“He’s the least interesting person at the party”: When Vincent Gallo called Spike Jonze a “pig piece of shit”
Spike Jonze made a pretty undeniable impact on the American alternative scene back in the 1990s, his BMX photography and skateboarding videos proving to be the key to his success.
When he made the promotional skating clip Video Days, Jonze ended up impressing Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. By the end of 1992, he had several music video credits to his name, most notably ‘100%’ for the pioneering New York rockers, which featured skateboarding clips (including a young Jason Lee). It didn’t take long for Jonze to become an in-demand music video director, and he went on to work with everyone from The Breeders and Björk to Beastie Boys and Weezer.
In fact, Jonze was making some of the most iconic music videos of the decade, often taking a rather bizarre approach that felt different from the usual MTV fodder. It was only natural, then, that when he started his feature filmmaking career, his debut, 1999’s Being John Malkovich, would be every bit as strange.
Jonze has come to harness a pretty distinctive style that bathes in the surreal, presenting a vision of life that is rather extraordinary, as though we’re stuck on the threshold between reality and some twisted dreamworld. He’d earn a ‘Best Director’ nomination for the movie, although his first Oscar win wouldn’t come until 2014, when he won ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for his technological romance Her.
It’s safe to say that, while Jonze has only made four feature films, he has asserted a strong influence over cinema across the 21st century, bringing a distinctively absurd approach to the mainstream, but not everyone is convinced. In particular, the vitriolic actor and director Vincent Gallo once had some pretty nasty things to say about Jonze, which shouldn’t come as a surprise at all.
Gallo, who has directed films like Buffalo ‘66 and The Brown Bunny, once cursed Roger Ebert’s colon, accused Sofia Coppola of being a slag while fat-shaming her father, and similarly body-shamed Christina Ricci…the list goes on. He has long supported Republican politicians, too, expressing his love for the likes of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, as well as many heinous policies, so it’s safe to say that Gallo is a rather controversial figure, and it’s a shame that he holds such despicable views, because he has made some great art in the past.
But God does Gallo love to complain. When it came to criticising Jonze in an interview with Hikari Takano in 2003, he revealed that he had known the director since he was a kid. Calling him a “rich Jew from the Upper East Side,” Gallo claimed that Jonze “saw a bunch of black and Hispanics and wanted to be like them, so he sort of buddied up on the skateboard BMX bike scene. He’s embarrassing as a BMXer, he’s embarrassing as a skateboarder.” Yikes.
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Calling him “the biggest fraud out there,” he added, “You have to separate filmmaking from screenplay and performance. As a filmmaker, he is nothing. Zero”.
Gallo’s tirade didn’t end there, with the actor/filmmaker also accusing Jonze of being boring. “If you bring him to a party and there’s ten interesting people there, if I’m with Johnny Ramone, John Frusciante, ten of my friends and Spike is there, which has happened a hundred times, he’s the least interesting, he’s the person who doesn’t know anything.”
It seems hard to wrap your head around such a brutal verbal attack on someone who has never said anything of the sort about Gallo; there’s certainly insecurity and bitterness at play here, merging with Gallo’s natural predisposition for being incredibly offensive. He concluded, “He’s the person who doesn’t say anything funny, interesting, intelligent. He has no point of view. All he does is want to find out what you think, so he’s sure about what he should be doing. He’s a pig piece of shit.”
