While our Comic Con correspondents are already on the convention floor and reporting stories, a handful of other selected journalists are headed to San Diego via train, in a car fully decked out to promote City of Ember, the Bill Murray fantasy coming out next year. Don’t even talk to me about how jealous I am. Anyway, CHUD cornered the movie’s producer, Gary Goetzman, but not to talk about a movie that’s actually scheduled to be released any time soon. The movie they really wanted to know about was the perpetually troubled Where the Wild Things Are.
And Goetzman really did have something to say, even though the details on exactly what the project is doing seem to still be fuzzy. "We support Spike's vision. We're helping him make the vision he wants to make,” he explained, while also confirming that Jonze will get final cut of the film. Goetzman also brushed off rumors that early screenings have terrified children, and that Jonze has been assigned to make the movie a little more kid-friendly. “"Kids are much smarter than [the studio types] think. Spike won't talk down to kids. He's got a kid's soul."
In the minimal details he mentions about the actual production, Goetzman makes the movie seem like some Werner Herzog production, with film crews trekking into the wilderness and everything going horribly wrong from there. “As you go deeper in the jungle and weather sets in... We misjudged that, production-wise.” At the very least, the movie is starting to earn its comparisons to Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote, the doomed production famously documented in Lost in La Mancha. Jonze may get final cut, but that’s only if there ever is a film that can be released in the first place.
