Spike Jonze is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and photographer. After starting out as a skateboarding photographer for Freestylin' Magazine and co-founding a magazine called Dirt, Jonze transitioned into filmmaking. His first films were of skateboarding, and he eventually transitioned into making music videos for musical acts like Sonic Youth, Beastie Boys, Weezer, Bjork, and Fatboy Slim.
Jonze's first major film was Charlie Kaufman's absurdist sci-fi film Being John Malkovich in 1999. It earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. Soon after, he had an acting role in David O. Russell's war comedy Three Kings. His next film as a director was Adaptation, also written by Charlie Kaufman about Kaufman's experiences trying to adapt Susan Orleans' The Orchid Thief into a film. In between films, Jonze directed music videos for a variety of artists, while also dabbling in producing.
In 2009, Jonze penned the screenplay for an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's iconic children's book Where the Wild Things Are, which earned critical acclaim. After working on several music videos, Jonze wrote and directed Her, released in 2013, and which earned him 3 Academy Award nominations, for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Original Song ("Moon Song," which he co-wrote with ex-girlfriend and Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman, Karen O.). Also in 2013, he co-wrote and co-produced the film Jackass: Bad Grandpa.
Adaptation was written by Charlie Kaufman and based upon The Orchid Thief, a book by Susan Orlean. Kaufman's journey of battling writer's block in adapting the book become the film that Spike Jonze directed. It was released in 2002 with a budget...
If the most unusual movie had to picked out of every movie ever produced, the movie selected may well be Spike Jonze's quirky Being John Malkovich. The film follows a struggling puppeteer, Craig Schwartz, who discovers a portal on floor 7 of an...
Her is a 2013 American romantic science-fiction film directed, produced, and written by Spike Jonze. The film follows Theodore, a lonely man in the final stages of a divorce. His career is writing "beautiful handwritten letters" on behalf of other...
