Jonze has a month until the film debuts at the New York Film Festival, and it’s nearly locked, but there were still hand-drawn placeholder graphics in some of the clips, waiting to be replaced in the next few weeks. I was so excited by the clips that I started peppering Jonze with granular questions about the world he created, many about Theodore’s workplace, BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. One, asked innocently enough, stopped Jonze: The letters Theodore dictates are printed out in perfect cursive, so do the clients send in handwriting samples for the computer to mimic? “We didn’t … yeah, uh, we didn’t think of that, that they should do handwriting samples,” Jonze said, stuttering. His publicist approached to whisk him away. “She’s undermining my confidence now,” he told her, gesturing to me and laughing. “Now I’m going to have to reshoot the movie.”

“Oh Jesus, what did you do?” the publicist asked me. “You know that he’s going to go home tonight and try to figure out a way to stick that in. We can’t have this! I need the movie to be ready in three weeks!” She appeared to be joking, but studio paranoia about Jonze’s neurosis and obsession with detail had the ring of truth. I apologized, and then for good measure tossed out the idea that Jonze do a behind-the-scenes mockumentary tour of the BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com operations. “If you tell him that, he will go home and start working on that tonight,” the publicist said, and refused to let me near him again. But he came back around anyway. “I’m going to put that in there, the handwriting samples,” he said, quickly and furtively, like delivering a spy message, “and pretend I thought of it.”