Seriously. Who did this? They should have their nose rubbed in it like a bad dog.

It’s a salad of Tim Burton and Jean-Pierre Jeunet with a touch of Edward Gorey dressing.

It’s a story from Woody Allen’s dark, self-reflective comedy, “Deconstructing Harry.” Underrated in my book.

Catherine Keener, who was nominated for an Oscar for her work in “Being John Malkovich” and who plays a divorced mother in “Where the Wild Things Are,” told me that her 10-year-old son, Clyde, once asked her why Jonze didn’t live with his parents; apparently Clyde didn’t realize that Jonze was an adult.

Interesting:

He hadn’t set out to make a children’s movie, he said, so much as to accurately depict childhood.

Something to write on your office wall:

“I realized only then that it happens millimeter by millimeter,” he told me. “If you compromise what you’re trying to do just a little bit, you’ll end up compromising a little more the next day or the next week, and when you lift your head you’re suddenly really far away from where you’re trying to go.”

heh heh:

After about an hour, Malkovich asked Jonze if he was American. “I thought he was Czech,” Malkovich told me. “He had such a funny way of expressing himself. It sounded like he’d learned English as a second language.” Nevertheless, Malkovich said, Jonze was “funny and charming and strange, and he seemed to desperately want to do this film.”

Poignant:

To borrow a phrase that Sendak once used to describe his best-known creation, Max, Jonze inhabits a world in which one can “skip from fantasy to reality in the conviction that both exist.”

Link to the New York Times Magazine article

And by the way – how great is Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Brick, The Lookout, Mysterious Skin…I think he’s going to be in my Inappropriately Young Crush file.