Credit: Tara Walton/Toronto Star

Despite a lenghty résumé that includes SCTV, Home Alone, Best In Show and many other comedy classics, Catherine O’Hara had never had so much fun working on a project as she did on Spike Jonze's box-office-topping adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are. As one of the actors behind the film’s titular pack, O'Hara voices the caustic, rambunctious Judith, turning in a spirited performance O’Hara attributes to Jonze’s free-form director style.

“In a good way these characters are not archetypes, and they don’t have ‘arcs,’” says the actress during a recent roundtable discussion. “We physically acted everything for a month with remote microphones — and Spike Jonze was just being Max [the book/film's child protagonist]. The first time we met him, we went to his house and he took us up in the hills behind his house and was like, 'OK, what you do you want to do? You wanna play War? let’s play War!” And you’re just in the erratic play of it, because he’d suddenly jump on your back.”

She pauses meditatively. “It was just so… wild.”

The rehearsal process for the voiceover narration was also unorthodox. Though O’Hara has previously voiced animated characters (her credits include Pippi Longstocking, Chicken Little and Over the Hedge), the actors — which also include Forest Whitaker, Chris Cooper and James Gandolfini — were secluded for a month with remote microphones, acting out the stirring play later animated onscreen.

“We actually got in a sleep pile and had a bread roll fight. Spike called it ‘contact directing’; we did contact acting.”

A sense of play runs flush throughout the film, but at a pacing that’s closer to an Ozu film than any children’s blockbuster. Though O’Hara’s own children (she has two, aged 12 and 15) responded to the film in its early stage of production with tears, the actress speaks of the responsibility to provide your kids with “good comedy, good art.”

“There’s a lot of great kids movies, but there’s a lot of crap out there too,” she admits. “The scariest thing is to go into another room when your kid’s movie is on, and hearing the music that tells them what to think at every moment, and the sound effects — honest to God, I’ll think, ‘Turn it down — that’s making me sick to hear it!’ And, of course, there’s a dead parent at the beginning of every children’s movie and the lesson they’ll have to learn while they shove old TV and movie references down their throat.

“When we first met with Spike at his house, we had a live iChat with Maurice Sendak. What a thoughtful man, who is so respectful of children. He talked about how kids will go see anything and you have to give them worthy entertainment for their fresh minds.

“It seemed to me that Spike wanted that child-like, wild-thing innocence from everyone. He insisted to us, 'Don’t do it like you’ve done it forever, start fresh from what these characters are going from.' So the whole film seems as innocent as a big movie could possibly be.”

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