So I went into the novelization thinking it would be a place to put all these passages and scenes that wouldn’t fit into the movie. And I did end up using a few of those scenes. But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version.
From an interesting interview with Dave Eggers at the New Yorker in which he talks about more than just the Where the Wild Things Are movie. To really get a sense of him and the direction he took for the movie, I suggest reading “Max at Sea,” an excerpt from the novelization.
educating alice 