The print, by the artist Todd Hido, hangs on a wall near a giant rectangular dining-and-conference table in the loft where Spike Jonze lives and works when he’s in New York. Several years ago, Jonze saw it in a gallery and felt stirred by what he calls “the beautiful mysteriousness of it. And also, you know, the memory of it.”
Around a corner from where we’re standing, a bedroom glows behind a wall of curtained glass, but the flow of Jonze’s sunsplashed Lower East Side living space allows him to pad barefoot from where he writes to where he plays music to where he has meetings to where he eats to where he hangs out. Jonze grew up on the East Coast but has recently spent much of his time in Los Angeles, and the loft feels capacious enough to accommodate his many selves—one can imagine the skateboard brat of the eighties heel-flipping across the floor while the subversive-music-video prodigy of the nineties blasts the Beastie Boys and the still precocious but mature film artist of the last ten years shuts out the noise and works alone at his desk. His home is large enough to accommodate a crowd, but it’s designed for a party of one. Specifically, for a grown-up who wants room to think.
“It feels like a memory,” he says, raising his fingers toward the photograph. “The mood of a day without the specifics. A memory of this girl, in this beautiful, funny forest.” (...)
The movie that grew from that gesture will have its world premiere as the closing-night attraction of the New York Film Festival on October 12 and will open in New York on December 18. Her is not about the woman in the photo so much as it is about the man longing, perhaps hopelessly, to connect with that woman. It may be the most personal film yet from a director who has long juggled so many personae that his actual identity remains deliberately elusive, even after twenty years in the spotlight. The film, a wistful adult romantic drama set in a near-future L.A., is the first Jonze has written on his own as well as directed. Like his other work, it is searching, disarmingly sincere, and melancholy in surprising places. Her springs from a notion that could be played as rimshot contemporary satire: A sensitive, lonely guy (Joaquin Phoenix) coming off a rough divorce falls head over heels for a woman who’s literally custom-made for him—the artificially sentient female voice of his new computer operating system. But just as he did in Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Jonze uses the gimmick to unlock a door to unsmirky human feeling. The result is not just a cautionary meditation on romance and technology but a subtle exploration of the weirdness, delusiveness, and one-sidedness of love. For all his imaginative conceits, Jonze is, in his way, a realist; he’s less interested in playing with the technologically extraordinary than he is in demonstrating the ways in which it can burrow into our most private selves. (...)
Jonze wrote Her almost three years ago over a long New York winter. He worked from dozens of pages of his own notes, as well as the memory of a brief interaction he had with an artificial-intelligence computer program a decade ago in which “for the first 30 seconds, I had that buzz, like, It’s responding to me! Then it quickly fell apart and you realize, Here are the tricks, here’s how this works. But what if I could sustain that forever? What would that be like? I wanted to take that idea as far as I could possibly imagine and feel.”
by Mark Harris, Vulture | Read more:
Image: Brigitte Lacombe
