Vice Magazine Asks Spike Jonze if He Knows He's Special

When Vice's Shane Smith sat down to chat with hoodie cinema savior Spike Jonze, he made it clear from sentence one that he was not just an interviewer, but an interviewer with five years friendship with Jonze under his belt.

So we were warned from the outset that Smith brought a certain, er, perspective to the table.

Normally mere readers are not privileged to see the workings of a celebrity interview; that is, the long minutes of kissing up before the tape goes on. And even the kissing up when the tape is rolling usually discreetly finds its way to the cutting room floor before the final version of a Q and A goes on. In the interviews of my own career, I have worked tirelessly to shield my readers from the shamelessness that goes on in your typical profile.

But seeing as Smith was interviewing his five-year buddy, it seems he wanted to paint a scene not just of interviewer and interviewee, but of two bros just you know, like, hangin'.

Below are a few of the gotchas Smith threw down at Jonze, talking about his new adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are:

• Well, I think you did a great job on the writing, but when I was watching the movie I was thinking to myself that this must have been a hard sell to a major studio for a tent-pole release. This is obviously a big film, but it's also so intimate and artistic…

• I was thinking that this was a very brave film for you to have made because you made art even though it's financed by a conglomerate and there are so many millions of dollars involved and so many pressures against it. That's incredibly brave, and I'm proud of you.

• It's going to be huge. Are you nervous about that? You're not a public guy, and you made this thing for five years and it's your little baby and everything, and now it's going to be in, like, People magazine. You're gonna be in People! Can you believe it?

• Wow.

• That's really pretty amazing.

• It must have felt insane to finally see it all put together.

• Are you excited?

• Eat it and then lick it?

Answers to these bold inquiries available at Vice.