Keeping Up With The Jonze

I’m always highly suspicious of people who everybody likes. Tiger Woods was sports’ golden boy till we read his text messages; we all thought Bertie was great craic til he lost our money and hid in a cupboard; and hell, apparently Ted Bundy made a delightful first impression.

So after being repeatedly told what a lovely guy Spike Jonze is, I wasn’t surprised when he refused to shake my hand, instead waving me away with a grimace. I knew it. Don’t worry Jonzey, I won’t force you to make physical contact with a mere mortal like myself. In fact, I thank you for waving me away like a wasp at a picnic, as you’ve confirmed my prejudice – there are no nice people in Hollywood, only bloody divas.
Then he sneezes. And smiles. “I’m so sorry, I keep sneezing and don’t want to get you sick. How ‘bout we be ghetto and knuckle-bump, it’ll be safer for you!” Goddamn it, he’s adorable. Let’s hope he has some dead bodies hidden somewhere in this fancy hotel suite! I hate being wrong, even for a minute.
Boasting an incredibly genre-jumping CV, Jonze began his career shooting skateboarding stunts and directing music videos, working with artists such as Bjork, Beastie Boys, Daft Punk and Fatboy Slim. Jonze’s directing talent and quirky humour – not to mention his unique sense of rhythm – resulted in one of the 90s’ most iconic videos, as he bemused movie-goers by performing a hilarious and bizarre dance to Fatboy Slim’s 1999 hit ‘Praise You’ in the foyer of a cinema.
But while most music-lovers remember the song, and could, if plied with enough alcohol, do their own version of the now infamous dance routine, music video directors don’t usually become household names. To combat this deplorable collective failure – and to celebrate the work of notable music video directors – Jonze collaborated with Academy-award winning director Michel Gondry and English music video director Chris Cuningham to form Directors Label, a series of DVDs devoted to notable music video directors.
“I wanted to do a DVD of a collection of my work, and thought that it would be more fun to do it with people and other directors that I loved,” explains Jonze. “Michel and I sort of came up together; we were both doing videos at the same time and were inspired by each other. We were friendly, but we also had that kind of competitive friend thing – not frenemies, but we had this thing where we’d show each other our work and be jealous of each other. And then we got Chris, who I didn’t know as well but who I loved, onboard and we all started working together.”
The volumes released by Directors Label proved impressively popular. Still, you can’t beat a big movie for getting the name out there and so Jonze is still best known for his avant-garde collaborations with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, including his feature film directing debut, the black comedy Being John Malkovich, which earned Spike an Oscar nomination, and the highly acclaimed Adaptation. Then, last year, after a decade of work and amid huge public anticipation, Jonze finally released his labour of love, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s iconic children’s book Where The Wild Things Are. The film raked in $100 million worldwide, and was highly praised for its dark sentimentality.
For the past ten months, however, Jonze has taken on the role of producer, and in that guise has been working on something completely different. Because Oscar-winning intellectual mind-trips are all very well and good – but sometimes you just need to shove an apple into your friend’s anus and get a hungry pig to remove it. Or do you? Either way, Jackass 3D has arrived.
“I can’t believe we’re on film number three!” Jonze exclaims. “We didn’t even think we’d make the first movie: MTV just wanted us to keep making the show, and it was my idea to say, ‘Well, let’s conclude it with a movie’. And we also knew we’d have more freedom with a movie than the TV series – so we said we’d do one in part because we were getting frustrated fighting so much with the legal people and them censoring everything.”
In fairness, MTV’s legal department may have had cause for concern. In 2001, a 13-year-old boy was left with severe injuries after trying to copy a stunt from the show, and Jackass was publically attacked not only by concerned parents, but politicians also.
“Senator Lieberman complained about the show,” Jonze recalls, “saying it was dangerous and we quickly learned that TV execs really don’t like being called to Washington to testify at Senate hearings! It was just this moral panic, you know the usual ‘this is the end of Western civilisation’ thing.”
Jackass is undeniably juvenile, but holding it responsible for destroying culture as we know it is probably giving it more credit than it deserves – after all, Paris Hilton definitely had some role to play in it too. However it may well mark the end of the usual “respect your film producer” culture, as Johnny Knoxville and his castmates famously prank everyone on set, no exceptions.
“The paranoia!” the producer sighs, shaking his head. “The sheer paranoia is unbearable! You’re always looking over your shoulder. And I get off pretty lightly, I mean…” He trails off into a whisper, and knocks on the wooden table beside him. “Actually, I’m not even going to finish that sentence, I’m not risking jinxing myself or having them hear me!”
He really wasn’t kidding about that paranoia, then. On the other hand, Jonze is famously a bit of a prankster himself, and during his four-year marriage to Oscar-nominated director Sofia Coppola, it was she who was forced to constantly be on her guard.
“Once, she had been away for like three months, and I picked her up from the airport wearing a fat suit and all these prosthetics so I looked like I’d gained a hundred pounds while she was gone… that was a really long time ago, but yeah, her reaction was kind of hilarious!” He grins at me mischievously. “Yeah, okay, maybe you’re right – I probably shouldn’t play the innocent card too much!”
While recounting the various pranks Knoxville and co play on each other, Jonze frequently breaks into giggles, making the skinny, wide-eyed producer seem much, much younger than his 41 years. It’s hard for my brain to compute that this man, who finds the idea of Steve-O doing a bungee jump from inside an excrement-filled Port-a-Loo so hilarious, is the same guy who worked on the soaringly ambitious and mind-blowing conceptual movie Synecdoche, New York. Surely he’d prefer to stick with these rather more intelligent projects, above working on Jackass, which, let’s face it, might just miss out on a Best Picture nomination at this year’s Oscars.
“I’m not thinking about films in terms of audience,” he insists, “I’m just thinking of what I want to make, and what I want to spend the next month or year making. And so a project just needs to be exciting to me. I love watching highbrow things and relaxing with something silly – and I just look at work the same way. I think the spirit in which something’s made, especially with Jackass, is transferred directly into the movie and the experience of watching it. Shooting Jackass with all my friends is just so crazy, which makes it fun to watch. And then a project like Synecdoche, New York comes along and it’s original and exciting and has a completely different appeal. But I’m enthusiastic about both, which is how I know it’s worth doing.”
And then Spike Jonze proves to me that – his work on projects where dwarves are dressed up as leprechauns and hit in the face with a giant trout notwithstanding – he may in fact be a genius: he proffers a logical explanation for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.
“We just wanted to make a horror movie, it was an intriguing idea for us,” he explains. “But there are a lot of conceits or devices with horror movies, which are used to make it fit into a horror movie genre – whereas we wanted to make a movie about things that are truly horrifying and really scary like mortality and ageing and sickness and the decay of your body and loss, and losing people you love. Those are the really scary things.”
That, and me telling Johnny Knoxville that Jonze doesn’t think he gets pranked that much.
“Oh you wouldn’t!” the producer exclaims.
Don’t be so sure, Jonzey – after all, you may be lovely, but no-one claimed I was.

Jackass 3D is in cinemas now.