Spike Jonze is an American director born in Rockville, Maryland, celebrated for wildly inventive films blending emotional sincerity with surreal, high-concept premises. Being John Malkovich, following office workers who discover a portal into the actor's mind, established his singular ability to render bizarre conceptual premises with genuine emotional weight, in the first of several acclaimed collaborations with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, followed by Adaptation. Her, imagining a lonely man's romance with an artificial intelligence operating system, became his most acclaimed solo directorial work, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Where the Wild Things Are, adapting the beloved children's book, showed his ability to render childhood emotion with unusual visual ambition. Jonze's consistent fusion of surreal high-concept premises with genuine emotional sincerity has made him one of the most distinctive imaginative voices in contemporary American cinema. Read more