Was it in your brain for a long time that you wanted to make it into a film?
No, because it was one of those things that I loved but I wouldn’t have wanted to touch. I didn’t know what I could add to it that wouldn’t ruin it. But I’ve gotten to know Maurice Sendak over the last 14 years and talked to him about it occasionally. He would ask me if I would want to do it and I would contemplate it and try to think of—

Hold on, hold on. So he asked you if you wanted to do it?
It was something he was developing into a movie for the last 20 years.

Do you know who else was ever going to do it?
I’m not sure who had gotten really close to it, but he talked to a lot of different people.

It must have felt amazing to be personally asked by him.
Oh yeah. I mean, I love him, and I love his books. And since I’ve loved them from when I was so young—In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are and Pierre and The Nutshell Library—those images are all so…

Ingrained in your head?
Right. When you love something from that age, you end up loving it really deeply because the images are there way down inside you. As you’ve grown, you’ve grown around them and they’ve just gotten deeper into you.

http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n9/htdocs/spike-jonze-140.php?page=1

Via:

http://gawker.com/5359940/vice-magazine-asks-spike-jonze-if-he-knows-hes-special