Where the Wild Things Are: Nature Calls the Shots on a Wild Rumpus in Australia

Director Spike Jonze’s new live action movie, Where the Wild Things Are takes on the ambitious task of bringing a boy’s boundless adventure fantasy to life in the real world. But where? To capture a stunning mix of extreme landscapes, Jonze’s team spent five months on location along the southernmost edge of Australia in Victoria. Here they found the rain, hail, whipping winds, and even rogue waves to be welcome, if daunting, challenges (particularly for the actors in the Wild Things costumes, which weighed up to a hundred pounds each). We caught up with production designer K.K. Barrett and producer Vincent Landay, both longtime Jonze collaborators, to learn more about where the action happened, close calls, and how nature called the shots.—Mary Anne Potts 

You considered many destinations—Argentina, Hawaii, New Zealand. Why Australia?
K. K. Barrett: We wanted to create a world that would be relevant to the story and a child’s imagination. And a world that Max could invent on his own and that the audience could absorb as new. Australia seemed to have the greatest diversity in a tight distance: Most of the locations were about 45 minutes to an hour and a half from Melbourne, and they were all so extreme. Max’s imagination drives the story as he's changing and inventing new worlds. He’s constantly taken aback by them and then accepts them and makes them his own. So each location needed to represent that.

CamelBak Gives Water Bottles to Bottle-Banning Australian Town

CamelBak Australia is donating 2,000 of its Better Bottles to Bundanoon, a tiny tourist town 90 miles southwest of Sydney, Australia, that voted in July to ban the sale of bottled water. The difference with the CamelBak bottles, of course, is that they won’t be pitched into the rubbish at the end of the day. Rather, they’ll be refilled again and again by some of the 2,500 residents at indoor taps, drinking fountains, and three spanking new filtered-water filling stations around town.

The movement against the sale of “single-use” bottled water began when a Sydney-based beverage company, Norlex, proposed pumping water from a local aquifer to bottle for sale. The prospect of buying back their own water—marked up as much as 250 times—in the midst of a seven-year drought struck some Bundanoon townspeople as ridiculous. In July, a meeting was called and more than 350 citizens voted to take it a step farther and outlaw the sale of bottled water.