Master of Aesthetics a Look Into the Curious Mind of Wes Anderson
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Master of aesthetics A look into the curious mind of Wes Anderson Photo by Entertainment Pictures he director Wes Anderson is making a movie Story by in a large studio in the East End of London T while seated at his desk in Montparnasse, in Richard Brody Paris. His workspace is as carefully arrayed as the set of one of his films. A boxy nineteen-seventies touch- The New Yorker tone telephone rests on a dark-wood Art Deco desk, alongside a new Apple keyboard, a big computer screen and a scanner, a modern cordless phone, and Design by a pair of small speakers. Behind the desk stand book- cases filled with art books, encyclopedias, uniform Emily Erskine editions of literary classics, and a variety of tastefully selected objects, including a battered leather suit- case with metal corners and a postcard of Albert Camus. The walls are the color of Chinese mustard; yellow curtains shade high windows. The windows are cracked open, and the airy room, one of many in the bright and spacious apartment, is alive with the 1 buzz of scooters and the whirr of infinitesimally by hand, and photographed, frame by cars from the street below. frame, in each new pose; the succession of these poses, edited together, simulates motion. The same technique The phone rings, and Anderson, a was used to bring King Kong to life in 1933, as well as in tall, slender man of forty, answers the “Wallace and Gromit” films, Tim Burton’s “Corpse it. He’s wearing brown thin-wale Bride,” and Henry Selick’s “Coraline.” Anderson could corduroy pants, a purple sweater not have chosen a more painstaking way to make his over a sky-blue shirt, and beige first animated film. And doing it on the industrial scale socks without shoes. He stays required for a studio motion picture—this one is being on the phone for about twenty produced by Twentieth Century Fox Animation—is a minutes, talking while sending and gigantic undertaking. It occupies two buildings at 3 Mills receiving e-mails, which come Studios, on London’s River Lea; in one, a vast, hangar- with a blip and go with a whoosh. like stage, animation is taking place simultaneously on Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton and Bruce Willis from “Moonrise Anderson speaks clearly and twenty-nine sets. Kingdom.” (2012) rapidly, with a disarming blend of serenity and intensity; his ideas spiral out in an avid yet smoothly flowing rush. “The only real issue, “The animators are like I think, that we want to deeply musicians, in that they explore is, “What can we do to the ending?” he says to Andy take an inanimate object Kara Haywardw from “Moonrise Kingdom.” (2012) Weisblum, the film’s editor, who is in New York. “I had always pictured and infuse it with life.” it being more positive, even though At dinner that evening, in a bistro on the Rue de Vau- everything I’ve done to the set and girard, Anderson said, of working on the movie, “It’s a to the way it looks has made it Anderson initially assumed that, given the exactingly weird combination of sedentary and frantic that I’ve more bleak.” technical format, his participation in the day-to-day never quite experienced before.” It wasn’t what he’d shooting would be limited. In fact, though, he “found a expected, but Owen Wilson, his close friend and a long- For more than a year, Anderson way to insanely micromanage the movie anyway.” He did time collaborator, pointed out that the process “seems has been engaged in the produc- his micromanaging almost entirely from his apartment to suit how meticulous Wes is about getting things ex- Screen grab from “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” (2014) tion of an animated adaptation of in Paris (a city that he loves, and in which he has spent actly as he imagines them.” He added, “When I was Roald Dahl’s 1970 children’s book much of his time since 2005), fielding phone calls and with him in Paris, he wasn’t even leaving his apartment. “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” the story of answering dozens, even hundreds, of e-mails a day from I was joking that it would be like the middle of ‘Shine,’ a fox whose pilfering from three his colleagues in London and New York. At Anderson’s where the kid plays Rachmaninoff and then collapses. grotesque farmers provokes them request, new systems were devised that allowed him . It seemed like his work was never over, because he into absurdly violent and extreme real-time access to the pictures that were being shot. could control the whole universe of the movie.” attempts to capture him, as he leads his family and friends on As Jeremy Dawson, one of the film’s producers, told Anderson’s renown as a director was sealed in 2000, increasingly wild and desperate me, “The animators are like musicians, in that they take when, at the age of thirty, on the basis of his first two adventures in order to survive. an inanimate object and infuse it with life.” Anderson films, “Bottle Rocket” (1996) and “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson, who has made five conducted them, for the most part, via remote control. he was named “the next Scorsese,” by Martin Scorsese previous feature films, including “On this one computer is almost the entire history himself, writing in Esquire. Scorsese was right in one “Rushmore” and “The Royal Te- of the film,” he said, pointing to the Apple Mac Pro on respect: Anderson’s first films, like Scorsese’s, intro- nenbaums,” is using a hoary tech- the floor beside his desk. Allison Abbate, another of the duced to cinema a new tone, an original mood. But it nology known as stop-motion film’s producers, who also worked on “Corpse Bride,” was hardly the tone or the mood of the early Scorsese. animation, in which figurines are said, “His vision is serious, and it’s driving our technol- Anderson’s characters are rarely violent or even par- placed in a physical décor, moved ogy.” She added, “In the past, we sent videotapes.” ticularly demonstrative; their dialogue is understatedly Natalie Portman from “Hotel Chevalier.” (2007) 2 3 shares their self-discipline; their coolness under pressure; their appreciation of the exacting work ethic behind the beauty of objects; and their physical joy in the presence of danger. Anjelica Huston, who met Anderson after seeing “Bot- tle Rocket” (and then appeared in three of his movies), found him to be “very courtly and proper.” He “had that old-fashioned deportment,” yet had infused the movie with a kind of energy and a “rogue presence” that she hadn’t seen “since the old movies with Jack”— Nicholson—“and Dennis Hopper.” Cate Blanchett, who appeared in “The Life Aquatic,” said of Anderson, “Is he Dorian Gray, I wonder? He is from another time, but it’s completely and utterly genuine.” In short, Anderson resembles his films, a fact that, he knows, has played a role in their success. Anderson directing Bill Murray in “The Life Aquatic.” Photo by Ernesto Ruscio “In the course of doing these first few movies, I found Photo by Daniel Jackson a way that felt instinctively right for me, and I didn’t feel constrained,” he told me. “The end result is that they’re “In the course of doing these first very personal movies in a way that some people really Q&A with Wes few movies, I found a way that felt connect with.” Nostalgia and decay are common themes in your films, instinctively right for me, and I didn’t feel embodied very clearly here in the crumbling hotel. Are Anderson’s idiosyncrasies, personal and artistic, reso- you saying the past is better? constrained.The end result is that they’re nated from the start with a certain segment of the pop- very personal movies in a way that some ulation: hipsters—young bourgeois bohemians—who No, I just like old things really. There’s a little Christmas stall came of age with the Internet and took from it both a in Paris along the Champs-Élysées where they have a bunch of people really connect with.” trendsetting attunement to pop culture and a chance laptops and you can type in your address to come up with all these images from different time periods. The idea is that you go to make quick money while remaining artists at heart. and find where you live as it used to be. I love it. A generation born of a paradox, its members recog- droll, and their behavior is at once quietly idiosyn- If his first two films and the one that followed in 2001, nized themselves in the romantic ironies of Anderson’s Your films are sometimes criticised as favouring style cratic and startlingly sincere. The performances are “The Royal Tenenbaums,” suggested the work of an movies, as well as in his embrace of the expressive over substance. Do you think that is fair? controlled, tamped-down. The action takes place extraordinarily sensitive and sophisticated hothouse power of luxury objects. Robert Lanham, in “The Hip- I don’t know if I agree with the premise because I don’t really amid eye-catching décors and anachronistic furnish- talent, Anderson’s two subsequent films, “The Life ster Handbook,” a 2002 comic sociological portrait of separate all those things. For me, a movie begins with the char- ings. The scripts offer a winking catalogue of inside Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004) and “The Darjeeling the new urban youth culture, says that “ ‘Rushmore’ acters that I want to write about and the world that they live movie references, and the soundtracks are replete Limited” (2007)—both of which were shot on location, defined Wes Anderson as the quintessential Hipster di- in.