For a time, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the prospects for unorthodox moviemaking in Hollywood appeared promising. Prompted by the phenomenal success of “Pulp Fiction” in 1994, the big Hollywood studios tentatively opened their gates (and their wallets) to a new generation of “independent” directors, among them Jonze and his friends David O. Russell and Alexander Payne. In 2003, when Jonze was just starting work on “Where the Wild Things Are,” Warner Brothers established a boutique division that went on to put out movies like “Before Sunset” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” But five years later, Warner Brothers Independent, like many other prestige units in Hollywood, was shut down by its parent studio, and “Where the Wild Things Are” began to feel a little like a relic, an artifact from some freewheeling, irretrievable past. When I sat down with Jonze, I’d just seen a rough cut of the movie, and although I’d been expecting something unusual, I hadn’t quite been prepared for either the Cassavetes-speak or the lack of any clear conflict or resolution. I told Jonze I’d imagined something more along the lines of a traditional children’s fantasy film, something like “Harry Potter,” for example.

Image Credit... Photograph by Dan Winters for The New York Times. Illustrations by Geoff McFetridge.

He looked at me as if I’d let him down. “It’s in the visual language of, like, some sort of fantasy film, and it is a fantasy film to some degree,” he acknowledged, “but the tone of it is its own tone. We wanted it all to feel true to a 9-year-old and not have some big movie speech where a 9-year-old is suddenly reciting the wisdom of the sage.” He hadn’t set out to make a children’s movie, he said, so much as to accurately depict childhood. “Everything we did, all the decisions that we made, were to try to capture the feeling of what it is to be 9.”

When Spike Jonze was 9, he was Adam Spiegel, a shy, sensitive kid growing up in Bethesda, Md., a suburb of Washington. His father, Art Spiegel III, the grandson of the founder of the Spiegel catalog company, lived in Manhattan, where he ran a multimillion-dollar health care consulting firm. When Adam was 2, his parents divorced, and his mother took Adam and his older sister first to New Jersey, then to Philadelphia, before finally settling in Bethesda. At home, Jonze would later write, discipline was “erratic.” At school, Adam fared poorly. “What they were teaching didn’t interest me,” he told me.

What did interest him was BMX, or bicycle motocross. The sport originated in the late 1960s, when 12-year-old boys began racing their dirt bikes on motorcycle tracks, though by the time Adam bought his first bike, BMX was less about racing and more about emulating what skateboarders were doing — riding on half-pipes and quarter-pipes, doing tricks in the street. Adam, by many accounts, was a very good trick rider, and he wound up with a job at a bike shop in a local strip mall, selling grips and cranks to other teenagers. Except for the 19-year-old owner’s family members, who took occasional shifts behind the register, all of the employees were under 21. They all wore surf shorts, and they all had nicknames: Tinkerbell, Wild Bill, Rootgirl, Sweetness. Because of his unruly hair, Adam became Spike.

In the summer of 1987, the day after his senior-year final exams, Jonze and a friend packed their belongings into the trunk of a beat-up brown Plymouth Colt and struck out for the West Coast. The college-application process had not gone as well as Jonze had hoped. Of the six colleges to which he’d applied, only Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, accepted him. The top film and art schools — U.C.L.A., CalArts, N.Y.U. — turned him down. Not that he particularly minded. “I was only going to go to college because that’s what I thought you were supposed to do,” he told me not long ago. Fortunately, Jonze had a backup plan. In high school, he wrote a handful of freelance articles for Freestylin’, a BMX magazine, and when he and his friend reached California, they steered the Colt to Torrance, the industrial city half an hour south of Hollywood where the magazine had its editorial offices. The editors, Andy Jenkins and Mark Lewman, were 21 and 19. They had been looking to hire someone new — not a professional journalist but a BMX kid like themselves, a young person who knew the sport and loved it. They chose Jonze.

One afternoon in February, Jonze drove me around Torrance in a white 1969 Porsche that he borrowed from Lance Acord, his cinematographer. (When Jonze is by himself, he gets around on a Vespa.) He was dressed stylishly, if a bit raffishly, in an untucked lavender dress shirt and a gray tie with lilac stripes. There was a skateboard in the backseat. For most of the ride, he was chatty but not particularly forthcoming, asking nearly as many questions as he answered. We turned into the sprawling industrial park where the editorial offices of Freestylin’ were once located, and he slowed the car and grew quiet. A sign on a warehouse said “Global Communication Semiconductors Inc.” Jonze pointed to the sun-bleached concrete building where he and his friends used to work. “There were so many amazing people, and we had such an amazing time, but it’s the most banal place,” he said. Behind the warehouse, Jonze told me, was the low-rise, low-rent apartment complex where he lived after arriving in Torrance, sharing a living room with two other teenagers and a drum set. The carpet was spotted with grease stains from people constantly tearing apart their bikes. Kids drifted in and out, crashing on the floor for weeks at a time. (“There was a guy living in the dining room for a while,” Jenkins told me.) In the mornings, Jonze and his roommates would throw their skateboards over the wall in a back alley and glide to the office through a couple of parking lots. After 5 p.m., the members of the editorial team — none of them older than 21 — had the company warehouse to themselves. “We had a refrigerator full of film,” Jonze told me. “We’d skate ramps. We’d build rails. We had everything. It was, like, way better than any college.”