Spike Jonze Relates ‘Wild Things’ Delays to Bad Case of Gender Confusion

Where the Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze recently gave his most expansive interview yet about his troubled, tortured, presumed-dead and reanimated fantasy epic, which Warner Bros. is now committed to opening Oct. 19, 2009. And while light-treading Jonze makes his biggest statement about the delay by offering virtually no statement at all, a teasing philosophical aside about his young star Max Records summarises pretty much all you need to know about Jonze v. Warners:

I think that’s what freaked the studio out about the movie too. It wasn’t a studio film for kids, or it wasn’t a traditional film about kids. We didn’t have like a Movie Kid in our movie, or a Movie Performance in a Movie Kid world. We had a real kid and a real world, and I think that’s sort of where our problem was. In the end they realised the movie is what it is, and there’s no real way to… it’s sort of like they were expecting a boy and I gave birth to a girl.

[Laughs] So they just needed their time to sort that out and figure out how they were going to learn to love their new daughter.

It could have been worse, Spike: We hear Baz Luhrmann’s newborn faced a full-blown sex-change over at Fox.

• Moriarty Sits Down With Spike Jonze… [AICN]