Exclusive footage from the making of Where The Wild Things Are

“In terms of musical genre we tried to avoid everything,” explains Carter Burwell the composer responsible for the thudding, crunching, whirring and wonderful score that features in the recent box office smash Where The Wild Things Are.

Burwell said rendering the film’s music to fit Maurice Sendak’s children’s book - where Max, a disobedient little boy, goes to live with monsters in the woods-, was challenging because he wanted the score to maintain the naivety of the tale.

“The music shouldn’t feel like it is coming from any form of locale or any specific time or place [...] We tried to use sounds that could be made with materials that might be found on the forest floor like a bit of wood,” he said.

“We used flexible tubes that are really just the tubes from a pool vacuum cleaner. If you swing them in the air they become like an enormous overgrown flute.”

The film, directed by Spike Jonze, topped the North American box office in the first week of its release and took $32.5 million in its debut showing.

Remarking on the film adaptation of his 1963 book, author Maurice Sendak said: “The film maintains its peculiarities as a work. I’ve never seen a movie that looks or feels like this.”

Watch an exclusive video with Carter Burwell below: