Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy (48 page)

Spike:
From the time I was thirteen, I was so into the BMX and skate world—that was like the comedy world to me—but I kept thinking,
That’s not a job.
You know,
I’ve got to go to college and get a
real
job.
But it was the thing that I loved. Getting to work on the thing that you’re always thinking about anyways is like the biggest—that’s the goal.

Judd:
What did your parents think of you going deep into the BMX world?

Spike:
My mom was very encouraging, I think, because she saw how excited I was about it.

Judd:
She recognized that sense of fun.

Spike:
Yeah, I think so. I think she trusted me. Looking back, I had a point of view about what things meant to me and she saw that. Like if you’re told that something should be taken seriously, you should try and figure out why before you take it seriously. I always wanted to know why before I believed something.

Judd:
The thing I was thinking when you were talking was when we were young, there was no Internet. When I was interested in a subject—like, oh,
I wonder what happened to Lenny Bruce
—I would have to go to the library and get out the microfiche. Today, kids are so savvy. All that information is just sitting there. You can look up Martin Scorsese and watch hundreds of interviews with him. But we were really in the fucking woods. If you wanted to know something, it was hard to find out. Like, I didn’t even see a picture of USC before I went there. I didn’t visit. There were no photos. Where would you get a photo of it? You’d have to write a letter: “Can you send me a brochure of USC?” My parents didn’t even know what I did at school. I filled out all my applications. Like today, if you have a kid, you’re there constantly. You’re so deep in their lives. But my parents didn’t know what the hell I was doing, most of the time. Was that what your experience was like?

Spike:
Yeah, but my mom was really encouraging in wanting me to work at this BMX shop in Rockville or to go on tour, or letting me move out to California. She was super-supportive of it. But, yeah, I’d be gone for three months on summer tour and she wouldn’t know where I was.

Judd:
I would never think to do that in a million years. My daughter’s sixteen. The idea of shipping her out…But I did the same thing. I would just jump on the train and go to Poughkeepsie to interview Weird Al Yankovic. I didn’t know where I was. I used to go to the city by myself all the time when I was fifteen.

Spike:
My dad lived in New York so I would go back and forth. I went to school a little bit in New York and, yeah, by the time I was ten, I was wandering around the city by myself all the time.

Judd:
That’s when the city was dangerous.

Spike:
We got mugged in Central Park. I’d get chased on my BMX bike. But also, going back to the idea of—one of the things I got from working in the bike shop and just being a part of skateboarding in general is that everything—and I would have never known this intellectually at the time—but in skateboarding, the city is a playground. The city is for you to reinvent. You’re looking at it in a different way than everybody else is. You’re looking at handrails in a different way. The things that people might sit on to have lunch, the ledges, you’re looking at what you can do, tricks you can do or lines you can do and everything is to be invented.

Judd:
Is skateboard culture progressive? Because it seems like there are so many artists that come out of it. Like, I love Mike Mills. There’s so many others, too—Templeton and all of the
Beautiful Losers
artists. Is that part of what they’re taking from that culture?

Spike:
There’s no one way to do skateboarding. It is athletic but it is also really creative. It’s a very individual, individual-minded thing. And especially in the eighties or early nineties, when it wasn’t that popular. It wasn’t on TV. It didn’t have the X Games. We didn’t have skate parks. You had to go out of your way to be a part of it.

Judd:
No tennis player or baseball player has ever directed a good movie. I mean, it is interesting when you think about how many filmmakers and
artists come out of skateboard culture and zero come out of football, baseball, tennis, soccer. It’s not part of any other sport.

Spike:
I think it’s—there’s a number of things. One is that you’re not told how to skate. In other sports, somebody’s telling you: “This is the way to do things.” There’s a discipline to it. In skateboarding, you create your own discipline. You’re in a bank parking lot with your friends at night and you keep throwing yourself down a set of stairs trying to land a trick. Your friends are skating, too, and you are all supporting each other, but you keep slamming and getting up because you want that feeling of mastering it and rolling away. There’s no coach. Also, and this is in other sports, too, when you’re trying to land a trick, the methodology of getting that—it’s like this sort of OCD thing, where you’re getting closer and closer every time you flick the board. The way you’re sort of visualizing your body doing it. I remember being about seventeen or eighteen and there was this kid Matt Hoffman, who is this amazing BMXer. We are great friends and used to travel together and shoot photos a lot. He’s probably one of the most notable BMX guys. He invented so much. He was the first guy to ever think of building a mega-ramp and almost killed himself learning to ride it. He told me about the idea of visualizing a trick and he never read it anywhere, he just discovered it. He realized that he had to start picturing in his head what he was going to do because he was inventing stuff that no one had ever done. Once you see somebody else do it, you can do it. But if no one’s ever done it before, you don’t know it can be done. You have to do it in your head and
imagine
it can be done.

Judd:
That’s like thinking you can do a video with a man running on fire that’s shot in twelve seconds and then slow it down and that’s a video. That’s visualizing something that hasn’t been done before.

Spike:
We never asked permission.

Judd:
Studios today are in a weird position because they want to do the thing that will make the most money but they also know that they need innovation and they have to have something new and exciting for the audience to get them into the theaters.

Spike:
And they have a fiscal responsibility to the people giving
them
the money to make movies. I don’t want to rail against the studios here, because
I’m so fortunate and I have friends that work at the studios and I get to work with them and they are real friends and collaborators. But I see what their jobs are and understand the situation they’re in. When I did
Where the Wild Things Are
, I had so much trouble getting that movie through when I was editing it because it was so not—you know, I think they were expecting a “family film.”

Judd:
They thought you were going to do
The Grinch.

Spike:
Yeah, maybe.

Judd:
And when did they find out that they weren’t getting
The Grinch?

Spike:
About ten months after we shot, I showed them a rough cut, and that’s when they were like,
Oh shit. We have to put this in front of an audience right away.
I could tell there were things that they were worried about. If somebody’s going to give me money to make a movie, I’m going to be very collaborative with them and listen to their concerns, but it’s also my job to protect the idea of the film because, without that, we’re all lost.

Judd:
When you were making it, did you think, like,
Oh, if I do this correctly it will connect in some deep way and reach a certain amount of people
, or did you think,
I have this idea and I’m lucky enough to be able to do it, so let’s go?

Spike:
I want the studio to make their money back and I want to be able to make movies in the future. And when I’m making a movie, I want to be responsible and listen to the concerns of the people who gave me the money. But at a certain point, I have to put that all out of my mind because it’s not the responsibility of that movie. That movie’s responsibility is to be true to itself. If I don’t get to make another movie, I’ll make something else. I’ll make a movie for a million dollars. I’ll go write a short story. I’ll go write a book. I believe that. I mean, if I’m put to the test, I hope it’s true. I hope it’s not just a romantic idea.

Judd:
That approach frees you up to be as creative as possible because you’re not completely reliant on Hollywood or the studio system to keep you working.

Spike:
With
Where the Wild Things Are
, there was a point where I was told, during the editing process, that they were worried about what the movie was and the problem was also it was financed by multiple companies, so—

Judd:
They all wanted their say?

Spike:
They were all nervous about—

Judd:
Isn’t that the worst, when you can sense that jobs are on the line? I’ve made movies and then the next year people have been fired and it’s not necessarily
because
of your movie, but you’re definitely a part of what brought down the administration. When we did
The Cable Guy
, Sony had had a few bad movies in a row and then, suddenly, everybody was gone.

Spike:
I feel like even if they’re going to lose their jobs they can’t possibly care about the movie as much as I do. And they can’t possibly go to the lengths that I’ll go to protect it. With every film, I’m so grateful that they made my movie and I will extend myself to keep the conversation open and hear their thoughts. But with
Wild Things
, there was a point where it started to feel abusive. There was a point where I said to somebody at the studio that I was working with, whom I’m actually close friends with now, I was like, “If I came to you and talked to you about your child the way you’re talking to me about my movie right now, you wouldn’t listen to me. If I came to you and said, ‘Man, your kid is fucked up. He’s a problem child and he is freaking me and everyone out. I think you should put him on medication. You know, he’s really a fucked-up kid,’ you’re never going to listen to me because I’m judging your kid and I clearly don’t like or get your kid. But if you came to me and said, ‘Your kid is really special. I see how special he is. I sat and talked to him the other day and what he was talking about was amazing. But there’s a school that might be better for him than the school that he’s in right now and I’ll go visit it with you if you want…,’ that’s a different thing. I’ll listen to you.”

Judd:
It takes a long time to find the people who get what you do. The first half of my career, I was always at war with people. We would fight and
scream and curse and cry and I was a terror because people didn’t understand what I was trying to do. They were so mad at me, like I was letting them down. Because
Freaks and Geeks
didn’t have more viewers or
The Ben Stiller Show
wasn’t beating
60 Minutes.
But
The Ben Stiller Show
was up against
60 Minutes
at seven-thirty on a Sunday! It was an edgy sketch show but they, you know, you get into these battles because either they feel you’re unimportant or they feel like you’re not doing what they want you to do. And then finally you find someone that gets your joke and so you make
Superbad
and then you say, “Hey, I’ve got another one. Do you want to do
Pineapple Express
?” and they say, “Yeah.” And suddenly you’re in this great rhythm with a studio because they get your tone. They got the joke. With comedy, as soon as you succeed, you have some credibility and then they trust you more. It must be much more extreme with you because you’re doing things that are always very new to the studio. You have a track record of succeeding doing something that’s completely original, but yet it must also scare them because you are reinventing the wheel every time out.

Spike:
We’ve been lucky for sure.
Wild Things
was the only one that I’ve ever gotten in those kinds of fights with because the budget was so much higher. I was on a different playing field because what I wanted to do required a lot more money. And so when you’re taking that much money from somebody, there’s going to be a danger.

Judd:
They do the math: Okay, it cost us a hundred, it needs to gross three hundred.

Spike:
And it’s a weird movie. Some people find it very sad and strange or dark and that doesn’t feel like a “family film.”

Judd:
It’s a remarkable movie, but it’s so daring. When I watch it, I think,
This feels like it was made in another land.

Spike:
There are people who like it and people who don’t like it. I don’t even know how to judge that kind of thing. I just know it’s true to what I set out to make, and it feels dangerous in the way I promised Maurice Sendak it would feel. When I first started talking to him about the movie, it always scared me because I loved the book and I didn’t want to fuck it up and I didn’t know what I could possibly add to it. And then I finally had
the idea of what I’d add to it, which is: Who
are
the wild things? And, you know, who are they to
Max
—they are emotional volatility and emotional wildness in his life—in him and the people he is close to. If I could make a movie that captured what it felt like to be a person at nine years old trying to understand a confusing and sometimes scary world—that was my goal. I remember talking to Maurice about it and saying, “Maurice, I’m a little nervous about what I want to do because this is what it is to me but I know this book is a lot of things to a lot of other people.” And he said, “I don’t care.” He said, “Just promise me that you’re not going to pander to children, that you’re going to make something dangerous and personal and true to you. If you do that, then you’ve done the same thing I did when I wrote the book when I was your age. The book was mine and now this movie has to be yours.” With his blessing…and not only blessing but his artistic integrity challenging me and pushing me and inspiring me, I felt like as long as I’m true to the assignments that he gave me, I will have done right by him.