"Where the Wild Things Are"

The fantastic island home of the Wild Things in "Where the Wild Things Are" looks like it required globe-hopping to capture its parts on film -- the landscapes include turbulent coastline, barren forest, desert sand dunes and rocky cliffs. All (with the exception of the dunes) were located within 90 minutes of downtown Melbourne, Australia.

"Maybe it could have been shot in America," said production designer K.K. Barrett. "But it would have required such a caravan traveling to so many different places. We couldn't have found them in an hour and a half of each other." Even the dunes weren't far -- a six-hour drive to the southern coast.

Each location was depicted as it was, except for the forest, filmed at a camp burned in a forest fire. "The guys in the [Wild Things] suits had low visibility," Barrett said. Some trees were real, "but some were fake ones we moved around" so the actors wouldn't bump into them.