Spike Jonze's work includes commercials, film, music videos, skateboard videos and television.
72 Facts About Spike Jonze
2.
Spike Jonze co-founded the skateboard company Girl Skateboards in 1993 with riders Rick Howard and Mike Carroll.
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Spike Jonze began his feature film directing career with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, both written by Charlie Kaufman; the former earned Spike Jonze an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
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Spike Jonze was a co-creator and executive producer of MTV's Jackass reality franchise.
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Spike Jonze later began directing films based on his own screenplays, including Where the Wild Things Are and Her ; for the latter film, he won the Academy Award, Golden Globe, and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay, while receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Song.
6.
Spike Jonze has worked as an actor sporadically throughout his career, co-starring in David O Russell's war comedy Three Kings and appearing in supporting roles in Bennett Miller's Moneyball and Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, in addition to a recurring role in comedy series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret and cameo appearances in his own films.
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Spike Jonze co-founded Directors Label, with filmmakers Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry, and the Palm Pictures company.
8.
Spike Jonze is currently the creative director of Vice Media, Inc and its multinational television channel Vice on TV.
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Spike Jonze is the grandson of Arthur Spiegel and the great-great-grandson of Joseph Spiegel, founder of the Spiegel catalog.
10.
Spike Jonze's parents divorced when he was a young child and his father remarried.
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Spike Jonze fronted Club Homeboy, an international BMX club, alongside Lewman and Jenkins.
12.
Spike Jonze formed a close friendship with Mark Gonzales, co-owner of the newly formed Blind Skateboards at the time, and began shooting photos with the young Blind team including Jason Lee, Guy Mariano and Rudy Johnson in the late 1980s.
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Spike Jonze became a regular contributor to Transworld Skateboarding and was given a job at World Industries by Steve Rocco, who enlisted him to photograph advertisements and shoot promotional videos for his brands under the World Industries umbrella.
14.
Spike Jonze filmed, edited and produced his first skateboarding video, Rubbish Heap, for World Industries in 1989.
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Spike Jonze's following video project was Video Days, a promotional video for Blind Skateboards, which was released in 1991 and is considered to be highly influential in the community.
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In 1993, Spike Jonze co-directed the "trippy" music video for The Breeders song "Cannonball" with Gordon.
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Also in 1994, Spike Jonze directed the videos for the Beastie Boys' songs "Sure Shot" and, more famously, "Sabotage".
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Spike Jonze made his film debut as an actor in a bit part in the drama Mi Vida Loca.
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Spike Jonze collaborated with Bjork for the video for her 1995 single "It's Oh So Quiet", a cover of a 1951 Betty Hutton song.
20.
In 1997, Spike Jonze made a short film called How They Get There, starring Mark Gonzales as a man who is playfully imitating a woman's actions on the other side of a sidewalk before running into danger.
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Spike Jonze worked with the electronic music duo Daft Punk on the music video for the instrumental song "Da Funk" in 1997.
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Spike Jonze made a cameo appearance as a paramedic in David Fincher's film The Game.
23.
Spike Jonze filmed a short documentary in 1997, Amarillo by Morning, about two Texan boys who aspire to be bull riders.
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Spike Jonze was one of the cinematographers for the documentary Free Tibet, which documents the 1996 Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco.
25.
Spike Jonze developed an alter ego named Richard Koufey, the leader of the Torrance Community Dance Group, an urban troupe that performs in public spaces.
26.
Spike Jonze showed the video to Slim, who appears briefly in the video.
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Spike Jonze then assembled a group of dancers to perform to Slim's "Praise You" outside a Westwood, California, movie theater and taped the performance.
28.
The video received awards for Best Direction, Breakthrough, and Best Choreography, which Spike Jonze accepted, still in character.
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Spike Jonze made a short mockumentary about the experience called Torrance Rises.
30.
The first feature film Spike Jonze directed was Being John Malkovich in 1999.
31.
Spike Jonze co-starred opposite George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube in David O Russell's war comedy Three Kings, which depicts a gold heist by four US soldiers following the end of the Gulf War.
32.
Spike Jonze directed a commercial for Nike called "The Morning After" in 1999, a parody of the hysteria surrounding Y2K.
33.
Jonze returned to video directing in 2000, helming the video for the song "Wonderboy" by the comedy duo Tenacious D Along with Johnny Knoxville and childhood friend Jeff Tremaine, Jonze co-created, executive produced and occasionally appeared in the television series Jackass in 2000, which aired on MTV for three seasons until 2002.
34.
At the request of Al Gore's presidential campaign in 2000, Spike Jonze directed a short video about Gore at his home.
35.
Spike Jonze collaborated with Fatboy Slim for a second a time in 2001, directing the video for "Weapon of Choice", starring Christopher Walken dancing around a deserted hotel lobby.
36.
Spike Jonze co-produced, contributed to the writing of the segments, and made a cameo appearance in the film.
37.
Spike Jonze directed a 60-second commercial called "Lamp" for the furniture store IKEA in 2002, which won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, considered a prestigious award in the field of advertising.
38.
Spike Jonze made a faux documentary called The Mystery of Dalaro in 2004 as part of an advertising campaign for the Volvo S40.
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Spike Jonze directed a commercial for Adidas titled "Hello Tomorrow" in 2005, featuring the music of his brother Sam "Squeak E Clean" Spiegel and Jonze's then-girlfriend Karen O of the band Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
40.
Spike Jonze directed ads for GAP and Levi's, and co-directed the skateboarding video Fully Flared with Ty Evans and Cory Weincheque in the same year.
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Spike Jonze directed the music video for Kanye West's single "Flashing Lights" in 2008.
42.
Spike Jonze produced Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York in 2008, which Spike Jonze originally intended to direct.
43.
Spike Jonze himself said that he "didn't set out to make a children's movie; I set out to make a movie about childhood".
44.
Spike Jonze wrote and directed We Were Once a Fairytale, a short film starring Kanye West as himself acting belligerently while drunk in a nightclub.
45.
Spike Jonze wrote and directed the science fiction romance short film I'm Here in 2010, based on the children's book The Giving Tree.
46.
Spike Jonze co-directed the video for LCD Soundsystem's "Drunk Girls" with the band's frontman James Murphy and directed the video for Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" in 2010, the latter being an edited version of Jonze's short film Scenes from the Suburbs, a dystopian vision of suburbia in the near-future and an expansion of the themes of nostalgia, alienation, and childhood found in the song.
47.
Spike Jonze was part of the main cast for the black comedy series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret as the supervisor to David Cross' character for the first two seasons in 2010 and 2012, before being replaced by Jack McBrayer in the third season.
48.
Spike Jonze resumed his longtime collaboration with the Beastie Boys in July 2011, directing the video for their song featuring Santigold, "Don't Play No Game That I Can't Win", in which the band members are portrayed as action figures.
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Spike Jonze then directed the video for Kanye West and Jay-Z's 2011 single "Otis", which saw the pair driving a customized Maybach 57 around an industrial lot.
50.
Also in 2011, Spike Jonze played a small supporting role in the sports drama Moneyball as the husband of Robin Wright's character, who is the ex-wife of Billy Beane.
51.
In 2012, Spike Jonze co-directed the feature-length skateboarding film Pretty Sweet with his Fully Flared co-directors Ty Evans and Cory Weincheque.
52.
Spike Jonze provided his voice to a video game character in the film, Alien Child, who interacts with Theodore.
53.
At the 86th Academy Awards, Spike Jonze was nominated for three Academy Awards for Her, winning for Best Original Screenplay and receiving further nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Song for co-writing "The Moon Song" with Karen O Spike Jonze won the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay at the 71st Golden Globe Awards.
54.
Spike Jonze co-wrote, co-produced, and appeared in Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa, a hidden camera comedy film starring Johnny Knoxville as the vulgar grandfather Irvin Zisman.
55.
Spike Jonze played his wife Gloria, but was cut from a majority of the film.
56.
Spike Jonze served as the creative director of the YouTube Music Awards on November 3,2013.
57.
At the ceremony, he directed the live music video for Arcade Fire's "Afterlife", documented Lady Gaga's live performance of "Dope" with Chris Milk, and premiered a short film written by Lena Dunham that Spike Jonze directed called Choose You.
58.
Spike Jonze had a small role in Martin Scorsese's 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street as a stockbroker who teaches Jordan Belfort the ins and outs of penny stocks.
59.
Spike Jonze got the part as the film shared the same casting director as Her, who asked Spike Jonze if he wanted to appear in the film.
60.
Spike Jonze directed the video for Kanye West's "Only One" in 2015, which was filmed on his iPhone in a foggy field and featured heartfelt interactions between West and daughter.
61.
Spike Jonze made a guest appearance in the fourth season of Lena Dunham's television series Girls in March 2015.
62.
Spike Jonze directed the short commercial film Kenzo World to promote a fragrance by Kenzo in 2016.
63.
Spike Jonze is the creative director of multinational television channel brand Viceland, which launched in February 2016.
64.
In 2017, Spike Jonze directed Frank Ocean's summer festival tour, which included 8 shows which took place in different cities around the US and Europe.
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Spike Jonze produced and decorated, alongside Ocean and artist Tom Sachs among others, an elaborate stage with a runway and central platform for the same concert.
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Spike Jonze wrote and directed the stage show Changers: A Dance Story, starring Lakeith Stanfield and Mia Wasikowska.
67.
In 2019, Spike Jonze directed a commercial and accompanying short film for the website building service Squarespace starring Idris Elba, as well a short film titled The New Normal advocating for marijuana legalization in partnership with the cannabis company MedMen.
68.
In that year, Spike Jonze filmed the Aziz Ansari stand-up special Right Now, operating close-up shots himself onstage.
69.
Spike Jonze won two consecutive Directors Guild of America Awards for his commercial work in 2018 and 2019.
70.
Spike Jonze dated singer Karen O throughout 2005, although the couple broke up shortly after.
71.
People magazine reported that Spike Jonze dated actress Drew Barrymore in 2007.
72.
Spike Jonze was reported to have begun dating Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi in 2010 and the couple briefly lived together in New York City.