I just want to do things that excite me - that make me laugh or touch me or confuse me,” says Jonze, whose career spans everything from musicvideos and commercials to films, television and publishing. It can be hard for some to reconcile that the person who helped launch youth-culture, male-targeted magazines Homeboy and Dirt, and once helped kidnap Brad Pitt on “Jackass,” is the same artist behind the idiosyncratic critical darlings he has fashioned for the bigscreen. Jonze, 44, is one of the entertainment industry’s most enigmatic talents. “In other people’s hands, this material could have been impossible,” says Sue Kroll, president of worldwide marketing and international distribution at Warner Bros., which is releasing the film. Jonze’s script and direction takes what could have been a one-note premise and makes it a heartfelt love story. It just happens to be between a man and the voice of his computer. Jonze’s latest endeavor, “Her” - which just won awards for director and film from the National Board of Review - is at its heart about a relationship. Jonze is, after all, the filmmaker who took us inside the mind of a character actor in “Being John Malkovich” and captured the most meta case of writer’s block in “Adaptation” before bringing the classic children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” to life. Like his previous turns in the driver’s seat, it defies easy classification. And “Her,” Jonze’s fourth directorial feature, hits theaters Dec. Jonze receives a story and producer credit on “Bad Grandpa,” in which Knoxville is disguised as an elderly man and pranks unsuspecting bystanders. That dichotomy is on full display this month with two projects that couldn’t be more disparate. But in addition to a childlike enthusiasm for all things, he has an amazing, critical-thinking adult mind.” “He’s a handful,” says Johnny Knoxville, who collaborated with Jonze as an actor on MTV’s “Jackass” series and movies, among them their latest hit, “Bad Grandpa.” Adds Knoxville, “There’s a lot of laughter and wrestling and pranking on a set. “Childlike” is a word used often by those who know Jonze best, including a tight-knit group of collaborators the filmmaker ferries from set to set, some of whom he’s worked with for nearly 20 years. Asked why the filmmakers didn’t enlist a real child for the part, Zumbrunnen instantly responds, “We did!” “It might be his best role yet,” jokes the helmer’s longtime editor, Eric Zumbrunnen. There’s another perfectly cast voice in the movie too - a foul-mouthed alien child who appears inside a videogame played by Theodore. Much has been made of the vocal performance that Scarlett Johansson delivers as the title character in Spike Jonze’s latest film, “ Her,” about a computer operating system named Samantha who falls for her human owner Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix).
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