

A man falls in love with an operating system, which is difficult to believe because people hate new operating systems. I was also aware that being dragged away by security may have made an impression that would have made a second interview somewhere down the road less likely.

Spike Jonze is a busy man, and with Edith Bowman awaiting her interview slot it simply wasn’t the time for an idiot like me to be causing delays. Still, being unprofessional in this introduction is one thing, refusing to leave an interview is quite another. This may rank amongst the most unprofessional things said on Den of Geek so far this year, but I just really wanted to hang out with Spike Jonze. Eloquent, friendly, enthusiastic and inspiring. Then, there’s that Spike Jonze is so much fun to talk to. He’s directed so many notable music videos, some great feature films ( Being John Malkovich and Where The Wild Things Are) and has been a part of the Jackass team since its inception. One is that Spike Jonze has had a long, interesting career. I wanted to stay and talk to Spike Jonze some more. We will live in a different way.” What about the robots, though? Will they ever take over? Jonze stares back.Let me get this right out of the way: I did not want to leave at the end of this interview. “Maybe that’s me being naïve or optimistic at the very least. Yet he says he’s hopeful for the shape of things to come. Understandably, he’s more focused on his career as a filmmaker now even his videos have begun to take on the form of mini-movies, as with his sublime 28-minute promo for Arcade Fire’s ‘The Suburbs’, a more disquieting vision of the near future. And there are a lot more people are much more excited, and should be doing it, because they’re living it. “I’m not as excited about doing them as I once was. When we meet, Jonze has just come from the YouTube awards, shooting a live ‘video’ for Arcade Fire’s ‘Afterlife’, but he’s surprisingly off-hand about a medium that he, along with the likes of Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Jonathan Glazer, turned into an art form. Since then, he turned the Beastie Boys into ’70s cops for ‘Sabotage’, put Björk in a Busby Berkley-style routine for ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ and made a man with a dog’s head troop through the streets holding a boom box for Daft Punk’s ‘Da Funk’. Yet somebody was watching his early effort Video Days, a twenty-minute reel of skateboarders pulling stunts, led to Sonic Youth hiring him to shoot footage for their promo for 100 per cent.
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Our subjectivity is so completely our own.”Īccess unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up “Even after years you don’t really ever know how they see or think about the world. “To have an intimate relationship with somebody a leap of faith,” says Jonze. Never mind it’s a man and his OS, it’s a heartfelt expression of just how difficult couplings can be.
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“I realized as I was writing it,” says Jonze, “that I really wanted to make it a relationship movie.”Įven if it’s not your run-of-the-mill rom-com, it explains just why Jonze’s movie has been moved from its original January UK release to a Valentine’s Day slot.

But as much as Her deals with our increasing reliance on digital companions, it moves away from that as Theodore gradually becomes intimate with his OS – who names herself Samantha (voiced, brilliantly, by Scarlett Johansson). And we haven’t even got to the films yet.Īdmitting he’s fascinated by the evolution of computers (“Is artificial intelligence less than our intelligence?” he ponders), his research took him from reading futurist Ray Kurzweil to watching TED talks on developing technologies. Russell’s Three Kings and Martin Scorsese’s recent The Wolf of Wall Street (he’s the penny-stocks broker Jordan Belfort meets). Groundbreaking videos for Beastie Boys, Björk, Fatboy Slim and Arcade Fire a founding member of the multi-million dollar Jackass TV show and movie franchise an ad-hoc acting career in films like David O. Well, that’s one way to get your interviewer on side.Īs much as I’d like to buy into his flattery, it’s Jonze who is the clever one. “You’re so much smarter than I am,” he says when I articulate one question about his new film Her. But today, dressed in a jacket and tie, and sitting in the early evening gloom in a London hotel, he’s quite the host. The first time I met him, for his 1999 directorial debut Being John Malkovich, he was cripplingly shy – barely able to get out a word. It’s hard to know quite what to expect from an encounter with Spike Jonze.
