Catherine O’Hara is my idea of the ultimate funny aunt. At the Royal York Hotel for a roundtable interview with Toronto press promoting Where the Wild Things Are (O’Hara is the voice behind wild thing Judith), she is high-spirited, fast-talking, and engaged to an extent that is downright noble for someone who has been woken up early for a day of inane interviews. O’Hara first came to prominence on the beloved SCTV before joining the Christopher Guest Repertory Company. With performances in several of the funniest movies of the last 20 years (particularly Waiting for Guffman and A Mighty Wind) to her name, and showing unexpected acting ability in Guest’s 2006 film For Your Consideration, in person she’s just about everything you’d hope she would be.

“Can I ask a question?” asks a very timid-sounding journalist.

“NO-O-O!” O’Hara replies, stretching the word somewhere close to infinity. “I’M NOT HERE TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS!”

“What was it like working with director Spike Jonze?

“If you hang out with people, like you hang out with Spike Lee—Spike JONZE!” She makes an exaggeratedly pained face. “God, I knew I was going to say that at some point. First time! If you hang out with Spike Jonze, he’ll get you to play.”

“The first time we met him, we went to his house and he took us up to the hills behind his house: ‘Okay, whaddya wanna do? You wanna play War? Let’s play War!’ He doesn’t talk to you as a director […] he’s just Max [the main character of Where the Wild Things Are]. He goes, ‘Uh, I don’t like the way you’re talkin’ to Ira, I think you two should go in separate corners.’ Uh, excuse me? What are you talking about? What are you saying to me? He just demands you to be Judith—or demanded me to be Judith—in the moment, so he improvises like crazy.”

Jonze had O’Hara and the other voice actors (including Chris Cooper, James Gandolfini, and Forest Whitaker) record together, and, in many cases, actually act out their scenes. “It was so smart to have us record together […] to set us up with these mics so we could actually move, we could actually get in a sleep pile, and actually have these bread roll fights.”

A journalist observes that Jonze sounds like a big kid. This launches O’Hara into a story about the antics on set that she recites so breathlessly it’s as if she’s telling it for the first time. Here’s the unabridged transcript: “The crew that was shooting us was the Jackass crew, and we had these big foam cubes as set pieces, and they had long foam pieces that we could use as trees for knockin’ each other down. And the Jackass crew in between every set-up and take were tryin’ to kill themselves. And one guy kept tryin’ to teach me to jump from cube to cube. ‘No! I won’t DO THAT! What are you, INSANE?’ [He says:] ‘Aw, it’s great, come on! You gotta really move quickly from one to the other!’

“And I show up at lunch that day and say, ‘Where’s what’s-his-face [the crew member]?’—can’t remember his name, sorry—‘Uhhhh … he’s in the hospital.’ He comes back and he’s still laughin’ and he’s got a cast and he broke his collarbone. ‘Oh, you wanted me to try that, didja!?’”

Critics have observed that Where the Wild Things Are is, with its meditative pace and serious tone, an oddity amidst the kung fu pandas dominating family films. Indeed, O’Hara is borderline outraged by the current state of children’s entertainment. “Y’know, the scariest thing is, go to another room when a kids’ movie is on, and the music that tells you what to think at every moment, and the sound effects! Honest to god, I come in the room, my kids’ll be watchin’ those, I’ll be like, ‘OKAY! Turn it down! I don’t want to hear that! It’s making me SI-I-ICK!”

“And of course there’s a dead parent at the beginning of every children’s movie now. Have you noticed this? What is the deal!? And there’s always a lesson. A friend of mine was at the premiere [of Wild Things] the other night in New York and she said, ‘Thank god you didn’t have those two little Borscht Belt wiseasses on the side, y’know, TV and old movie references shoved in there.’”

O’Hara, whose kids are 15 and 12, has her own ideas on quality family entertainment. “Y’know, I let my kids watch Trailer Park Boys, because it’s re-e-aally funny, and they do not swear. My 15-year-old never swears because he knows the kind of pathetic guys that talk like that. That’s where there’s a really good lesson in, ‘You do not wanna be these guys.’”

“But, y’know, Barney I steered clear of! ’Cause, I’m sorry, just artistically? I want them to see good comedy, good art, not public domain music and automaton children!”

Where the Wild Things Are is now in theatres.