Filmography: Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), Her (2013) Spike Jonze (aka Adam Spiegel), the former skater and music video director, probably wouldn't strike someone as a great auteur if you happened to pass him on the street, but the man's work speaks for itself. Jonze made his debut just prior to the new millennium in 1999, introducing the world to the mind of Charlie Kaufman by bringing Kaufman's bizarre script, Being John Malkovich, to life. Jonze's first work of the 21st century saw Jonze reteaming with Kaufman again to make Kaufman's super-meta script Adaptation, the story of Kaufman and his fictional twin brother writing the script for the film Adaptation, into a feature film. Adaptation is basically the writers' equivalent to the Fellini classic, 8&1/2, and is almost as good to match. One of the best films of the new millennium, Adaptation not only stands out for Kaufman's incredibly intelligent script, but also for Jonze's terrific direction, that manages to perfectly pace and shape all the neurotic twists and turns the films story takes. After a bit of a hiatus, Jonze forged his own path sans Kaufman, first adapting Maurice Sendak's classic childrens book, Where the Wild Things Are, and then writing his first wholly original work, Her. While his adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are received mixed notices and did poorly at the box office, the response to Her was quite the rebound. Telling the near-future story of a man who falls in love with his self-aware operating system, Her became Jonze's first film to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and won Jonze his first Academy Award for writing the films script. While Jonze's work post-Kaufman has tended a bit too much toward the airily fanciful, losing some of the dark humor prevalent in Kaufman's scripts, Jonze is an immense talent in his own right, and what he has planned for the future will be eagerly awaited by many.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
