effect would be the basis for Her , his next film and, for many, his masterpiece. With it, he showed that in addition to creating powerful and moving images, he also knew how to braid stories.
In Her a man named Theodore fell in love with an operating system with artificial intelligence. With this dramatic premise, Jonze created not a science fiction film, but one of the most interesting romance films of the last decade. The gossips say that the story had a lot of personal, that the female character of Her was inspired by Sofia Coppola , with whom Jonze was married for 4 years. If Lost in translation had been her farewell letter, Hers was his. Whether it is so or not, the truth is that the script was very well written. For him, Jonze received the Oscar for best original screenplay and showed that he was a much more mature and complete filmmaker than the director ofHow to be John Malkovich .
Like Michel Gondry or F. Gary Gray , Spike Jonze came to the cinema through the world of video clips and that is something that has marked his way of narrating. In his early days, the merit of his works lay precisely in his ability to visually exploit a script that he had not written. But as the years have passed and the films have passed, he has shown that he knows how to build a work from the script, as is the case with Her , without neglecting his visual aspect.