LOS ANGELES—Forest Whitaker has had a varied career, one that has seen him playing characters as diverse as a legendary jazz man and an African dictator. He kick-started his career as jazz legend Charlie Parker in Clint Eastwood’s Bird and won an Oscar for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. However, he says that no previous role prepared him for doing the voice-over for a giant puppet in Where the Wild Things Are, which opens Friday (October 16). The filmmakers requested that all the voice-over actors in the film spend a month in Australia to help them create the characters. He says, in an L.A. hotel room, that he did whatever he could to get the character right.

“I wore a suit with a belly. I just wanted to figure out where my hands would go and to figure out how to speak and how to move and how to gesture. It allowed the other creatures to rub my belly, and they touched me differently and our relationship shifted and changed.”

In the film, which is based on the Maurice Sendak book of the same name, Whitaker plays Ira, a lovable giant who is making the best of a life spent stuck on an island with other monsters. He encourages them to be a family and is helped in his efforts by a visiting boy (Max Records) attempting to work out problems with his mother.

“Ira is trying to find a complete family unit,” he says. “He wants order in his life, and he puts holes in trees because it gives him a purpose, and purpose is important to him. It’s a statement of what he can’t have because there is emptiness there. He is trying his best to pull everything together with this kid and with the community. It is all about trying to find some balance and order in his life.”

Although the actors were temporary substitutes for creatures later created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, Whitaker says their time in Australia proved to be valuable to the making of the movie. He says that each member of the voice-over cast, which also includes James Gandolfini, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano, Michael Berry Jr., Lauren Ambrose, and Chris Cooper, found a way to relate to their characters. It wasn’t easy, he admits, given that the monsters throw mounds of dirt at one another.

“I think everyone wore something that allowed them to get in character,” he says. “For instance, James Gandolfini wore ripped shorts. There were individual cameras on each person, and they followed us around and we slept in a pile. The rehearsals gave us a chance to go through the scenes and figure out how the characters would act and react. It was kind of crazy because we were enacting the scenes and playing them out and doing the rock-throwing scenes and hitting each other with Styrofoam and laying on top of each other. It was all in aid of understanding our characters a little better.”