In Conversation With...Spike Jonze

Even if Spike Jonze were content to limit himself to directing music videos for the likes of Kanye West, Arcade Fire, Björk, the Beastie Boys, and Daft Punk, his place in the pantheon of modern media's most fertile image-makers would be secured. Yet Jonze's ambitious forays into movies have expanded his singular gifts to feature length, and in every case proved just as imaginative.

On the eve of the release of his fourth feature, Her — from which our audience will enjoy a special preview of scenes — Jonze joins us on stage to discuss his prolific career. Interviewing him will be his friend and colleague in truly independent filmmaking, Kelly Reichardt, whose Night Moves also plays in the Festival.

Jonze's first two features, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, were written by Charlie Kaufman, a man who clearly shares with Jonze some essential affinity for appropriating popular iconography for a higher purpose. The stories they told, and the visually inventive way Jonze interpreted them, were clever and moving — postmodernism with a heart. And with his transporting realization of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, Jonze proved that tales of loss and wonder can speak to film-goers of all ages.

With Her, his first solo screenwriting credit — which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a writer who develops deep feelings for an operating system — Jonze explores how desire, loneliness, and technology can combine to make our most elusive fantasies come true. It may be Jonze's most personal statement. After all, what is going to the movies all about if not falling in love with some seductive, synthetic vision of our wildest dreams?

Cameron Bailey