This article was taken from the February 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Since his 1999 debut Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze has been directing wonderfully existential head-trips on the big screen.
Follow-ups Adaptation and Where The Wild Things Are both featured unique universes with a melancholic beauty.
His new film, Her, about a man who falls for an artificially intelligent operating system, is the first he's written himself. Jonze talked to wired about privacy, technology and Aphex Twin.
**Wired: Your last film, the 2010 short
I'm Here, was a robot romance. Did Her grow out of that at all?**
Spike Jonze: They're somehow related, but not as much as you'd think. This is a love story - and there's robots!
But that movie was about first love and being in your early twenties. In this one, a man
[Theodore, played by Joaquin Phoenix] is coming out of a long relationship and meeting somebody new. I'll be curious to see how related it is - I don't even know.
**Both are love stories, which is new territory for you.
Although Being John Malkovich and Adaptation involve romances.**
Yeah. Well, I guess a lot of things I make are relationship movies. Maybe all movies are relationship movies, because they're all about how we relate to each other.
Was that the impetus for this one, rather than the stuff about operating systems?
It was both. There were definitely ideas about things that are happening right now, and the way we're living. Not as a sociological thing, but the way I find myself living - the amount I interact with technology every day. But also I wanted to write a relationship movie and it seemed like an interesting way to do it.
I strived to make Samantha, the operating-system character played by Scarlett Johansson, her own entity, her own being or consciousness. She is her own person with her own wants and needs that she brings into the relationship, her own fears and her own self-doubt. Her own journey. And that's what's challenging about a relationship - it's two separate people with their own attempts to navigate the world, with all the emotional life they're carrying around, while at the same time trying to navigate it together.
You screened I'm Here in US colleges then interviewed audiences for some online films. How did that go?
We had this sort of confessional booth where you walk in, close the door and a monitor asks you the questions: "What was this movie about to you?", "What relationship in your life did it remind you of?". It wasn't an interview with a person, it was just you and a camera, so that changes the dynamic in an interesting way. They're really touching for me, they're sincere and sweet little films.
Funny, too. It was an exciting way to have a dialogue, to make something and have somebody else make something back.
**Did any of the responses feed into
Her?**
Good question. I should watch them again. I wouldn't be surprised because everything feeds into what I'm working on. Any conversation I have with anybody that's real is always revealing and inspiring.
There's been a lot of talk on how Twitter is reviving appointment TV, even if we are all also multitasking with smartphones and tablets. What are your thoughts on how technology
can bring people together?
Technology's part of the movie, and the movie's look on it is very multidimensional. Technology obviously has incredible value to us and our lives and society, and it also has negative effects. I'm wary, though, of saying anything like, "This is what the movie's stance is."
Do you switch off from tech? Do you make efforts in your life to just go off-grid?
Yeah, definitely, for sure, sometimes I'll do that. I took my email off my phone: just a simple thing to say that I'm not doing email all day, I'll just do it when I'm in front of my computer.
Things like that. The idea of how quick it all changes, the idea of having a home phone now is such a quaint idea. I have a home-phone number and I like it! It's like a throwback already.
There's a line where Samantha says, "I saw on your emails that you've gone through a break-up," and Theodore says she's being nosy. This was before the Prism and NSA revelations, but were you thinking about being tracked and logged?
Now you mention it... when I first started making notes, I was thinking about it more in terms of the ideas we're talking about.
But then as soon as I sat down to write it, I realised I just wanted to make this relationship movie. Those ideas are in there because they're in the DNA of the movie, and they're certainly all things that I've thought about and they are unsettling,
but it's not what the movie's about.
You use Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th" in the trailer. It's interesting that you've used the most un-electronic of his songs.
It's true! We tried to make a modern score that doesn't feel electronic. Aphex Twin is a singular voice in that world in terms of bringing complex compositions and emotions to that form of music. Whenever I start writing I try to put together songs that feed the feeling of the movie. I was talking to [director] Chris Cunningham about it, who loves and has worked with Aphex Twin. He sent me a couple of songs and that was one of them. I'd heard it before, but hadn't totally paid attention to it, but when he sent it to me - wow. It's not in the movie, but the songs that you write the movie around become so embedded in it that when we go to make a trailer they fit together so naturally, because in they're part of the DNA of the movie.
Her will be released in the UK on 14 February.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
