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Like every other movie Jonze has made, Her is about loneliness and the nervous, tiny grasps we make to evade it. Because I thought I was interviewing Jonze and not Spiegel, who is divorced with no kids, I may have asked some questions that were more hurtful than I should have. Like if a man with so many projects and so many friends still has time to feel lonely. ("Yeah, I do," he says in his gentle, slow, soft, slightly high-pitched voice, which makes him sound more like a small boy than a 44-year-old man.) And why the movie has so much baby fever--a pregnancy fetish, a video game called Perfect Mom, a hilarious, obscenity-spewing alien child video-game character voiced by Jonze that he plans to turn into a phone app--to which he says, "Well, there are a lot of kids in the world. People seem to keep having them." And whether he asked Siri, the iPhone's primitive version of the character Johansson plays, if she'd seen his movie:
Jonze: I hope she did.
Me: [To Siri] Have you seen the movie Her yet?
Siri: I did not.
Me: [To Jonze] How does that feel?
Jonze: It hurts. [To Siri] Why not?
Siri: Why not what?
Jonze: Never mind, Siri. [To me] Had you asked her that already?
Me: Yeah.
Jonze: So you wanted to see my feelings hurt?
No. I wanted to be the trickster, to rile him up, to see him yell at Siri or beg her or anything other than just be sad in his small-boy voice.
The earnestness makes him seem relaxed, but Jonze can be tenacious and exacting: he has made only four movies in 15 years. This is the first one he has written on his own, having learned from Dave Eggers when they sat in a room together writing Where the Wild Things Are to accept imperfection, keep writing and go back later to fix it. But he will fix it. Cutting scenes is still painful for Jonze, so he sent a long version of the movie to the speedy Steven Soderbergh, who in just 24 hours sent back a 90-minute version that snapped Jonze out of his stasis. Jonze has a coterie of coolness he depends on, having talked through much of the story with his friend American Hustle director David O. Russell and shared it in sweat-soaked installments with clothing designer Humberto Leon during walks home from kung fu class in Tribeca. He also got input from director David Fincher (who lent him office space before he got an office), Charlie Kaufman (with whom he collaborated on Adaptation and Being John Malkovich) and Miranda July (a fellow eccentric filmmaker and writer).
He won't discuss earlier versions of his ideas (Chris Cooper shot some kind of part in Her), but there's one he can't hide: He shot all of Her with Samantha Morton as the operating system. And Morton didn't do it in voice-over but on the set, in real time, from a very uncomfortable-looking 4-by-4 black plywood box. He scrapped all that and rewrote and reshot the part, hoping to find an unknown actress or at least one willing to do the role uncredited so the audience wouldn't picture anyone specific. But then he liked Johansson, who brings an earthy humanness to the operating system.